I’ve found my new musical crush in Sharkmuffin, an all-female noise-punk trio from Brooklyn whose third EP 1097 debuts this month. If their first two EPs were humble admissions of guilt, 1097 is the realization that they were right all along—a giant ‘fuck you’ to whoever pissed them off personally or politically.
The cover for the first track, “Foul Play” features lead guitarist/vocalist Tarra Thiessen on a beach between two cairns, maybe meditating on the past as she plots revenge or desecration, or maybe she’s coming up with the band’s haunting surf-rock guitar riffs. Either way, Sharkmuffin has definitely grown into themselves since their inception, coming back with more confident and experimental harmonies, cranking up the feedback and screaming even harder through crackling filters.
The closest I’ve gotten to experiencing what these women must feel on stage is playing Black Sabbath’s War Pigs on Guitar Hero. You know what I’m talking about: your punked-out avatar is in the back of some small, smoky rock club and out of your amateur fingers comes this deep, cathartic bass and you’re like, ‘Shit, that’s how you make Rock n’ Roll!’ Bassist Natalie Kirch is certainly no amateur, but 1097 has a surprisingly organic rock feel, moving away from their Yeah Yeah Yeahs influence and more towards the likes of The Ramones and Sleater-Kinney. Sharkmuffin is everything you could want in a band: gritty, delightfully aggressive and unapologetic.
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Sharkmuffin is Janet Labelle (drums), Tarra Thiessen (vocals), and Natalie Kirch (bass). Their new EP 1097 from Dazzleship Records can be found here.
