Xiu Xiu Scream Through Reality

In a freezing movie theater on Gena Rowlands’s birthday this past June, I watched Peter Falk’s palm make harsh contact with skin on screen and haven’t shaken the crowd’s reaction since. John Cassavetes’s A Woman Under the Influence, the film in question, has its reputation as an emotionally fraught, arduous film to sit through for a reason, but as there are moments of levity which will slip your memory until you’re sitting there revisiting it, letting yourself chuckle that the objectively absurd or humorous moment created by Rowlands’s spacy protagonist. Then, Falk’s character will slap her out of frustration or berate her in front of his friends, and the gasping audience audibly reels, as if to chide themselves for ever getting too comfortable, for letting themselves believe they were safe. Cassavetes and Rowlands’s collaborations work like that: discomfort must be considered and endured, making those short glimpses of light they reveal all the more precious. There are few artists so beloved because of the way they depict the reality of that discomfort. These are never decisions made for shock value, but to serve as an exercise in dissecting human relationships—bonds which hold strenuous weight, which snap with no clean resolution.

In the world of experimental music, Xiu Xiu has taken a similar approach over their 22 years of existence—making three quarters of a pop song and then never letting it resolve, aping the indie sound du jour but distorting it, hiding the final piece you need to complete and frame the puzzle and leaving you scrambling on the floor for it. Long before they were considered a cornerstone figure of a certain type of unabashedly queer, truly alternative milieu, Jamie Stewart always built universes out of a small set of influences or one distilled, potent sensation—creating an overwhelming body of work which seeks to immerse you in the disjointed and supremely moving reality of life. I find their magic difficult to explain to people who aren’t familiar with their vast back catalog; it’s like a shared language in which only the converted know how to speak to each other.

About 15 hours before I speak to Stewart and their bandmate Angela Seo (who has contributed to Xiu Xiu projects since 2006 and became a full-fledged member in 2009), I hear about Gena Rowlands’s passing and can only hear their music in the language of the tightrope walk she performed by acting, filled with brazen emotionality. I think of the clattering eruption of debut album Knife Play’s first track “Don Diasco,” the delicate masochism of Fabulous Muscles’ title track, the mechanical groove of FORGET’s “Wandering,” the ominous grind of Girl with Basket of Fruit’s entire tracklist. I think of the irreverence inherent to the band’s work as well—in song titles and visuals and reimagining the work of everyone from Nina Simone to Angelo Badalamenti to Morrissey to ZZ Top to Rihanna, magicking them all into Xiu Xiu classics. I think about the devotional, often lighthearted fanbase it’s all inspired—the fans buying tiny shorts with the band’s name written across the back, posting pictures of their Xiu Xiu tattoos, helping new fans acclimate to the jagged nature of their discography on every online music forum you can find. It’s all in the name of music exposing the fleshiest, unfiltered depictions of human misery. It’s as if they mean to say, These are our devastations, but they’re our realities. Why would we whimper through them when we could scream?

For the winding path the project has taken over time, Xiu Xiu does not make “rock music” in a traditional sense. In a post-genre landscape, where so many artists pride themselves on defying the labels we stick on music to digest and understand it, this band has always blended influences and sounds with abandon, usually leaving the guitar to play a fairly utilitarian role. Yet, from the opening notes of “Common Loon,” the lead single from their latest LP 13″ Frank Beltrame Italian Stiletto with Bison Horn Grips (named after a switchblade owned by Stewart), there are riffs front and center. I remarked to someone that it sounds exactly how the album’s cover looks—all metallic chrome with rainbow colors reflected back, a band of outsiders held together by the sound of that joyous guitar figure and the fizzling synths and glockenspiel hits that adorn it. From the jump, it seemed to be met with almost universal acclaim by fans used to the shapeshifting bound to take place between each Xiu Xiu release and casual listeners alike. In fact, it seems the person most perplexed by 13″ Frank Beltrame’s new direction is Jamie Stewart.

