Local Band Meow Meow Spreads Queercore Punk 

The Hudson-Valley-based band Meow Meow is on the brink of taking over the world. Maybe the world is a stretch, but over the last year, they’ve been spreading their queercore punk far beyond the confines of New Paltz basement venues. Their new single “Trampled Flowers” is the perfect introduction for what’s to come. 

Meow Meow was founded by lead vocalist Kitty Jagelka, lead guitarist Harry Lubiner and bassist Ash Wilk in 2020 who wrote fun, punky music that they performed on campus and at local venues. Throughout the years, they’ve had various horn players and drummers, but the band currently features drummer Sydney Dahl and saxophonist Celina McAleer. With them, the band is writing music they never would’ve thought of writing or performing.

They have spent 2024 experimenting with their live sound, performing at new venues in New York City and beyond. Most notably, they opened for MySpace sensations Millionaires in their first out-of-state show in New Jersey. They went out of state again to record a live session with the Philadelphia-based record label Cart Music. But come winter, the band is paring down on gigs and going back into recording mode. 

Their new single was released on Nov. 20, which marked the 25th annual Transgender Day of Remembrance. The messaging of the song is wholly significant to the day, observing those who have lost their lives to acts of anti-trans violence. Throughout the song, Jagelka repeats variations of the lyric “A girl who is a friend / A girl-boy girlfriend,” until the dynamic and emotional climax of the song, getting louder while singing, “Worse than something strange in the dark / is something strange in sunlight” over an acoustic breakdown. Jagelka erupts into an impassioned wail in the line, “I can’t / protect you / from everything that you don’t like about me.” Below the somber vocals, McAleer’s bellowing sax notes weave behind Lubiner’s grungy electric guitar and Wilk’s bassline, punctuated by Dahl’s drum crashes. 

The song was produced by Matthew Demersky from the Rockland County emo band Dumpcake in four sessions, but it has been in the works for much longer. Jagelka wrote the lyrics during the early days of Meow Meow about her personal complex relationship with gender presentation and identity. The song itself serves as a love letter to anyone who has felt fundamentally rejected and misunderstood.

“When I was in high school, I identified as a pretty binary trans guy and that experience split me down the center. I was one person with certain friends and I was another person with certain friends. Then the people who knew me as both treated me differently,” Jagelka said. “I really struggled to feel like I was giving the fullness of myself to anyone, or that anyone could handle that, or that anyone wanted to take that on.”

Though the song pulls from the “queer existence” that Jagelka mentions in the lyrics, many have applied their own meaning to it. “I feel like every single one of us has our own interpretation of ‘Trampled Flowers,’” Dahl said. “But other people have been listening to it and talking about it. It’s really cool hearing how everybody interprets things differently.”

Fans have been overwhelmingly supportive about the new song, even before its release. The band first performed the song at a Warwick DIY show to a receptive and excited crowd. Now that the song is out, they have had other bands covering the single, something Jagelka says is the “mark of a good song.” Bands as far as Glasgow have reached out to the band about performing it themselves and Meow Meow even received a piano cover of the heavy rock track. 

“It’s been kind of a crazy experience seeing the riffs that I’ve written come in so many different places from so many different people,” Lubiner said. “I still can’t believe that someone was willing to go to the lengths of not only covering the song, but adapting it to an entirely new instrument.”

The riff and title of “Trampled Flowers” were inspired by Lubiner’s elementary school days, when he gave a girl he was interested in flowers he picked only to find her and her friends stomping on them when he walked away. Though the distorted guitar riff is undeniably powerful and catchy enough to bang your head to, there’s a sense of hurt to the melody. It’s darker than Lubiner’s usual taste, but it represents the sound the band is growing into with their upcoming record.

“In terms of how we’ve been thinking about our music and how we’ve been writing, I think there’s definitely been a noticeable change. Almost a pre-Trampled and post-Trampled progression,” Lubiner said.

Jagelka, Lubiner and Wilk are planning to solidify the compositions of about 10 songs for a new record. Like “Trampled Flowers,” they mix older lyrics with a fresh sound on their next anticipated single, “Undulate.” Lyrics like “Fresh faced / How does it taste / All guts, no grace” were written by Jagelka years ago in 2019. The end of the song is completely new, with a time signature change leading into a punky sax solo written solely by Lubiner, Dahl and McAleer. The band is almost done recording the song, tentatively expecting to release it this February. With their next classic “post-Trampled” era song, Meow Meow is excited to transition into a sound with a different kind of intensity.

“I feel like I’ve been sitting with [these songs] for so long that that’s how I think of us. But this is a change for everyone else who hasn’t been to a live show where we’ve played in the last year,” Wilk said. 

“I think it’s kind of healing in that way to be able to take those ideas that we’ve left alone for so long that have collected dust, to brush the dust off and make something so new and beautiful out of it,” Lubiner said.

You can follow Meow Meow @meowmeowband on Instagram for more updates on releases and performances or check out their website meowmeowtheband.neocities.org.