8,000 years ago, bassist Lida Fox, guitarists Veronika Vilim and Avishag Cohen Rodrigues, and drummer Chase Lombardo were created in a lab in their own universe, which also happened to be a sex chat. “We were brought [to Earth] to show our art and our world to people, to the humans,” Veronika says. The foursome arrived in modern day New York City via an internet portal, a tear in the continuum where they were incarnated into human form from their blobby, amoeba beginnings. “It’s kind of off-putting to see our natural form,” Chase adds, “so we have this more humanoid form.” Once they got here, they deemed themselves “cumgirl8.” “Was it a painful transition, becoming a human?” I ask the women. “I think it’s more painful to see the reality of what this universe is, more than anything,” Veronika replies.
cumgirl8 do not label themselves a “band,” at least not by our current metrics. They’re an art collective, because their world isn’t restricted to just music. Over five years, Lida, Veronika, Avishag and Chase have broadened their own milieu by making zines, hosting a podcast and even creating a fashion line. “It’s easier to spread a message, too, if you have a multi-pronged approach,” Chase says. “We’re trying to help humans navigate this new post-reality that they’ve created with technology.” To cumgirl8, the truth of this period is no longer relevant, as human life exists on a spectrum. But, someone needs to help us navigate this new territory of frustration with exceptional pleasure, as all of the borders and binaries have been greyed out and what’s real versus what’s fake has never felt more ambiguous. cumgirl8, however, always gravitates back to the music.
“Music is the one thing that nobody can actually hold,” Chase says. “You can buy a record, but you can’t hold a record. You can stream music, but you can’t actually have it. It’s the most ephemeral way to connect with people, and it’s the oldest way—it’s really transcendent. You can’t say what it is—it’s a combination of sounds, but what the fuck is happening? That’s us. We’re cumgirl8. The 8 is infinite.” There’s a pause between the women. “Music is really the only form where we can actually go around and physically do it and be there, in our form forever around the whole world,” Veronika stresses. “There’s not really another art portal that does something quite like that.” “I think music, too, is inherently healing,” Chase says. “It’s healing to make, it’s healing to listen to and watch people perform it.”
By expanding the constrictions of performative spaces, not allowing themselves to get boxed into any sort of label by the industry, and embracing multi-dimensionality, cumgirl8 have opened up the room to everything—the well of possibility is now more infinite than ever before, according to Lida. “When you come to our shows, it’s not like we’re just playing our songs off the record,” Veronika says. “We’re really immersive and we want people to join our ideology and spread love and have respect for each other. It’s a huge pro, being able to really immerse people in this world—because you can see all these things on the internet, but the physical experience is just unearthly.” Chase notes that our senses go far beyond just our ears, that cumgirl8 can “incorporate the entire sensual experience using more than one art form.” “It’s more enjoyable,” she continues. “Our whole thing is pleasure, and the more we do, the more we can do.”
Some of cumgirl8’s “lifer fans” were around during their genesis in 2019, when they were playing bad gigs around New York City. “The more terrible our shows were, the better fans we got,” Veronika laughs. “Dedicated,” Chase emphasizes. The collective played a show at the Lot Radio in Brooklyn five years that was an especially messy, chaotic night—it was hot and they wore full-latex outfits (no other band on the bill was dressed up in any kind of way, mind you), their look being akin to what Chase calls “being at the science fair dressed up like the Statue of Liberty.” “It starts storming, the sound guy’s really mean to us, for some reason, Lida fell down and had to go to the hospital,” Chase says. “We were at a bowling alley and I was pretending I was a bowling ball, and they kicked us out,” Lida chimes in. “All of the equipment fell down while we were playing,” Chase continues. “I think we broke their shit. Everyone was really mad at us.”