“The main conclusion I’ve come to is, as much as we like this record, I am very confused by how it turned out the way that it turned out,” says Stewart, calling from Berlin, the city both they and Seo currently call home. They can, however, pinpoint the origin of its sound. This first conscious flirtation with guitar came from drummer David Kendrick, who had professed his love of psychedelic rock to the rest of the band—who then took his enthusiasm as a challenge to discover more about the genre, digging back through the classics. “It was exciting to open up a new treasure chest of 10 million records you’ve never heard before, the subculture you don’t know anything about,” Stewart remembers, referring back to other Xiu Xiu records which emerged from a specific point of inspiration, such as 2014’s Angel Guts: Red Classroom’s attempt to build off the work of synth-pop progenitors Suicide. “We thought, ‘Okay, why don’t we do a psychedelic rock record, to be the exact opposite of what we would normally ever pursue in any way?’”

After several weeks of writing and recording the planned Xiu Xiu psych-rock record, the band went back on tour and played early versions of the songs they had been piecing together. Yet, a brief exchange with Ezra Buchla, a friend of the band who’d played on their previous record—2023’s funereal, confrontational Ignore Grief—left Stewart doubting the new direction. “He walked up to me after a show we played in L.A., and he just went, ‘Oh, rock and roll, huh?’ and then walked away and said nothing else,” Stewart laughs. “I didn’t grow up listening to rock and roll. It’s not part of my musical DNA, particularly. I know that he didn’t say it to be an asshole. I think he was just surprised, because when Xiu Xiu started, he was in some other bands and we played together a lot, and we had almost no rock and roll references whatsoever.”

The way Stewart repeatedly refers to “rock and roll”—as if it’s an abstract concept they’ve never been forced to confront before, not a broad umbrella term for the most widely-adopted American music style since the emergence of jazz—is fascinating. It’s like you can hear their air quotes around the phrase, but you never doubt how novel it feels to them. This crisis of confidence caused by the passing comment led Stewart to invoke a quote from Blixa Bargeld of Einstürzende Neubauten which opens the album’s press release, supposedly uttered when Bargeld left Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: “I did not join a rock and roll band to play rock and roll.” “I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? I denied my musical god in some way!’” Stewart says, breaking into laughter as they recount their dilemma. “At this point, we had already written and recorded half the record, and we really liked what we had done. We began going in one direction, got completely freaked out by it and wanted to go in a totally different direction, but we didn’t want to give up everything that we had. A big part of our process is to not argue with whatever the goddess of music is presenting to us and just try to listen to what she has to say, and what she had to say was, basically, ‘Make a psychedelic rock record,’ but it was freaking us out.”

Seo, by comparison, didn’t find herself as panicked as they seemed stuck treading in psychedelic waters. “I think I may come to it from a slightly different point of view, because I came to playing and listening to music kind of late in life, so a lot of the genres don’t make sense to me,” she says, calling from her home in Berlin. “When I’m at a record shop, if they have [sections with] ‘world music’ or ‘new wave’ or ‘post-punk’ or whatever, I’m totally confused by all of it, right? I wish they would put everything in alphabetical order. There are times when I don’t really go too far into researching our spark of inspiration, and the funny thing is—and I don’t know if I’ve ever said this to you, Jamie—but it never really turns out how we say it’s going to turn out.” With this revelation, she’s perhaps hit upon the band’s clearest strength: such a clearly defined personality that all output still molds itself to sound like a Xiu Xiu record, regardless of the starting point. There’s an openness both bandmates channel when they speak, telling a story in colorful detail and then apologizing for rambling, which seems to match their creative process to a tee.

“We never go in there thinking, ‘Let’s be experimental or do something new or weird,’” Seo agrees. “I think we go in there and ask, ‘What could be more interesting than this?’ Or for music we’re inspired by, ‘What are they doing here that we don’t have or that can push us beyond what we’ve been doing?’ It’s not defining. The inspirations are not always limitations.” Stewart nods. “There really aren’t particular guiding principles for us, other than trying to be open to whatever happens,” they sigh at their own struggle to reconcile this new, intruding musical force’s place in the band they’ve nurtured for almost half of their life. “The idea that I would get uptight about allowing something else to happen also completely goes against the entire ethos of Xiu Xiu. So, no, it shouldn’t be a problem!” They smile and sound exasperated. “I don’t know what my fucking problem is. It’s not a problem.”

