I think it was Augusta who said some of your songs were started by making mistakes on your guitar. How’d you become comfortable with making mistakes and turning them into songs?
Augusta: I think I make the most mistakes. Charlotte and Ani are more classically musically trained than me. At the beginning, just being in the band was really intimidating for me. I’m left-handed, and I was trying to learn how to play the guitar upside-down, but my arm kept brushing up against these little knobs, and I got down on myself a lot. I would be at a show and say, “I’m not playing music ever again!” I think the whole mistake thing–even when I was pretty young, I enjoyed edgy and experimental music. The mistakes were turned into the music, and even now, we have songs that strum open (without chords).

Charlotte: Where we are now just came from a lot of practicing. I think we only played four years of music together before we wrote this record and that’s when we finally started settling into how we each play our instruments and how each play together.

What was the creative process like for this album?
Augusta: I haven’t been really sad in a while, which is actually a good thing, so I haven’t been writing songs. I’ve been creating in other ways, like cooking. But when I do write songs it is often when I’m very sad and type it out and let it go. Then I organize it into little sentences and stanzas for songs, and try to make words rhyme here and there, and then we write the music, but I never write the music until I see Charlotte and Ani.

Charlotte: The songs I wrote for this record were written when I was in a really terrible relationship with a really terrible person who ruined my life. It’s weird because I wrote those songs when I was really depressed. I was with that person for another eight months after that, and didn’t really look at them until after that. I realized how valuable these lyrics were and how they helped me understand what I had gone through. It was really important for me to have these songs to look back on, and have my life take shape and color and make sense to me. I was having a really hard time when I first moved to Montreal because I didn’t have a lot of friends other than the people I moved there with, and I would listen to my old songs, which was kind of comforting, but it’s also a warning sign when you listen to your own song and can relate to it again. It’s like, Let’s not do that again.

Ani: I feel like since we started writing our own songs, it kind of allowed us to realize it’s actually really fun to write pop songs, or it’s really fun to be really obviously inspired by Nirvana. I think our new album has helped us write songs on our own and then realize it’s cool to sometimes take it easy and just play a simple thing.

Augusta: I remember when I was younger I would write my guitar riffs based on the most complicated thing I could play at that time. I was just telling myself, People are gonna look at me and think I’m in this dumb girl band and I wanna be really cool and be super good at guitar.

Charlotte: We definitely tried to compensate for being perceived as “young women,” you know what I mean? It’s probably a good thing. It definitely made us stand out. We have a song on one of our early EPs that’s so hard to play that I try to play it now and I can’t even get through half of it anymore.

Augusta: We pushed ourselves really hard in the beginning because we wanted to be perceived as very talented.

Charlotte: [laughs] Yeah, we wanted to be child prodigies.

Augusta: We’ve gotten poppier since then.

All of your albums sound different but the talent and showmanship is always consistent. How would you describe the sound of this new album?
Ani: I’d call it angsty grunge post-punk, I think that’s what we’ve been saying lately.

Charlotte: Yeah, I think it’s more punky now. Definitely a lot of catharsis.

Augusta: A lot of angry music.

Charlotte: But also nuanced, you know? ♦