Chastity Belt started as a joke. A group of girls running around a Beta Theta (something) frat party in Walla Walla Washington, flipping over tables and yelling things like “Surrender to the god of punk!” No doubt they were giggling the whole time. Dreamed up in the unforgivable environment that is the small college town, where house parties reign and house parties with kegs reign tougher, Chastity Belt started as an excuse, a reason to be loud.
If I could sum up my phone call with lead singer and guitarist Julia Shapiro in one word, it would be “Totally.” Both of us are in that tender post-college mid-20s life, and listening through Chastity Belt’s repertoire, from 2012’s Fuck Chastity Belt to the forthcoming Time to Go Home, each song fits neatly into a timeline of events I totally understand. Getting to a party just to wish you never got there, getting too drunk on a Saturday and having to go home, being a ‘lil slut, the urge to light things on fire, crying.
“Back then I was just thinking—what’s gonna make the kids dance?” Julia reminisces on the band’s college town beginnings, giggling a lot. After a summer post-college apart, Julia along with guitarist Lydia Lund, bassist Annie Truscott and drummer Gretchen Grimm gathered again in Seattle and played some shows. Suddenly, they registered their audience had shifted—from a basement where five 20-year-olds and their seven bongs lived together in dirty harmony—to Seattle’s supportive DIY community.
“After moving to Seattle we realized ‘Oh, we don’t actually have to write joke party songs anymore.’”
And having started in jest, there’s still playfulness and wit there. “I just wanna have a good time / I hope you have a strong heart,” Julia sings on the titular “Time to Go Home.” A song about literally, getting too drunk and having to go home, Chastity Belt takes back teenage cynicism and makes it funny.
And although the band’s beginnings are clearly an influence on a chill, yet hard-hitting sound, they also play a role in the band’s personality. “It takes a certain kind of attitude to be a female in a band,” Julia says. That attitude is personified in Chastity Belt’s latest press photos—in mom jeans and ‘80s scrunchies, they smile as if to say the joke’s on us. “I think that’s part of the reason we started as a joke, was cause we thought we needed to be a joke in order to get that attention.”
It was a foolproof plan: “At that point we didn’t really know how to write songs, or be in a band. So in order to get people to listen to us we were like let’s make this funny. And if people say we suck, then we can just laugh about it.” Julia comically wonders if this method could ever extend to other professions. A joke lawyer who suddenly pleas “Nevermind! I’m a serious lawyer!”
In many ways, Time to Go Home is new territory for the band. Their second full-length release and first on their new label Hardly Art, the album has a few truly emotional songs sprinkled throughout, reminders that early 20s isn’t all, well, house parties. Vulgar and sweet, Chastity Belt’s vagina take back is easily summed up by a glance at their song titles: “Pussy Weed Beer,” “Nip Slip,” “Cool Slut.”