Of course, another of Xiu Xiu’s defining qualities is the sound of the band wrestling with the material, its meaning and whether the way they’re expressing it is the “right” way. Yet, for every dense and cryptic turn, there’s an open-heartedness buried under a few of those layers that beckons you closer, ties you to it. As if to apologize for the insular inaccessibility of Ignore Grief—like the band’s output is wrestling with its own warring impulses—opener “Arp Omni” presents a portrait of undiluted adoration, reaching out to touch that which the song’s narrator feels unworthy of. “I have done almost nothing right / My entire adult life / But having dared to touch the fire with you breaks the chains / Of my being nothing,” Stewart sings in their now-unmistakable pained whisper, strings growing up around them—as if the affirmation breathes life force into the organism of the album to come, propelled forward by the power of the feeling.

Some of the album’s most interesting moments come where you’re aware of that strain of retooling and pumping fresh blood into what might originally have existed as neo-psychedelic pastiche. On “Pale Flower,” a dip into more surrealistic lyrical imagery (“St. Vitus boiling in a kettle curses aloud / ‘“Auf wiedersehen Embracer gosh darned,’” “You could wipe the excrement of a rainbow off onto a loved one’s thighs”) woven with Bo Diddley references is offset by octaves of voices chanting on the chorus like ghosts, before a dark synth sound crashes its way into the middle of the song. The following track, “Veneficium,” opens with an massive, prog-adjacent guitar riff, but is soon made grittier by gothic keyboard passages and the taciturn threat of Stewart’s growl.

What’s most interesting about the record’s execution of psychedelia is that you can hear conventions of the genre torn apart by a willful misunderstanding of the mechanics it’s usually made with. (“Jamie hates the word ‘jam,’” Seo notes while recalling the process of returning to the studio post-revelation, “We can’t jam on anything.” “That’s for toast,” Stewart affirms with evident distaste. “We can improvise, but we may not jam.”) Again, Xiu Xiu is so singularly itself that it can’t shake its defining qualities, even if its makers try to.

One of the things that both disarms and draws listeners toward Xiu Xiu is the unguarded lyricism. It can often be compared to someone murmuring while waking up, before they can filter any purity out of the sentiment or inject any self-consciousness into it. Even the most abrasive songs support the music in this way (or, often, the most abrasive lyrics bolster more delicate music), depicting tenderness countered by violence, panic assuaged by the steeliness of the sound. “There were several times where we would have a set of lyrics and we realized that it was not putting across any sort of emotionality at all,” Stewart shrugs. “Whatever, I fucking love drugs, so I’m super happy with psychedelia for the sake of psychedelia, but in the case of this band, some genuine emotionality in the music is central to what we want it to be.”

Of course, there are precursors for this type of “rock and roll,” embracing both the visceral and the emotional to stretch the genre’s limits. Stewart recounts an interview they did with John Congleton (who mixed 13″ Frank Beltrame) for Atlas Obscura, where they asked him to name a record he thought “somebody could listen to and learn something from, that could broaden their horizons.” Congleton picked Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral, which then acted as somewhat of a production north star when he began work on the album. “He said one of the reasons he liked it was it seemed like every choice that they were making was super iconoclastic,” Stewart says. “I think particularly because this record, in terms of the arrangements, is fairly traditional—like, there’s an intro, there is a verse, there is a chorus, there’s a bridge and there’s Western folk music structure, except probably for the last song on the record.”

“I think because we had gone down that road,” they continue, “and also because we implicitly trust John to make interesting and complimentary musical decisions for us…because the arrangements were so traditional, having him, from a mixing perspective, go into it hogs fully loose or ‘iconoclastically’ seemed like it could take it up a notch and keep it from potentially coming across as regular or not pushed as far as we wanted it to be pushed.” Though the band are hardly strangers to maximalism, there are moments where you can hear those Trent Reznor-inspired instincts blow the whole thing up further—where it dabbles in sonic extroversion, where the drums sound a city block wide. “Sleep Blvd.” opens sparse and eerie before exploding into a thudding beat accompanying fuzzed-out guitar lines bleating at each other. “T.D.T.F.W.,” with Seo’s and Stewart’s chanted vocals doubling each other over a siren-like guitar passage, as if to alert you of the sound going up in flames, makes the darkness sound almost celebratory, not unlike Reznor plumbing the depths of his psyche on an ostentatious stadium stage.

