Shower Curtain: The Best of What's Next

Sitting on TV Eye’s graffitied wooden patio in Ridgewood, Queens, Victoria Winter recalls how her sister always used to tell her, “All you need is one show.” Growing up in Curitiba, the vocalist began uploading music to SoundCloud under the name Shower Curtain as a teenager. The self-produced bedroom pop tracks she made then have all been scrubbed from the internet, but after moving to Los Angeles and, later, New York City to pursue a degree at Parsons School of Design, Winter frankensteined the project into a new life in quartet form—alongside guitarist Ethan Williams, drummer Sean Terrell and bassist Cody Hudgins—but it was more of a domino effect than it was a calculated build-up. As they prepare to play a release show at this very same venue in November to celebrate their dreamy, shoegaze-inspired debut album words from a wishing well, Winter hopes to capture the fateful phenomena of “right place, right time” that led each bandmate to the group. “It’s telling the story of how things come together,” she reflects. “There’s a kind of magic in that.”

Winter’s sister was ultimately right: all it took was one show for her and Williams—the two primary songwriters—to cross paths. At the Lower East Side’s New Colossus Festival in 2022, Winter was playing a show with her bandmates, whom she’d met during her time as a backing drummer in LA. Williams was in the crowd—trying to mosh in between the “45-year-old men and music journalists”—and he was enthralled by not just Winter’s hypnotic voice but her band’s flourishing indie rock-hybrid sound. After the gig, he went up and complimented her. “He told me I reminded him of Wednesday, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s my dream support slot,’” she recalls. “I asked him if he wanted to join me.” After lots of manifesting and journaling, in the hopes of a full quartet, Winter met Terrell and Hudgins through shows with other bands, assembling a super team to finally make Shower Curtain a complete project two years later.

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In the New York City DIY scene, it was easy for Shower Curtain to make connections. “I would just try to get booked at one venue, and from there, someone else would ask me to do another show,” Winter says. Coming from Curitiba, where the chances to play live were few and far between, she was just grateful to finally be present in an active music scene. “It was really hard in the beginning, because there were a lot of cultural differences, but overall, there’s just so many more opportunities here,” she continues. “I miss Brazil a lot still, but over there, I’m lucky if there’s even any post-COVID venues left.”

Winter’s mother would play her traditional Brazilian music as she was growing up, while her father introduced her to contemporary punk music like the Dead Kennedys. She moved to LA during an era of chill garage rock that opened the door for acts like Cherry Glazerr and Mac DeMarco to flirt with the mainstream—an era she traces back to heavily when considering Shower Curtain’s core influences. Accompanied by Williams’s adolescent love for hardcore and ‘90s alt-rockers like Weezer and Pixies—paired with a deep appreciation for the modern-day shoegaze of DIIV and Ringo Deathstarr all across the board—the result is a strong, dreamy thread of hazed-out indie music with a strong, sturdy backbone of pure rock ‘n’ roll piecing the entire sound together.

Shower Curtain, Winter’s first official EP under the name, was a short collection of sweet love songs with the similar sort of psychedelia that was a constant 10 years ago. Winter’s voice then was soft and gentle, kinetic but with a hint of introversion that almost prevented her from making music at times. “I’m not a shy person at all; I’m very big as an individual,” she says. “But for some reason, sharing my music used to be so scary. The first show I had when I was 17, I didn’t even post about it.”

In 2023, Shower Curtain put out the single “edgar” as a full band—a dense and turbulent track about Winter’s cat being diagnosed with feline leukemia virus. It’s filled with grief and anxiety, as she wrestles between accepting reality and holding a shred of hope. They followed up in November of that year with “meus passos,” a more atmospheric, collaborative single with a Curitiba-based band called terraplana. Winter had been friends with terraplana vocalist and guitarist Vinícius Lourenço since 2017, and the two would exchange videos of riffs and ideas over WhatsApp that eventually made up the song. Shower Curtain’s 2023 releases signaled a shift in the band’s sound—to an energy that was more pensive and thoughtful, bursting with experimentation and progressive noise.

The process of recording words from a wishing well was an exercise in around-the-clock collaboration. Having come from a solo background, Winter felt slightly anxious about showing her lyrics to the rest of her bandmates—but writing together with Williams was a practice in that, too, since he produces all of the music as well. She began to shed the fear that her work wasn’t good enough to share. “It takes getting used to someone, because that’s your idea, and it’s very vulnerable,” she says. “The band relationship tests those boundaries. It’s constantly a vibe check. Shower Curtain doesn’t really function as, ‘Hey, this sounds like it’s done, like you have to play this part now.’ It’s kind of like a skeleton. We’ll work on work on the guitars separately, but once I figure it out, it really comes together within the group. All of that came from trust building.”

When Shower Curtain played SXSW in March, they were forced to withstand a full 48 hours together in close quarters—navigating physically uncomfortable situations in a crammed Subaru Crosstrek as they made the grueling road trip to Texas. Not only did the band survive running on no sleep, running out of gas and running over one of their laptops, but they didn’t despise each other when it was all over, either. “Our vibes were just so high, and we were somehow having fun all the time,” Winter says. “It surpassed my expectations. I was like ‘Damn, I really recharge with these people,’ which is a really good sign.”

words from a wishing well celebrates this meeting of collaboration and friendship, and acts as a more accurate representation of how Shower Curtain wants to truly be seen moving forward. “benadryl man” ebbs between traditional indie rock and bizarre, accelerating shoegaze—as Winter laments the fear of seeing things in the shadows of her apartment once she began living on her own. After mishearing Williams explain the outlandish “hat man” Twitter meme, she weaved her own vivid and paranoid interpretation of this haunted figure. “Suck your soul, you’re a shell / I can tell you’re in your personal hell,” she taunts toward the looming cough-medicinal figure, with an element of fascination dissolving into unrelenting fear.

“wish u well,” the first single released from the debut, calls back to that softer sound that was found in Winter’s earlier tracks, and takes more of a dream pop approach with swooning and fluttery guitars. Hushed among the instrumental mist, Winter says goodbye to someone who she once adored. She’s forlorn as she sings the chorus: “Thought you were my favorite / Now I can’t see it.” words from a wishing well is about love, fear, jealousy, grief and anxiety—a culmination of what Shower Curtain has been through so far, and where all these different shapes may take the project next.

Shower Curtain have always operated by taking it one step at a time: one gig, one song, one fan, one deciding and conclusive moment that will take them to the next level. It’s been a long time in the making, and now all they can think about are the next chapters. words from a wishing well, in Williams’s eyes, is “the best versions of the songs” they could have possibly made—a mindset they will keep bringing to their future work as they progress deeper into their career. “In the past, if I was unhappy with something, I would just be like, ‘It’s good enough,’” says Winter. “With this record, it needs to be the best we could have done now. I don’t think that’s the best record that the world’s going to see from us, because I still think we’re gonna slay—and make the next one even better.”

After working hard to establish themselves in the ever-progressing world of the NYC rock scene, Shower Curtain believe that this album finally represents what it’s like to go to one of their gigs. And, with a little luck, it might just attract new fans. If that’s the case, then Victoria Winter and her band can’t wait to meet everyone. “I would love for [words from a wishing well] to motivate more women to get into music,” Winter says. “Every time we get a new fan, it’s always like, the bad bitch in the crowd. It makes me so happy, because it seems so genuine that the girls are excited about the music. I’m doing something right, because that’s what I was searching for when I was 17 and 18.”

Shower Curtain: The Best of What’s Next