It was the kind of showing that, for most up-and-coming acts, could’ve been a breaking point. And for cumgirl8, it almost was. “The five people that happened to be there really wanted us to continue,” Veronika says. So they did, only to spend the rest of the night, post-show, at the ER because, right before the set, Lida tore her knee up on some gravel while carrying gear into the venue. “Because we were sweating so much in the latex, the bandage I had put on just melted off during the set,” she explains, “so my knee was just hanging open.” “We call Lida ‘Bleeda’ because she naturally bleeds more than other people,” Veronika declares. “Yeah they actually put too much blood into her human body,” Chase adds. I think that’s a circumstance most of us can relate to.
The first thing that sticks out about cumgirl8 is their wardrobe: bright, fluorescent tops made of material that looks good when light bounces off of it, mesh tights, low-rise Daisy Dukes, go-go boots, kaleidoscopic eyeliner, Roy G. Biv-colored hair moving in every direction conceivable. It’s trashy and electric, stunning and tonally proper. Someone referred to cumgirl8 as “scantily-clad creatures from the Black Lagoon,” and I immediately said to myself, “I don’t think there’s another description that would fit.” How the four women landed on that aesthetic, however, wasn’t their decision. “It just came to us how everything else has come to us,” Veronika says. “We’re all drawn to similar things, and that’s how we were drawn together, as well,” Chase adds. “Drawn together as in ‘sketched out,’ or drawn together as in ‘colliding energetically’?” I ask. “Both,” Chase and Veronika reply.
In 2023, cumgirl8 signed with 4AD—the very same London-born label that has put out all-time great records by everyone from Bauhaus, to the Dead Can Dance, to the National. Longtime fans of the label, the same type of folks who loved the Pixies 30 years ago, were not so stoked to see a band of anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, sex-positive amoebas join its ranks. But one of cumgirl8’s greatest joys comes from winning people over. “That’s the reason why we’re doing it,” Veronika says. “There’s this message that we’re trying to put out to people, and the problem with it—with being objectified—is that we’re being told that we can’t, or that we’re not good enough, or whatever fuels the fire. It’s rewarding to see people start to understand what we’re doing, because we are doing something.” “We objectify ourselves,” Chase continues, “so it’s really funny when people get mad at that—because it’s like, ‘But we’re in control. This is the point!’ We have agency over ourselves, so why don’t you come see us and then you’ll probably understand. And sometimes they do come and then they get it, or they don’t, which is even better—because, if we’re pissing people off, it’s such a compliment.”
Lida, Veronika, Avishag and Chase have had their fair share of interactions with cumgirl8 converts, but one such instance with a “rapper from London” stands out more than a year after the group got their record deal. “He really started making an effort whenever 4AD would post [about us online],” Chase says. “He would just be like, ‘This is garbage, 4AD has sucked since the Pixies, this is bullshit,’ and I kind of argued with him a little bit in the comments and got him to come to a show. Then, he went back to the original comment and was like, ‘My bad, y’all, I saw them live and they rip.’ It was really cute. He might not have been old enough to be at the show, but it felt like we really saved him. That was really rewarding, his little accountability moment was hot.”
Making music that is provocative and challenging, too, can open up the floor to some really incredible and surprising gigs. That magic combination, where the cylinders of the songs, the presentation and the crowd are all firing, is a much more regular occurrence for cumgirl8 now. “And I think that’s the reason why we’re still doing it,” Veronika admits. “Yeah, even if there are hardly any people there, we still give it our all,” Lida adds. “Every show feels like an experience.” When you listen to cumgirl8’s music, you can hear flashes of Cocteau Twins, Madonna and a kind of techno music that might make the walls of your home cave in if you play it too loud. But there are no unlikely sources of inspiration for Lida, Veronika, Avishag and Chase; everything fits, because they’re infinite. “Curtains, dust, everything falls on the spectrum,” Lida says.
