Big Girl Are Ready to Be Your DIY God
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Self-Released
Big Girl’s performance was the crux of a protest show held during last year’s South By Southwest, where a slew of punk-adjacent acts gathered to play a thrashing, beer-soaked free set under a highway. On stage, frontperson Kaitlin Pelkey is flanked by two backup singers, Christina Schwedler and Melody Stolpp, whose sharply coordinated moves set a ferociously campy scene. Their show is quite the production, with multiple guitars, choreography, and Pelkey’s powerhouse vocals wrangling the chaos. The singers’ frenzied dance lights up the band’s layered rock sound, miraculously weaving a biting punk aesthetic out of melody and perfectly timed movements. How the hell did Big Girl come up with this strange concoction of a live show? “Be truthful and be stupid,” frontperson Kaitlin Pelkey says.
At the dyed-red heart of Big Girl’s songs, Pelkey’s voice contorts and swirls, never missing a note, yet not quite content to settle on one for too long either. The band’s new single, “DIY GOD,” finds expressive electric guitars chugging, sparkling, and wailing in Pelkey’s wake, trailing her like the briefcase chained to her wrist in the music video. There’s something a little unsettling about the tone of her voice: although pretty, her melodies are a little loopy, a little queasy, channeling ghosts of glam rock past in a way that counterbalances the songs’ scuzzy instruments. Turns out, a touch of theatrics is the perfect canvas for the NYC band’s very real experiences and emotions.
"DIY GOD" is just the first taste of a forthcoming EP called DYE which is coming later this year. Pelkey wrote most of these songs in 2020 in the midst of her mother’s dire health crisis, which she eventually succumbed to, passing away in 2021. “A lot of the stuff I write about is pretty heavy, pretty dark,” admits Pelkey. Paradoxically, the depth of her painful moments fuels the panache that sets Big Girl apart. “Just remembering that you have to keep the joy in your story - it actually elevates it,” she says about the maximalist aesthetic of their live performances and forthcoming EP. Pelkey’s songs strike a remarkable balance between maudlin and cathartic, both extremes fueled by the same deep well of emotion.
Red keeps showing up in Big Girl’s new era, whether seeping out of Pelkey’s freshly colored hair in a sink or lighting up her energy in an angry swath. “It’s bloody,” she says about the motif. Dyed-red hair isn’t just a stylistic choice, she elaborates: it’s “transformation on your own terms…bringing color to a place that once had none.”
Photo by Tess Fulkerson
Big Girl’s guitarist Crispin Swank produced DYE with help from Justin Pizzoferrato (Speedy Ortiz, Dinosaur Jr., Pixies), who had also helped them bring their debut album, Big Girl vs. God, to life. They knocked the EP’s five songs out in just three studio days, tightening up their sound from the manic sprawl of older songs like “Big Car Full of Mistakes.” In contrast, “DIY GOD” sticks with just one time signature throughout—although don’t expect a clean-cut indie rock track, with Pelkey’s voice maintaining a dash of drama a la Puberty 2-era Mitski. The single is a lurching, groovy confessional, culminating in Swank’s guitar shredding Weezer-style behind exasperated choruses. “No one can fuck it up like I do,” Pelkey sneers, summing up the EP’s flamboyant existential crisis in a single line.
Disassembling—hitting a wall and starting over—succumbing to weirdness and chaos. It’s all a part of Big Girl’s journey through DYE. Quitting a job on a sunny day, dyeing one’s hair just to feel something. Despite the band’s larger-than-life sound, their struggles are the same as everybody else trying to find meaning in an uncertain era. Big Girl’s snark is just one stripe in a swirl of deep experience: grief, joy, and rage at the horrors of our modern world. But what better vessel for angst than sharp, relentless rock songs?
“So watch me burn it all ‘cause I’m so bored that I told you the truth,” Pelkey howls on “DIY GOD,” wrestling with the apparent futility of… well, everything. The final scene of the music video shows Pelkey thrashing in the waves on the Miami shore, melodramatically raging against the impossibility of art, of joy, of any hope at all. The song answers its own question in a flash of graffiti in the middle of the music video: “Red Hot Salvation.” With their newest songs, Big Girl’s underlying belief shines through that creating DIY art is, in and of itself, the salvation that they seek.
Katie Hayes is a music writer and karaoke superstar in Austin, Texas. She is from there, but between 2010 and now, also lived in Lubbock, TX, Portland, OR, and a camper. Her life is a movie in which her bearded dragon Pancake is the star. You can check out her Substack here and some of her other writing here. She’s writing a book about growing up alongside her favorite band, Paramore.
