Photo credit to Meghan Marshall
“So the other night, me and your mom actually went out for this really good seafood dinner, and I treated her to the works, ya know? I treated her like a princess, because your mom deserves it. And then, after that, I took your mom home, and I bent her over my desk, and I fucked the shit out of your mom. And God, she fucking loved it.”
If you were on TikTok in 2021, you might recognize that monologue, which builds to the explosive, taunting chorus of Sorry Mom’s viral hit “I Fucked Yr Mom.” It’s those lines (which were a first-take ad lib on the day of recording), delivered by lead singer and songwriter Juno’s versatile, instantly identifiable voice, which make the song so compelling — nothing goes viral on TikTok more quickly than an irreverent monologue you can perform.
The song’s popularity brought attention to the delightfully vulgar EP “Juno Goes to the Big House.” Now, two years later (with a few singles in between), New York-based queer punk band Sorry Mom has released a full album, “babyface,” which careens through genres on an exploration of adolescence and maturity. Recently featured on the official Spotify playlists Queercore and Riot Grrrl, Sorry Mom is seizing their happenstance virality and proving themselves to be mainstays of the new punk scene.
I caught up with Juno, drummer Taryn, and bassist Kari just a few days after the end of their “babyface” tour. The run ended with a performance at Boston Calling on May 28, which, at around 1,500 attendees, was the band’s biggest crowd yet. Each band member was ecstatic about how well the tour went, citing the opportunity to meet fans, play new cities and share the bill with Froggy and a variety of local openers as memorable highlights.
There was also a palpable excitement recalling how many audience members were singing along. “At the end of ‘2006,’ I had a little bit of hubris, and I was like ‘Scream it with me!’ and I just kind of hoped they would, and they did,” Juno said. “And then the song ended, and I just kind of stood there for 10 seconds. I was like, ‘Whoa,’ this is this is completely new.”
Sorry Mom’s formidable music lends itself to being sung in festival crowds just as much as at home in your room. Each song perfectly encapsulates the energy of the blossoming queer punk scene, and yet offers something you’ve never heard before. The band might owe some of this uniqueness to the remarkable diversity of its influences, which are all over the musical map. Juno’s songwriting has long been influenced by punk rock classics like Green Day but has recently begun to incorporate elements of old-school country artists like Woody Guthrie, illustrated by the track “You Scare Me (VIRGINIA WOOLF).”
“I’ve also gotten really into Hungarian folk music,” Juno added suddenly. Taryn added that “Our next album is going to have a big Hungarian spin on it,” and it was unclear to me if she was joking. It would seem difficult to unify these inspirations into something coherent, but Sorry Mom skillfully leaps between genres while maintaining a consistent vision, with tracks on “babyface” ranging from screamo influences to riot grrrl to banjo-forward.
Kari shouted out Iron Maiden’s Steve Harris and Duran Duran’s John Taylor as two bass players who influenced her approach to bass. “I think John Taylor is a big one for me. I love how melodic he is. He kind of broke the stigma of the bass being backing all the time. He was kind of more forefront and was able to complement every other instrument with his playing. I’m also just a huge Duran Duran fan.”
Taryn was introduced to drumming at nine, honing her craft on Rock Band for the Xbox 360. Now an experienced and impressive drummer, she credits Blink-182’s Travis Barker and Twenty One Pilots’ Josh Dun as drumming inspirations, saying that the two remind her to keep things exciting: “When we play live, when we’re writing drum parts and recording music, I’m like, how fast can we make this? What can I do to catch people’s attention?” This line of thinking has apparently paid off, as an overwhelming majority of the press coverage of Sorry Mom’s recent performances have noted Taryn’s smiley, energetic approach to her drumming.
Sorry Mom’s unified onstage dynamic is impressive. There is an easy cohesion among the band members that seems to be a function of their shared passion for learning new skills, as well as learning from each other. Kari in particular said she picked up new technical knowledge while mixing “babyface.”
“When I was first learning how to mix I was taught very pop, very clean — everything should be pristine. And so while I was mixing the album, it was really fun to send mixes to Taryn and Juno and have them both say, ‘Oh, you should like make that dirtier. Or make that more like disgusting.’ So, it was really fun for me to figure out the line between making it sound professional but also disgusting and dirty and very punk. I definitely had a good time with that.”
Life on tour has brought lessons as well. “Taryn and I both learned we need to eat more bananas, because we were covered in bruises by the end of the tour. It was kind of crazy,” Kari said. “I don’t even know where they came from.”
“Some bruises made sense because I’d be drumming and I’d hit so hard that I hit my upper thigh,” Taryn said. “But I had a bruise on my butt cheek, and I was like, ‘How the fuck did I get that?’”
Although it might build on the influences of male-dominated punk and rock scenes, the music of Sorry Mom is not made with men in mind. “I think I say this in every interview now, but I don’t write songs about men,” Juno said. “This is for young girls. No one’s gonna make you feel left out of it,” Juno continued, with a passion familiar to anyone who has felt an unfair need to prove themselves in male rock spaces. “No one can say you’re not a real punk fan, or this isn’t real hardcore, it’s not metal. It is, and it’s for you. We made it for you.”
While the music is intended for young non-men, Sorry Mom still embraces the variety of people who find value in their work. “We have a bunch of punk fans or hardcore fans, many of whom are male, that come to our shows, and then next to them are 16-year-old emo chicks, and I really like that our music puts those two types of people in the same room,” Juno said.
Kari praised the safe, courteous behavior she sees at Sorry Mom shows. “I was really turned off from going to hardcore metal and punk shows when I was younger, because I was scared I would find myself in the mosh pit and get punched in the throat and die,” Kari said. “But we have the most respectful pits. If anything happened, people would help each other, and I love that about our fans.”
