Cumgirl8 - Any Questions?
On November 16th, New York’s post-punk synth rebels Cumgirl8 electrified Bologna’s Covo Club with a show that felt like stepping into a forbidden Y2K video game. Dressed in handmade costumes dripping with ribbons and nets, the four-piece band blurred the lines between performance, protest, and play. With sultry vocals, anarchic screams, and goth-laced grooves, they unleashed tracks from their latest album, The 8th Cumming—a bold critique of cyberfeminism, womanhood, and desire.
Four fairy-punk game avatars jumping and shouting in a black club in front of moving Y2K graphics and shiny pixels. Cumgirl8 playing at Covo Club in Bologna felt like watching gameplay of one of those games you weren’t allowed to play as a kid. But as the songs and luscious yells went by, it felt like they invited you to Choose Your Fighter.
Cumgirl8 is composed of Lida Fox, Veronika Vilim, Chase Noelle, and Avishag Rodrigues: a New York-based post-punk-synth band that has been hypnotizing the masses while ripping off their expectations. They say they met 8000 years ago in a sex chat in another universe, and how could you not believe them?
Lida Fox, Veronika Vilim, Chase Noelle, and Avishag Rodrigues of Cumgirl8 photographedCumgirl8 - Any Questions? by James Potter, via Interview Magazine. © All rights belong to their respective owners. No copyright infringement intended.
They formed the band in 2019, and their music has benefitted from the members’ backgrounds in modeling and fashion, and their shared love for punk music. Their projects have reshaped and taken different forms through podcasting and fashion design.
Their music is like pushing the fast-forward and rewinding buttons on a Walkman connected to a Macintosh. Smooth, sultry vocals heir of the great female punk and shoegaze vocalists of the 80s and 90s scene like Exene Cervenka or Kathleen Hanna, mix seamlessly with unapologetic screams. Groovy and goth keys, beats, and riffs both sway and rage.
Their latest album The 8th Cumming was published this October and it’s all that. A cyber futuristic critique on cyberfeminism, nature, technology, horniness, and womanhood. A conceptually digital work recorded on tape inward analyzing the relationships between the online and the real world soaked in activism as all their projects have been.
‘Cicciolina’ for example, is a dedication to Ilona Staller, the Italo-Hungarian controversial pornstar-turned-political activist for human and animal rights and sexual freedom. She was involved as well in ugly legal battles over child custody and image rights with her ex-husband, Jeff Koons. The American contemporary artist managed to leverage and exploit her status in both negative and positive lights, especially when she was the main inspiration for the famous graphic and revealing art collection, Made in Heaven. Staller became a supporter of the band when they celebrated her birthday in Rome last year and honored her with the song—an ode to a woman who fought the status quo that considered her incapable, as a woman and sex worker, of progressive political activity, and fought for her image to be respected and not exploited.
Cumgirl8 is exactly that: A four-piece band taking and owning the stage in handmade costumes covered in ribbons and nets, enjoying their displayed femininity and friendship, which is palpable as they perform, interact, and take turns at the instruments. No role is defined, as they play as a unison being and chant anthem-like songs on the troubles of being a woman, like ‘uti’. You don’t expect the drummer to leave her seat and start springing from one side of the stage to the other, screaming like a goblin channeling the physical pains of a urinary tract infection. And yet, she finished the song asking in perfect Italian: “Avete domande?” (do you have any questions?). I didn’t.
A snippet from Cumgirl8’s live concert at Covo Club, shot by Raandoom at the event
