Pom Pom Squad - Death of a Cheerleader LP

When Pom Pom Squad's Mia Berrin was 21 years old, she fell in love. Sure, she'd been in love before, but this time, something was different: "It just felt like a switch had flipped inside my head," she says. "I realized I had been living a life that was not my own, watching myself from the outside." As a kid who bounced from town to town growing up, and as a person of color in predominantly white spaces, Berrin had become accustomed to maintaining a constant awareness of how others perceived her-a "split-brain mentality" that she adopted as a necessary means of survival. But now, tumbling through her first queer romance-and her first queer heartbreak-some of that self-separateness began to mend: "Suddenly," she says, "I was in a body that was mine." Of course, displacement can start to feel like a life sentence when even the pop culture you're trying to escape into doesn't feel like home. "As a teenager, I was always looking to see myself represented," Berrin says, "but I never really saw a path drawn out for someone who looked like me." So she held tight to the glimpses of herself she could catch-from Death Cab For Cutie to Sade; from the camp and synth-pop of Heathers to the pastels and gloomy mellotron of The Virgin Suicides; from John Waters's take on suburbia to David Lynch's. "I absorbed everything I could and tried to make a collage that could incorporate every piece of me," she says-and in the process, she gained a particular appreciation for the heady mix of music and visuals, how a great song could become even greater when woven into an artist's overall aesthetic. But it wasn't until Berrin got into punk and grunge-artists like Courtney Love and Kathleen Hanna, who were both unapologetically outspoken and unapologetically femme-that she knew she had to start a band.