THANK YOU, CUM AGAIN

The new cumgirl8 EP phantasea pharm kinda sounds like Sparks, if Sparks were composed of four sexy 8,000-year-old aliens. And it’s heavier on the reverb, too, you might say.

The August 2023 release marks the NYC quartet’s first on a major label, 4AD, perhaps cementing the band’s delightful frivolity with a layer of gravitas. I remember when their name started appearing on the lineups of Brooklyn venues in the carefree final months leading up to the pandemic, and I remember just as well people talking shit. “Model rock,” they’d call it. “Those girls don’t even know how to play their instruments,” they’d say.

It all felt too familiar, the sort of dismissive comments you might have encountered in this rag during its first go-round, but not while in line for a drink at Market Hotel among the enlightened culturati of 2020s Bushwick.

And it’s true—the members of cumgirl8 do look like models, glamazon in both physique and presence. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t good.

I had to check my own personal biases when their EP landed in my inbox; I didn’t know whether to take them seriously either, but I admit, the fact that they had signed to 4AD made me take a closer look. And now, a few months later, I’ve been sucked into the groove: I want to go to this phantasea pharm. It’s otherworldly, somehow both ethereal and thump ing with Eurotrash electronica at the same time. It’s spooky and a little unsettling, and I like it.

It also isn’t serious. And that’s okay! Not everything has to be. I’m trying to have a good time here. I’m gonna put our VP of content on blast and say I had to strong-arm this story into the magazine. I really wanted y’all to know about this band, but he side-eyed me. He said, “Don’t you think it’s just shtick?” And I said, “So what if it is?” Just as being hot doesn’t preclude you from making cool music, being shtick isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If it were, people wouldn’t still be shoveling Dippin’ Dots down their gullets at amusement parks and baseball stadiums all over America every summer.

In fact, that’s a great way to think of cumgirl8, before we go any further: They’re like the Dippin’ Dots of contemporary post-punk.

I meet up with them on a steamy late-July day in downtown Manhattan. They’re set to play the recently reopened Pyramid Club (which is now called Knitting Factory at Bakers Falls, but that’s neither here nor there—the point is, we’re in the East Village). It’s too loud in the greenroom to conduct an interview, so we walk over to Tompkins Square Park. On the way over, guitarist Veronika Vilim notes that crab legs look a little like bloody tampons, and wouldn’t it be cool if they pulled them out of their pants on stage and threw them out into the crowd? I’m reminded of an alt drag queen I heard about down in D.C. who got semi-canceled on that niche circuit for using a live lobster in their performance. I guess if the crabs are already dead, it’s fine.

Veronika is dressed in a hot-pink mesh top with feathery pasties, atop some graphic floral low-rise pants and a pair of vinyl polka-dot go-go boots. Her eyes are lined in dramatic swoops of black liquid, and her long blonde hair is piled on top of her head, braids spilling out like tendrils. She looks like Josie and the Pussycats meets Zenon: Girl of the 21st Century—in fact, they all do, dripping in mesh and exposed six-pack abs and loud leopard prints.

They’re both impossible to miss and impossible to ignore, which makes it difficult to peacefully interview them amongst the chess tables in Tompkins, surrounded by all manner of catcallers and otherwise...chatty interlopers (I can hear them shouting incoherently at us in the background as I transcribe the interview months later). And within seconds of beginning, the band tells me they’re 8,000 years old and met in a different galaxy. I must pivot. The circumstances aren’t optimal, but I’m a professional, goddammit.

And let’s be real—it’s somehow less intimidating to talk to a band of age-old extraterrestrials than it is four aggressively stylish downtown hot girls. I ask them how they found each other.

Drummer Chase Lombardo tells me they met in a chatroom of sorts, “looking for like-minded people.” Dressed in a mesh bralette and low-rise pants, she gesticulates as she continues. “It was pretty easy [to connect] from their responses, and circling different universes, we were excited to come to Earth to bring some inspiration about sexual politics, but also love and acceptance.”

So it was like a Discord chatroom or something, then? I ask. Veronika jumps in, “It was like Discord, but a different thing because it was 8,000 years ago.”

Where did the name cumgirl8 come from?

“Cumgirl number one through seven, like, suck—but eight was hitting,” Chase explains. Already I can tell Veronika and Chase are the most vivacious of the group. Bassist Lida Fox will interject occasionally; guitarist Avishag Rodrigues sits taciturnly and smokes cigarettes.