Comparatively, the album’s final two tracks feel like the only ones which sidestep this approach. If “Arp Omni” felt like the intense glow of the album coming to life, closer “Piña, Coconut & Cherry,” devolves into a near-breakdown over a muted dance beat as Stewart’s shouted vocals distort: “You can’t refuse love like this / It’s criminal / You must love me, love me, love me / You are mine, this is mine / You are mine, this is mine.” The record ends with a meltdown, which is maybe its own form of iconoclasm, but there are half-sure moments of solace surrounding them too, creating even starker contrasts as 13″ Frank Beltrame ends. Penultimate track “Bobby Bland” tip-toes over a drum loop and menacing breathing sounds, until the beat disintegrates and loses its footing before restarting—like the album is beginning to lose its footing, yet to stutter to a halt. “A mother and father do not have to be / A biological disaster,” Stewart sings, depicting life as so many artists before them have tried to do by leaving room for relief even in our darkest nights of the soul. “They could be kindred spirits / And weirdly moving.” I think of Gena Rowlands hugging her children as they crowd her in an attempt to protect her, but mostly, I think of diehard Xiu Xiu fans and their own connection to this band—taking that which is an ugly, violent reality and injecting it with levity.

Even if it may sound strange to those uninitiated, there seems to be a lot of laughter in the world of Xiu Xiu. I suggest as much to Jamie Stewart and Angela Seo, and they seem to think so as well. “The point of making music is to have somebody listen to it and get something out of it,” Stewart says fondly. “I can’t think of a better reason to live than to get to participate in something like that. We have—I will say this with no hesitation—the best audience ever. And many people who have opened for us or we have toured with have said that—‘Oh, this is the best audience I’ve ever played for’—and we’ve opened for other bands, and it’s really different playing for other audiences.”

Angela Seo considers that this connection people feel with the work might have to do with the balance of those shades of darkness that collide throughout the catalog, lashing out and pulling the people around you closer in the same breath. “I do think there is so much in life that we can’t really accomplish without a certain amount of recognition of the absurdities in it. Especially when things are, like, so shitty.” She also thinks much of the writing serves the function of holding that space where “you know that it’s gonna be okay, in some ways, when it’s so horrible that you’re looking at it and saying ‘Wow, this is absurdly funny.’ It’s where you know that when you’re not so pissed or depressed, you’re gonna be laughing about it. We may be writing about something dark or terrible and other people will be like, ‘Why the fuck are you talking about it?’ But I’m also like, ‘Well, because it’s kind of just there, right?’ You have to tap into it, but I’m not gonna do it with total nihilism. I don’t think that’s really us, as much as we talk about all those things.”

“We’re not there being like, ‘Well, it’s the end of the world! We’re dead! Forget it, I hate everybody!’ It’s more like, ‘I hate everybody, but it’s also kind of funny that I hate you.’” She breaks into ebullient laughter that betrays the severity of either of the statements she puts forth as Stewart smiles at their computer from across the city and I watch them from across an ocean. Seo looks back at them through her own computer, as if checking in with her friend and bandmate to make sure she hasn’t desecrated what they continue to build together in sprawling, rage-filled fits still tinged with light as Xiu Xiu. “Is that right?” she asks through the screen, not even trying to contain her laughter. “Did I get that right? Maybe we shouldn’t say that.”

Instead of agreeing, Stewart cites another Xiu Xiu song—the whirring, sinister “Cinthya’s Unisex” from Angel Guts: Red Classroom, the first section of which ends with Stewart repeating the line “I hate everyone but you.” “That, I think, may be what Angela was trying to say,” they say, pausing as they consider the following string of words. “I mean, certainly we feel a tremendous amount of hopelessness and extraordinary frustration and resignation and cynicism and probably despair, but that we would say, ‘I hate everyone but you,’ means that there’s this little spark in the midst of that which keeps pushing us forward.”

These are the moments that knock the wind out of you, that leave a movie theater audience on an oppressively hot Saturday afternoon reeling—a laugh swallowed to leave an empty, grieving space. But there’s openness in that at well: the willingness to stare down the most sinister form of the unknown, even something as foreign as men wielding “rock and roll” as their imagined rebellion, breaking free from imagined constraints as you test how the phrase sounds coming from your own mouth and trying to wrangle it into a salve of your own. Between the guitar and the titular switchblade, maybe they’re just new tools to scream your reality through.

---

Elise Soutar is a New York-born-and-based music and culture writer.