Lambrini Girls reflect on acclaimed debut album.
L-R: Lilly Macieira, Phoebe Lunny. Image: Nicole Osrin.
Brighton-based punk duo Lambrini Girls are lead vocalist/guitarist Phoebe Lunny and bassist Lilly Macieira, whose rousing live performances, outspoken lyrics and high-profile fans like Iggy Pop have seen their profile steadily growing over the past five years. In January, they released their debut album, Who Let the Dogs Out, to a string of positive reviews.
Starting out as a quartet, of which Lunny is the sole remaining member, Lambrini Girls really took shape with the arrival of Macieira. Their friendship pervades everything they do as a band. “Sometimes you find one person that you can have a really specific strain of humour with, and me and Phoebe have that,” Macieira explains. “I think that really transpires in a lot of the things that we do both on stage and on social media. Even the album title, or the EP title – those are all weird inside jokes that we both think is really funny.” She describes their personalities as complementary, with her own orderly, introverted nature balanced by the more outgoing and flexible Lunny. “Phoebe is the braver one that can really handle things when things don't happen according to plan. I get a system overload and shut down when there's curveballs or unexpected things. Phoebe really saves my arse when that happens!” Lunny agrees. “I think Lilly's summed it up perfectly. The only thing that I can add is that we make a lot of space for each other. She's like a sister to me.”
Despite a growing catalogue of releases, first with Big Scary Monsters and now with their new label City Slang, Lambrini Girls are at heart a live band, who slot writing and recording around a hectic performance schedule. “We’ve had to give up all our hobbies. Me and Phoebe love playing piano; we both like to exercise; before all this, I liked book-binding, I make little notebooks and fix old books that I find at flea markets. But I haven’t done that in about two years now,” Macieira says. “We never see our friends. I never see my partner. It is well and truly, in every sense of the word, a full-time job.” While the band are still heavily involved in publicity, and were in sole charge of the album artwork, City Slang have taken some of the day-to-day tasks off their hands: “The little finicky promotional bits – for example, our records here in the UK, some of them come with Rizla papers – that's something that we don't have to organise, which is nice, because a year ago we were still fully, entirely DIY. I was tour managing, and Phoebe still does all of the social media, which has become a really big job.”
“Your inspiration is drawn from the world around you, and the world’s on fucking fire, so everything tends to be inherently very political”
Co-produced by Gilla Band bassist Daniel Fox, Who Let the Dogs Out takes aim at a variety of targets, from police brutality to homophobia and toxic masculinity. Although Lunny’s rage is leavened by humour, they don’t see how their lyrics could be anything but confrontational. “Your inspiration is drawn from the world around you, and the world's on fucking fire, so everything tends to be inherently very political.” Finding themselves a song short at the end of recording, they set about putting Lunny’s already written lyrics for “Cuntology 101” to music. Although they knew they wanted it to be their first-ever pop song, they were struggling for inspiration until Fox suggested trying the Moog Model Ds in the studio. “Personally for me, every time I get a new piece of gear in my hands, I get really excited, and then find it quite easy to write something,” says Macieira. “That’s how some of the other songs on the album started out as well. ‘Love’ was from when I got a new pedal – that was the first riff that came out of me when I was playing around with that pedal. So with ‘Cuntology’ it was really that we had new toys to play with, and got excited over it, and then a song came out, basically.”
“You’re Not From Around Here” was built the other way round, with lyrics added to an existing instrumental. Macieira is happy to acknowledge that the riff was stolen from Ditz’s “No Thanks, I’m Full” – “I don’t think anyone would ever know unless we said. It’s one of my favourites on the album, but I know Phoebe doesn’t like it very much – she was struggling with it a bit because that one feels very glued together. That was probably one of the most divisive songs on the album; we really disagreed on the parts a lot. But obviously we worked it out.”
Image: Press.
They do agree on “Special Different”, though, which deals with their experiences of being neurodivergent. “That’s me and Lilly’s favourite off the album,” Lunny says. “We feel we really challenged ourselves as musicians. It started with a guitar riff and then trying to fit a loose structure with lyrics around it. I think it was impressive of Lilly because the riff itself is super atonal, so she had to ground that with the key as well.” As Macieira explains, the song went through major structural changes before they were happy with it. “What I play in the bridge I was originally playing in the chorus, etc. Production-wise, it was pretty straightforward but then Seth [Manchester], our mixing engineer, added some really cool bits. Particularly in the bridge, which is my favourite part of the entire album, when things drop down completely and it's the bass for a little bit, then the slow drums come in and Seth put this really cool octave on Phoebe's vocals.” Listening to the early mixes, they decided it needed something extra. “We were on tour somewhere in France, I got my laptop out, got Logic out and we basically wrote two little string parts into the bridge, which you can hear very, very subtly, but I think they make a big difference – at least to me, because I know they're there and I love them.”
It's important to Lambrini Girls that their music can be performed at gigs without losing anything from the recorded version, so they have generally shied away from adding too much in production that can’t be replicated live. But Macieira, who has a background in sound engineering, relished the chance to experiment in the studio on “Special Different” and hopes to become more involved on that side for the next album. Although they haven’t written any material for it yet, they’re already fizzing with ideas for where they’d like to take their music next. “I would like to add more synths,” says Macieira. “I wouldn't mind going into something a little bit more dance in a noisy way. So still guitar music but I would love to experiment with some different instrumentation – not in the way where I would want it to be the whole song, but little details, little ornaments.” Lunny says they talk about their second album a lot. “The one thing from this album that I wish I'd done differently is my vocal style is pretty much exactly the same, bar one song. So I'd like to experiment with that, maybe get some slow songs in there. I'd love to try a lot more of a variation. I don't know, get a bit crazy.”
Who Let the Dogs Out is out now. For 2025 tour dates see here.
Author: Rachel Goodyear