Veronika corrects her: “Those usernames were already taken.” [Keep your story straight, ladies! —MB] Ever since, they’ve been trying to figure out who one through seven are. “We found cumgirl 1, which is Cicciolina,” Veronika continues, “and cumgirl2, which is John Waters. So we’re just waiting to find the other ones in between. Three to seven.”

Cicciolina is their muse, and the eponymous title of the EP’s opening track. Cicciolina is also the stage name of Hungarian-Italian porn star-cum-politician Ilona Staller. She made her name as an adult-film actress before being elected to the Italian Parliament from 1987 to 1992 as part of Partito Radicale, on a libertarian platform against nuclear energy and NATO membership.

“She was literally in Parliament,” Chase says. “Advocating for love and the end of the fucking war, Desert Storm. She told Saddam she would fuck if him if he would stop. She’s done the same for Putin recently.”

I assume Putin said no, and Chase agrees. “Yeah, he’s probably too busy. He sucks. Kind of Ken doll.” Which is to say asexual, impotent.

I did check the facts and they’re right, she also offered Osama bin Laden sex in exchange for peace. She would not be elected to another term in office, and like Cicciolina, cumgirl8 have taken some flak along the way for their sex-forward branding and ethos, so sex-forward that some would venture to deem it explicit.

“Our first Instagram was deleted. We’ve been banned from YouTube. We were shadow-banned from TikTok. We had to change it to ‘cgband,’” Veronika recounts. “It definitely has affected us, but we’re also just like, we’re still alive. We’ll be alive forever. You could come at us, but we can hold ourselves and still exist, without the hate and censorship.”

And it’s not just the name, dinging every algorithm that enslaves us. As I mentioned, this is a band of four exceptionally attractive, femme-presenting people. And I’ve been in the game long enough to know that folks will deride a band of hot girls simply for being hot. They must be undeniably good to be taken as seriously as a band of mediocre-looking dudes. So I ask them—is that the case, even in this, the year of our Lord 2023?

Yes, they all say in unity. “It’s definitely still a thing,” Veronika says.

“I don’t want to say too much, but I mean, we’ve gotten denied some opportunities because I think that there are other women who aren’t quite...” Chase trails off before picking up again. “I’m just saying it’s very interesting that there are women in the industry that would be surprised, because it’s usually the men who are misogynistic.”

I get the sense that she’s skirting the point: good old-fashioned internalized misogyny. The same kind that tugged at me when I decided that, now that 4AD sanctioned this band as “good,” now they were deserving of my attention. It comes from the fear that there isn’t enough room at the top for a bunch of women, and the threat only increases when the women in consideration—in this case, cumgirl8, are also beautiful. And unapologetically sexual. It’s a noxious blend of perceived threat, jealousy, and insecurity that drives this behavior.

They say it’s getting better, though. Chase specifies: “People are getting less scared of cum, and it’s getting more acceptable.”

And they see it in their fandom, who have taken to showing up at the gig dressed for the occasion. “People come to our shows and they’re always like, ‘Wow, the way you dress inspires me to dress the way that makes me feel good. I used to be way more self-conscious about the way that I dressed and being objectified. You’re making me realize that it’s okay to dress like that.’”

Chase continues: “There’s a full shift in our culture where we’re starting to realize that it’s really fucked up to judge a woman’s value based on how, like, how short her skirt is. [It’s about] realizing that you don’t dress for other people.”

It’s about reclamation, or perhaps the realization that you have no control over how other people perceive you.

Veronika steps in: “I mean, it depends how somebody says it. You know, if somebody says, ‘You’re a slut,’ like that [Veronika’s voice drops into a seductive purr], I’m like, yes. But if somebody says it like, ‘You’re a slut’ [now she sounds judgmental], I’m also like, yes.”

They think it’s a generational shift, with their younger fans understanding this nuance on a more inherent level. But as cumgirl8 have come to realize over their 8,000 years of existence, these cultural rhythms tend to fluctuate in a more epochal fashion. Chase thinks the youth will save us, but also, “There was the Paleolithic era, where they were pretty forward-thinking in their sexuality. Triceratops was horny.”

I end our discussion by asking what ethos really drives their band, outside these Zeitgeist shifts that are mostly out of their control.

Pleasure, they say. Expansive pleasure. And freedom.

Let the algorithm suck on that!