by mel minter
ABQ’S THRIVING LOCAL MUSIC SCENE
THE SECULAR AND THE SACRED ESCAPING PRISON AND ON THE RUN
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Indie rock band, Prism Bitch bills themselves as “aggressively friendly.”
acclaim, and they’ve found their way to both the West and East Coasts, touring with Built to Spill. (A third tour has been postponed due to the pandemic.) The band released its first album, The Getaway, recorded in Albuquerque, in October 2016. They followed that up with Prism Bitch in 2018, recorded in Los Angeles with engineer Toshi Kasai, who’s worked with the Melvins, Big Business and Foo Fighters. The band has been releasing singles from its forthcoming album, Perla, again recorded in Los Angeles with Kasai. The album, to be released in its entirety sometime this year, is named for Esguerra’s mom, who became a mother to them all while they were touring in her state of California. The songwriting has evolved over the four years. “I think we just all got better at songwriting,” says Rose. Esguerra adds that the quartet’s special chemistry allows
them to write effectively in a collaborative process. Letting go of the prison narrative allowed the band greater freedom in its songwriting, too. “When we first started writing, we were very jammy,” says Walsh. The songs on the first album weren’t completed before they went into the studio. “Now, we really practice them and really tighten them up.” You can check out the material and more on the band’s website (prismbitch. com) and its Bandcamp page, and follow them on Facebook (Prism B tch) and Instagram (prismbitchband).
WWW.ABQTHEMAG.COM | SEPTEMBER 2020
PHOTO BY TAYLOR BOYLSTON
When they first came together in 2016, Lilah Rose (keyboards, guitar, vocals), Chris Walsh (guitar, vocals), Lauren Poole (bass, vocals), and Teresa Esguerra (drums, vocals) called themselves Prison Bitch. With their theater backgrounds, the four had originally planned to create music for a play about prison life, and “actually go into prisons and interact with the prison community and see how we could uplift the environment,” says Rose. “But then, we didn’t want to write a play. We just wanted to play music,” says Poole, who learned the bass after joining the band, when the original bassist left town. They decided to “just rock,” says Rose, and they have done exactly that, rocking their way into one of the city’s favorite bands. (Along the way, the band added guitarist Nelson Crane, who recently left the group but remains a member emeritus.) They changed the band’s name after two members of Poole’s family heard “prison” as “prism,” and the name stuck. They liked the multicolored cultural image of inclusivity that “prism” suggested, and in the wake of the 2016 election, they wanted to make a statement with the word “bitch.” “We wanted to take that word back,” says Rose. “Men in power call women (that) a lot. It could be a derogatory term, but we wanted to make it a beautiful and endearing term, for a community to feel like they could be empowered by it.” “A lot of our stage stuff developed into this wild, raucous kind of performance, but we wanted everyone to feel included,” says Esguerra. “Prism Bitch seemed to lend itself to the stage persona.” “Yeah, we want to be like aggressively friendly,” adds Poole. “I think the name gave us the freedom to meet that edginess, which the name is,” says Walsh. “We have to go out on a limb and take risks.” The band’s in-your-face combination of punk rawness, pop hooks, and social justice consciousness has won critical