An example of this is when some fans at the barricade at Boston Calling moved out of the way to give Juno’s mom (the mom in question in “Sorry Mom”) a better view — a gesture for which Juno’s mom requested a message of thanks be sent. “She was like, you have to message this girl and say she was so polite, such a nice young lady letting me stand in front,” Juno said with a laugh. This level of respect, which can be hard to find at punk shows, is a testament to the power of the band and the audience they attract.
I asked about the significance of specifying that Sorry Mom is queer punk. “I felt like growing up, I never listened to queer music that was celebratory or funny or like, sexual or silly, in a way that wasn’t emotional and sad,” Juno remarked. “Like, we still obviously have our sad and emotional songs. There’s many of them on the new album. But I think an important part of it to me is cutting it with songs that are joyous and silly and fun. It’s queer music that you can listen to without having to be upset afterwards.” Sorry Mom’s music reminds queer listeners that it’s okay — necessary, even — to be goofy and seek joy, protecting your humanity amid growing political threats to LGBTQ+ rights.
The conversation kept returning to the serendipitous trajectory of the band, given that it may never have blown up if not for Juno’s TikTok. Much of “Juno Goes to the Big House” had already been written pre-pandemic, but Taryn and Juno never quite got around to recording it, and then the pandemic further delayed the possibility of going to the studio.
“It was supposed to be a family-and-friends kind of EP, just like a celebration of the band that we’d had in college, but it became something so much bigger, precisely because of when it came out,” Taryn said. “If we hadn’t had a pandemic world and we had put out our EP a year earlier, it’s possible no one would have ever listened to it, honestly. It was oddly, oddly lucky that we were forced to put it out when we did.
“You have to get so lucky, the timing just has to be exactly right,” Taryn continued, underscoring the band’s humble account of their success. “So I think that everything was meant to happen.”
Given this experience, Sorry Mom is well-acquainted with the unique experience of building a fan base through social media. Taryn, who works in marketing, had the most to say about social media’s influence on DIY bands and the music industry as a whole. She contends that TikTok is “putting the choice back in the hands of the people. People can decide like, ‘Oh, we like the small song from the small band. Let’s blow them up together. Let’s post about it.’ When people come together to do that, it really does feel like — for the first time in a long time — people are choosing what music is popular.”
She also noted that TikTok is having an unforeseen impact on the music industry at large: “Record labels have had a monopoly on what songs they send to the radio, what songs they put in movies, and you were kind of told what song is popular. I think TikTok is changing that culture a little bit, which I actually do appreciate, to an extent.”
Taryn’s marketing experience impacts the band’s approach to self-promotion online, which is crucial, considering that they are independent. “I feel like social media is the most effective form of marketing, and you’re forced to do it if you want to market anything at all. I don’t know about you guys, but if I see a billboard for something, I’m like, I don’t give a fuck. I’m not gonna do anything because I saw a billboard. It’s just a piece of — I don’t even know what they’re made of. Are they made of cardboard? Probably not. They’d blow away. But I don’t care about commercials, or ads on the radio; my mind has just learned to tune all that stuff out.”
But Taryn was also quick to acknowledge the growing concern over the detrimental effects of social media on mental health. “Personally, I want to get rid of it. And then I’m like, but I need to do it for the band. I need to make sure we’re marketing. So it’s tricky.”
Juno was similarly appreciative of the intimate and vigorous fandom that social media can produce but was more emphatic about the downsides, especially for female musicians on the internet. “I was definitely worried when our song first started blowing up. People were being very positive about it. And I was just like, ‘When’s it going to switch? When are people going to turn around and be like, “This is TikTok music” or “Kill yourself.”’ But luckily that never happened for us. The virality of our first album died down pretty quickly after about a month, which was honestly ideal because it never got to the point where they flipped on us.”
“babyface’s” focus on the end of childhood — alongside the nostalgic song “2006” — made me curious about what Sorry Mom feels their place is amid the current Y2K revival. After some reflection, Kari said, “Honestly, I don’t really understand fully what Y2K is.” I mentioned how the revival has struck me as somewhat disjointed and revisionist, as many of the trend’s perpetrators were very young children at the time, and she agreed: “Yeah, I used to just go outside and hit things with sticks and also play video games.”
Even if this Y2K resurgence is not entirely accurate, there is still a very real culture-wide yearning for an imagined simpler time, and Sorry Mom does an excellent job of unraveling that nostalgia for youth. Juno wrote these songs while working as a preschool teacher, noting that “There’s definitely something to writing music about being a kid, and then going to work for 10 hours a day with 3-year-olds,” even if the childhood of current young adults looked so different from the childhood of kids today.
Juno said that “babyface” tries to capture the “feeling of growing up in a completely different time, one that’s so close by but feels completely gone and inaccessible at this point. That brief era of wonder is over, and you’re unable to return to it.”
Sorry Mom’s advice for young musicians is to not worry too much about social media, since it’s all luck anyway. “What’s more important is being active in your local scene: putting up posters, going to shows, finding the DIY venues and knowing who to ask for addresses. And it’s how you’re going to meet the people you’re going to eventually play with,” Juno stressed.
Taryn highlighted the importance of falling in love with your instrument: “Just put your headphones in, and the right people will come to you if you love it enough and you do it every day.”
With Sorry Mom’s signature lightheartedness, Kari concluded by adding that “Nothing is that serious! So just have fun with it. If you’re taking it too seriously and not enjoying yourself, why are you doing it?”
To keep up with Sorry Mom, find them here: