Ribbon Stage (from left): Jolie M-A, David Sweetie, and Anni Hilator.
Virginia ZwangzerIf you’re looking for indie-pop thrills this quarantined fall, you won’t find many better than the ones on My Favorite Shrine, the debut EP from New York City trio Ribbon Stage. Jamming five songs into eight minutes — the longest, “Personal Hell,” maxes out at a lean 2:21 — the EP is all sugar-buzz hooks and aching guitars, approaching the platonic ideal of what a DIY band can do with the right mix of amateur enthusiasm and accidental pop songcraft. When it ends, you’ll want to listen again; you’ll probably listen to it a few more times after that, too, unless you have somewhere better to be right now than the blissed-out basement show in your head.
Ribbon Stage is a very new band, formed last year by three friends in New York using the punk-rock pen names of Anni Hilator (bass and lead vocals), Jolie M-A (guitar), and David Sweetie (drums). The songs on My Favorite Shrine were initially intended as a demo tape before making their way to the venerable Pacific Northwest indie label K Records, which released it as a vinyl seven-inch in its International Pop Underground series this summer. They haven’t played a single show yet, but they’ve tapped into something great.
David, 35, is the most experienced musician of the three, having spent a decade on the road as the howling frontman for some of Monterrey, Mexico’s finest punk and hardcore bands. He won fans in local scenes across the Americas with Ratas Del Vaticano and Tercer Mundo, but those bands’ heavy sounds were only part of his listening diet. “I’ve always loved indie-pop since I was a teenager,” he says. “But in my mid-twenties, I was very angry, and I couldn’t have that. I didn’t want to be cute.”
By around 2015, when he moved to New York, he’d begun to feel differently: “I didn’t want to play guitar in another band. I wanted to do something new.”
He first crossed paths with Jolie at the late, lamented Brooklyn venue Silent Barn, where she was performing with a noise band for an audience that she recalls as being “99 percent friends.” David was impressed by her stage presence all the same: “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I need to make a band with Jolie.’”
Jolie, 28, who grew up in Miami listening to her family’s Simon and Garfunkel records (“hippie-adjacent parent music”) before moving on to Green Day, Nirvana, and Pavement, was looking for a change herself, especially after the band David saw her in at Silent Barn imploded not long afterward. “I tried to be in a pop band with punks a few times, and it didn’t quite catch,” she says. “I was pretty disheartened. I had visions of songs and melodies, but no way to articulate them.”
She and David began exchanging YouTube playlists full of indie-pop bands from the Seventies and Eighties like Dolly Mixture and the Shop Assistants. Soon they were writing songs together with David on drums and Jolie on guitar.
The final piece of the puzzle came together after Jolie got to know Anni through their work as counselors at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, where they helped children aged five to seven start their first bands. “It was just a bunch of little kids banging on the guitar strings, and it was really fun,” Jolie says. “We were like, ‘We should do this’ — even though, from a technical perspective, our skills are maybe more close to what the seven-year-olds were doing than, say, any of our friends’ bands.”
An early attempt at starting a doom-rock duo fell by the wayside after Anni heard the songs that Jolie had begun writing with David. “I was playing them for her, and I think she liked them a lot better than the music I was coming up with between the two of us,” Jolie says. “So we all hung out, got some burritos, and merged bands.”
Anni, a 24-year-old Bay Area native with a background in furniture design, had never been in a real band before Ribbon Stage, but she quickly took to the lead-singer role in the new trio, writing most of the lyrics on the EP with a natural heartbreak-queen flair. “There was a lot of teen-diary inspiration, for sure,” she says. “We just riffed together so well.”
They recorded My Favorite Shrine last December on a 4-track tape deck in what Jolie recalls as “a windowless room in Bushwick.” Right away, it was clear that something magical was happening. “David has a really deep foundation of musical knowledge, and then there’s me, someone who’s obsessed with music but has literally no idea how to play, and Anni, who has a beautiful voice,” Jolie says. “You put that all together, and it’s scrappy without being bad.”
Jolie found Ribbon Stage’s name while googling cooking terms (“I didn’t like it, but they outvoted me,” she says). Anni used her visual-art training to design the EP’s pink-and-black cover, hand-drawing the lettering and the twee-horror images of flowers, ballet shoes, candles, and spiders. “We spent a long time making sure that it wasn’t too cute or too gnarly,” Jolie says. “It’s not just music, it’s accessories for your teenage bedroom.”
Since releasing My Favorite Shrine as a limited self-pressed cassette and a more widely distributed seven-inch through K, the band has been pleased to find that other people enjoy their music as much as they do. “I never share anything I do with my family members, but I felt like maybe this was universally likable enough to not totally humiliate myself,” Jolie says. “They were like, ‘Wow!’ They couldn’t believe it was so good. I was like, ‘Yeah, why would I make something bad?’”
The three musicians have been stranded separately by the pandemic — when we spoke over Zoom, Jolie was laying low in Olympia, Washington, while David and Anni were in Brooklyn and Queens — but they hope to gather and record Ribbon Stage’s first LP soon. “I have about seven songs written so far,” Jolie says. “I’ve been practicing the whole quarantine, and I feel really ready. … I’m playing the same seven songs on my little guitar, using the same five chords that I use, and I can’t wait to get Anni and David on them and make them into something completely different.”
ON THE RISE
M.O.T.H.E.R. – the new collaborative band helmed by Robbie Furze of The Big Pink and currently featuring Jamie T and Jamie Hince of The Kills – have given their first proper interview, talking to NME about the emotional origins of the project, their aim to be “the guitar version of N.E.R.D.”, and their hit-list of future collaborators.
Revealing the new project at the end of May alongside the blistering anthemics of debut single ‘My Love’, Furze shared that the seeds of M.O.T.H.E.R. had come from losing his own parent after a prolonged illness. “My mum got sick about five years ago and was ill for about four years before she died,” he told NME.
“In that period I had a daughter, which was this real juxtaposition of death and birth. My mates – Jamie T and Jamie Hince – came together for me, and then sadly Jamie [Hince] lost his dad too,” Furze went on, sitting in a West London pub alongside Hince.
Hince continued: “I lost my dad four days after Robbie [lost his mum], and it felt like, if ever there was a calling, it was that. But it didn’t all come out of that doom and gloom. I hate mentioning COVID but everyone had so much time on their hands and there was this open creativity back then. I was working on music with Jamie T, sending each other stuff, and the idea for the three of us to do something together came out of that. It felt nice, like we were buying into this camaraderie, and this gang.”
The three musicians have previous credits together, with the two Jamies also writing on The Big Pink’s most recent album, 2022’s ‘The Love That’s Ours’. Fully collaborating on M.O.T.H.E.R., Furze joked, was like “the clash of three egos”. “Everyone wants to work with each other because you like what each other does, and so it’s not quite imposter syndrome but you have to live up to [that idea] and jump in and be a character,” Hince continued. “You can’t be too humble about it.”
Recording between Hince’s studio in LA and Furze’s studio in London’s Bethnal Green, the current trio have also dropped their self-titled debut EP featuring three further tracks: ‘Real Human’, ‘Traitor’, and ‘Surrender’. The ethos of the band, meanwhile, is for the line-up to shift with each release, bringing in familiar faces from other groups and working with whoever might be available at the time.
“We did a little bit [of recording] with Jenny [Lee Lindberg, bassist] from Warpaint who I love; I really want to get something solid down with her,” revealed Hince, while Furze suggested that names including Zach Hill of industrial hip-hop trio Death Grips, and electronic producer Skream have all been in the mix for future iterations of the band.
“We ran into Zach and he seemed into it but then he started ghosting me,” he noted. “Whether or not he decides to text me back, it would be wonderful to have that kind of thing. Jamie Hince, Skream, Rhys Webb from The Horrors [who played on their recent radio session], and Zach – if I saw that, I’d wanna hear what that nonsense sounds like!”
Check out the rest of the interview with Furze and Hince below, as they discuss their endearing bromance, their admiration for Jamie T, and why the band are unlikely to ever make an album.
NME: Hello Robbie and Jamie! You must have been kicking about at a lot of ‘00s parties, how far does your friendship go back?
Robbie Furze: “Me and Jamie T started becoming friends on the circuit of festivals when the first Big Pink record came out in 2009. Then me and Jamie Hince met at Corona Capital in Mexico in 2012.”
Jamie Hince: “He had a reputation – I think we all had reputations… I remember his wife giving me these dried insect snacks and I didn’t eat them because I thought he might have laced them with something…”
Furze: “Every band playing Corona Capital was staying in this massive hotel, so it was just chaos.”
Hince: “It was at the height of ego. Everyone had bodyguards. Bands were trying to outdo other bands. Like, The Black Keys – you’re two guys from Ohio, you don’t need armed bodyguards…”
Where does Jamie T fit into all this?
Hince: “Our orbits crossed quite a bit. I remember seeing him at some tiny little pub when he was probably about 19, and I love how it’s come full circle. My heart sinks a little bit when I see Jamie T working because I know I’m nowhere near [as good as] that. I have to chip away at things and stand back and then dive in again to get the feeling, whereas he’s just got the feeling from the start.”
Furze: “He’s pretty incredible. The song ‘Traitor’ on the EP was supposed to be for my vocal, and he was almost getting pissed off that we couldn’t get the verses right. He was just like, ‘I’ll sort it out’, goes up to the mic, does one take and it’s done. See you later. He’s that kind of guy.”
Do you have to leave your ego at the door in those situations?
Hince: “I did this amazing beat for ‘Traitor’ that I loved, and I sent it to Jamie T and got back a text saying: ‘One pound fish’. Fuck! I mean talk about leaving your ego at the door… I know what he was saying, he thought it was a bit ‘cor blimey’ waltz. But some of the shit he ends up doing, it’s totally ‘cor blimey one pound fish’!”
Furze: “But whatever works for the track works, and everyone has to be happy with it. You push each other without really knowing it.”
How did you envision the project?
Hince: “These things just come together. It sounds cheesy, but I wanted it to be the guitar version of N.E.R.D. – a production team of people that love each other.”
Furze: “We’ve got songs in the pipeline with other artists already, and it makes it like an N.E.R.D. or Unkle or Massive Attack thing. Being collaborative makes me more excited.”
Hince: “It feels like that time has gone where albums really last. Records seem to come and go quite quickly now. So I’ve shifted my enthusiasm because I think the attention span has gone. You spend so much time making records and so little time getting any reward.”
Furze: “I’d like to do standalone singles, or another EP of four or five tracks as a batch. I wouldn’t wanna go further than that.”
None of your individual bands and projects sound that alike – where do you think your tastes align?
Hince: “There’s something unspoken that we all seem to agree on which is this epic-ness. There’s a line in one of the songs that talks about ‘the last of the hooligans‘ and that seemed to be the feeling behind it all. If there’s a similarity with what everyone wanted, it was maybe just being a bit romantic and epic.”
Why do you think you were drawn to that?
Hince: “I don’t know, maybe we’re just lonely men?”
Furze: “Beaten down but being pulled up by hope…”
Hince: “We’ve all been bashing around, making all this noise and spending so much time doing it; I think it gives you that feeling. There’s something tiny and irrelevant about what you do but something life and death about what you do too, and I think the cocktail of that makes it… well, the last of the hooligans.”
Tell us a bit about ‘My Love’ – the first proper single.
Furze: “It’s one of the most basic songs. It’s a love song about hope, but it just has such an incredible energy to it with its simplicity. I’m not a massive Beatles fan but it has this relatable energy [like their early music]. ‘I wanna hold your hand’ – you don’t get more basic than that, in a great way. I think simplicity is power. Sometimes less is more, and if you mean it you can get away with it.”
Are there going to be live shows?
Furze: “Definitely. We’re playing a bit of catch up because we didn’t think ‘My Love’ would get the reaction it has, but we’re desperate to get out and do gigs.”
Hince: “In the spirit of the collaborative project, I’m really liking the idea of having different people in different countries playing with us; having a different vibe each time.”
Furze: “It would be really exciting to see different characters that you know from different bands. For the radio session [with Steve Lamacq on BBC 6 Music] we had Rhys Webb from The Horrors on bass, and I love that idea.”
You’re obviously very close – what are your favourite memories of this charming bromance?
Furze: “Jamie’s probably my best friend in the world and we’ve been through a lot together. In 2015 we both uprooted and went out to LA together, I went out there for about five years and he stayed, so we were pretty inseparable. It got to a point where it was breakfast, lunch and dinner together.”
Hince: “We just became one person. People would confuse us even though we don’t look the same. He had an ex-girlfriend who he went to say hello to and she said, ‘Hello Jamie’. We just started having the same vibe. The same embarrassing energy. We’ve chilled out a bit recently but when I was in LA and Robbie was in London we’d speak to each other for four hours a day. I was getting complaints from his wife.”
The ‘M.O.T.H.E.R. EP’ is out now.
The Big Pink returned with their third studio album, ‘The Love That’s Ours’, in 2022. It marked their first full-length effort in over 10 years. T and Hince worked on that LP, too, co-writing the single ‘Love Spins On Its Axis’.
The Kills released their sixth and latest record, ‘God Games’, in 2023.
Jamie T, meanwhile, made a comeback with ‘The Theory Of Whatever’ the previous year. He recently joined forces with Fred Again.. on the track ‘Lights Burn Dimmer’, and performed with The Maccabees at their big London reunion gig last summer.
