Sometime earlier this year, Coco A Go-Go’s downstairs neighbors got a phone call, warning them about what was about to happen. The screaming they were about to hear was just for a recording, the Electric Street Queens frontwoman calmly assured them.
Then she let her wrath rip.
Coco breaks out her best banshee screech for “What You Really Want?,” the newest release from Boston’s slingers of sleaze-rock. The squirmy new garage track retaliates against the “deafening silence” of a romantic partner with its own kind of communication breakdown, scream-Queens style.
The song and accompanying video dropped last Friday (August 13), following weeks of an awkward assembly: “What You Really Want?” is the first tune the band has ever recorded remotely. Instead of cramming their usual glam into a recording studio, the song came together across practice pads, car rides, and Garageband.
“Recording remotely was really weird at first because a) I’d never done it and b) so much of being a Queen is us all being in the same room playing together,” Coco tells Vanyaland. “Even when we’ve recorded records I’ve been in the same room instead of doing the vocals separate. It was a challenge but I think we all learned a lot in the troubleshooting process… I also warned my downstairs neighbors about the screaming so they didn’t think anything horrific was happening upstairs.”
Adds guitarist Scram Maulagain: “It was a trip not playing in the same room with the band — and very different from the last two albums, in which the majority of recording was done in one day at either Rubber Tracks or Spenser [Gralla]’s studio [Local 469]. The main riff was something that I came up with biking home from work one day. I pulled over and recorded a sample of it on my phone and then played it on the guitar when I got home.”
To fill the void of not recording together, Coco fashioned a dramatic recreation of a typical Electric Street Queens show with little more than Barbies and bizarro special effects, captured in the “What You Really Want?” music video.
“Since we couldn’t be in the same room together, I got old Barbie dolls, painted them, and sewed tiny outfits and wigs, and built all the instruments,” she explains. “I really wanted to capture everyone’s personality through doll form and try to recreate our live shows.”
Let’s just say it’s alarmingly effective. Thrash to the wrath below.
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