Cardiff band Panic Shack on being a "DIY pop girl group" and their self-titled debut album • Interview • DIY Magazine

For anyone who’s ever seen Welsh party-starters Panic Shack, performing on stage seems to just make sense for them. And yet, the quartet didn’t grow up thinking that music would be on the cards as a career. “I didn’t ever think I would play music myself,” confides guitarist Meg Fretwell, before vocalist Sarah Harvey quickly agrees: “I also didn’t think I’d ever get to be in a band, but I always wanted to be.”

“It’s almost like a dream… but, now that I’m older, I’ve realised not everyone has that dream,” bassist Em Smith ponders, as they speak to DIY via Zoom. “So then, I’d [think] ‘ah, maybe I’m supposed to be in a band’, because I spent all my time thinking about it.”

Bawdy, aggressive, fierce - though Panic Shack may self-describe as a “DIY pop girl group”, their aesthetic is cut through with the fearlessness and carelessness of riot grrrl, and the confidence of punk. As such, their self-titled debut album shines with mainstream influences amid more left-field techniques and structures: almost a decade in the making, it documents the growth of one group of people, pulling from “little pockets of inspiration” that span everything from Spice Girls, The Saturdays, and Girls Aloud to Viagra Boys and The Slits.

From those early days as individual music lovers, the band - completed by guitarist Romi Lawrence - soon found their fates intertwined. Meg was hired and trained by Sarah in the Cardiff branch of high street mainstay Lush, before Em also found herself with a position at the cosmetic store. Familiar with one another from nights out and drunken DMCs, it wasn’t long before the three spent their shifts “imagining what else we could be doing if we could be in a band,” Em half-chuckles. “It kind of started as a bit of a joke… and then we just did it one day.”

The trio smile playfully, recalling the possible preconceptions that people around Cardiff may have had of the band at first. “[People] just knew us as these party girls that were always out at gigs. But they never knew we could pick up an instrument,” Sarah illustrates, as Meg chimes in: “unbeknownst to me, we’re actually really good at it. I didn’t think that we wouldn’t be, but… it was a risk.”

She continues: “We would go to a pub in Cardiff called The Queen’s Vaults to play darts and pool and drink loads of pints. At the beginning, the rehearsals were just an excuse for us to get together and go to the pub, and that’s genuinely how it started.” She laughs, before adding: “and you could do that on a Tuesday night, you know?”

“We’re four friends, having a laugh and whatever happens, happens… even though we take it very seriously, it’s not too serious.”

— Sarah Harvey

Those hangout sessions in pubs, coffee shops, and each other’s homes slowly but surely built the foundations of ‘Panic Shack’ - a record with origins as far back as 2015. “It’s kind of been brewing since we started,” Em begins. “There are some songs on there that we started writing years ago and there are some that are new, but I think we’re always in that creative kind of mode when we’re together.” She grins, becoming noticeably more animated when discussing their friendship. “We’ll be voice-noting and having a laugh, thinking up funny rhymes, and bouncing off each other… we’ve just got chemistry, and we all think we’re the funniest people in the world.”

For the band, the songwriting - and storytelling - always stems from “a bit of a joke” or “a common, shared lived experience” that will just “snowball” from there, Meg explains. This element of the everyday is vital to Panic Shack’s work, she continues, as such mundane yet important moments - from bitching sessions in the women’s toilets on nights out, to the excitement of being with your friends, or even talking about creepy men they face - are “not really reflected in music”.

The band want their songs to be realistic; they want the audience to feel as if they’re living through the experience in question. The aim, Sarah notes, is to make people “really put [themselves] in someone’s shoes - and that’s quite powerful as well, because it’s women’s shoes.”

However, to simply call a female artist or a band of women ‘feminist’ and move on is a disservice. That label doesn’t tell you what they sound like; it doesn’t encapsulate their high-energy, free-spirited punk sound, or the fun of their surf-rock and indie-pop sensibilities, and lumping all female-fronted bands together reduces their work to gender alone. Sarah just shrugs at that kind of ignorance. “We’re four friends, having a laugh and whatever happens, happens… Even though we take it very seriously, it’s not too serious.”

“I do also feel that, being a woman, you feel like you’ve got something to prove [at first], so you kind of put on a bit more of a front… [Now], I don’t give a fuck,” Em nonchalantly smiles. This attitude helps when the band are sometimes grouped with the same group of artists - acts as sonically varied as Lambrini Girls, Wet Leg, or Pale Waves - all because of their gender. It’s a point met with a collective, exasperated sigh. “We love them all, but there are so many other bands that you could compare us to,” Sarah all but rolls her eyes. “Why are you comparing us [to them] just because we’re female-fronted? [Do] men get compared to the [same] three bands in every interview?”

Despite the bullshit, Panic Shack are more than comfortable in their own skin, and those rehearsals-turned-nights out are still a pillar of their four-way friendship. Their carefree, fun-chasing spirits haven’t dwindled throughout the process; rather, they’ve become stronger. “It doesn’t really matter what day of the week it is to me still,” laughs Meg. Nearly ten years into being a band, they’re fundamentally no different: piecing together a collage of influences that scream with pop sensibilities in a post-punk setting, they’re just four mates, having a laugh, and making ferociously bold art in the process.

‘Panic Shack’ is out now via Brace Yourself.

#AD