SKEETER XCX

You're not gonna believe this but we listened to brat

Hey you lil freaks it’s blog time because we have like, a pretty big project coming out this week. The first four Charli XCX covers are coming tomorrow, then the next day, then again, then one more time. Von Dutch is the first one we’re posting.

Then part two is coming likely in March with a few more songs with different video aesthetics. You’re gonna love it.

This whole thing started in a few different places. If we really want to get into the weeds we could say it started when our singer Cam suggested we cover Vroom Vroom literal years ago because they are a genius, but to harp on it would be petty and unnecessary. Early into brat summer we were figuring out what our Halloween cover set would be and this album - immediately one of the greatest dance records of all time in case you weren’t aware - was obviously the place to pull from. We did a Daft Punk cover set the previous Halloween and it sounded almost nothing like Daft Punk in the way of instrumentation, etc. Some audience members were visibly confused - and then some of those left, some were won over. So naturally we had to find something else that would likely piss somebody off.

We made a shared playlist of possible songs, several of which were actually not on brat, but were still brat, you know? Honorable mentions included Lightning and Track 10. Boom Clap and I Love It were never on the list. No one will ever know why.

What we ended up with was the following set (order definitely not accurate):

Von Dutch

Vroom Vroom

B2B

365

Apple

Sympathy Is A Knife

Guess

Sympathy was the first song we got together, and bringing it to shows really drove home how fun it is to play. And then it turned out all the songs are fun to play because they are really, really good.

Then came the idea to record this thing at least pretty-properly, which then ballooned into getting live performance footage in the studio, and doing reshoots for some of the video footage that got lost, which is proof that there is or is not a god depending on how you look at it. We went into Silver Cord Studios, the literal biggest (ranking explicitly by ceiling height) studio that I, humble narrator, have ever recorded in. We arrived around 9 AM and recorded until around 9 PM with few breaks (huuuge shout-out to our engineer Tim and our DP John for being cool under our dictatorial rule). Pretty much all the takes used are just whatever the best take was after a couple runs, the band all playing together, as ascribed by the goal of the day: capture the set, because these covers are keepers. And then we got a few other goodies done in the studio for you, including but not limited to footage for Website, the single from our most recent album, BREAD. Go watch that shit too.

We just finished reshoots for part 2 of brat but it’s skeeter de milo so it’s weird, and we can’t wait to show you all of this shit. Also we really want to show Charli. If you’re reading this and you know Charli you have to tell us. It’s The Rule.

Mainly we just hope you have as much fun with the final product as we had making it. We hope you connect to it the way our local music community did in person. I’ve been thinking about this secret language that we tend to perceive in music taste, regardless of the actual artist’s views, etc (Kamala is in fact, not brat). As recently as this last fall I found that I would speak to people who still didn’t know Charli XCX by name (and in the height of SWEAT TOUR??), who brat summer simply hadn’t reached (insane). And here’s the thing: Charli XCX is definitely one of my “safe” artists, meaning if I meet someone who likes said artist, I feel more open to being my authentic self (see: queer idiot). If this project is for anyone, it’s for the social skeptic, especially the one who won’t go to a show because it’s a white cishet world out there. And if there’s anything I can add to that as an outlier in The Scene, there is a place for you if you want it. We’ve got you. Come say hi.

We’re playing at Our Wicked Lady on February 27th in support of Goof Goblin’s EP release.