cumgirl8’s 4AD introduction last year—an EP called phantasea pharm that followed a bunch of self-released singles—came together on stage, especially the song “picture party.” But when it was time to start making their debut album, the 8th cumming (out 10/4), Lida, Veronika, Avishag and Chase wrote all of it in December 2023 after six months of non-stop touring— “communicating telepathically” and recording everything live on analog the following January. None of these songs, like “ahhhh!hhhh! (i don’t wanna go),” “Karma Police” and “girls don’t try,” were born in the studio and felt “very right now” then and beyond. cumgirl8, too, have taken a massive leap this time around, contrasting their zany post-punk propensities of old with industrialized, primitive, Suicide-style synth-pop that covers its margins in sticky bubblegum and flirts deliriously with EDM, Top 40 and metal. It’s all metallic and distorted, sounding like something that was grown in a lab for me and hopefully you.
the 8th cumming will be, mark my words, the LP that introduces cumgirl8 to the rest of the pop-starved, freaky-as-fuck world. “mercy” is a SOTY candidate, existing as this sleazy, dramatic symphony that’s massive in color and scope—encompassing the crux of cumgirl8’s intentions here on Earth. The arrangements are hyper-alive, as the women reach a certain level of bombast that arrives to the rest of us like some shred of amorphous enlightenment. I tend to gravitate toward fucked-up art, but not in a heavy sense. It’s the explicit stuff probing the parts of humanity we’re taught, from a young age, to not engage with that grabs me. When cumgirl8 sing a lyric like “Let me lick my drip up from your chin to your lips” and “I want you to have your way with me ’til I die” with a certain taste of apocalypse on their tongues, or when they are writing songs about mental masturbation while also considering the human versus machine relationships, they beg their listeners to step into a zone that is systematically made to feel uncomfortable. As cumgirl8 see it, “post-reality” has already set in. Their music then, as it exists through the 8th cumming of it all, is a tome that can bring people into a present moment and make them live in it. “You gotta resign yourself to not knowing that the consciousness we grew up in is eroding,” Chase says. “We all have to admit that the lines have blurred—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, if you have a new compass to navigate it. It’s about seeking pleasure without judging it, feeling good when you’re in the muck of it.”
What the 8th cumming presents to a listener—as is the case with all of cumgirl8’s catalog—is an intergalactic, unknowable stamp of utopian, warped chaos. Lida, Veronika, Avishag and Chase make music that evokes an optimism for a better online world—one where sex workers don’t have to live in fear of being doxxed, anyone can log in and order Plan C, and the environment isn’t falling apart because of AI. If you’ve ever spent a night on Chatroulette, you’re going to love the 8th cumming. Now, I want you to imagine a world where rules, men and capitalism are all as alien as the women singing about it. That’s the world of the 8th cumming, and have mercy on us all, because it’s so colorful, innate, sexual and full of lust—a kind of internet-driven primacy that most artists are resistant to indulging in. For cumgirl8, there is no hesitancy in exploring something that everybody is so familiar with. That’s what makes it worth exploring and “coming undone” for, as it demands to be looked at differently. “The internet is a part of us,” Veronika says. “Our sexuality was developed through the internet, with Instant Messenger and stuff like that. The idea of people not being afraid on the internet, I think that attitude is a huge part of the band, too—and not being precious about it through our art and through what we do.”
It’s inspiring how much history exists around cumgirl8 already, just a mere 72 hours before their debut album reaches the rest of the world. I suppose it does help that they are all 8,000 years old. But none of it came intentionally, instead developing in response to their “explanations of our existence.” “I’m thinking of us in a little lab in the woods, just building our lore,” Chase says. “We are very DIY with how we do everything, as well, so it actually seems extremely appropriate for us to physically build our lore,” Veronika replies. “Whittling!” Chase exclaims. “Definitely a lot of glueing.” “There’s a lot of glue in the lore,” Veronika stresses. “A lot of fabric and beautiful yet absolutely disgusting chaos. Pritney is chewing on it.” “I think we’re all chewing on it,” Lida reacts. Pritney is cumgirl8’s manager and, if she’s falling asleep while listening to their music, then that’s how Lida, Veronika, Avishag and Chase know they’re heading in the right direction. Oh, and Pritney is a “party slut” and also a Pomeranian. What, did you expect anything different?
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.