A Strife Less Ordinary: Hot Press meets Warpaint

When it comes to twerking your booty in Robin Thicke’s face, it seems we’re going to have to put Theresa Wayman down as ‘undecided’. On one hand, the Warpaint singer and guitarist sort of admires Miley Cyrus’ if-you’ve-got-it-flaunt-it chutzpah. On the other, ‘Wrecking Ball’ isn’t exactly high art, is it?

“When I listen to Rihanna I can hear the quality in the performance,” Wayman proffers. “With Miley, I don’t see the value. I didn’t think her VMA performance sounded good. I don’t think she danced well. Actually, I don’t think she can dance.”

To be clear, this isn’t a diss. If the former teen starlet feels obligated to reinvent herself as a lap-dancing Duracell Bunny, who are the rest of us to scoff? Lady knows what she is doing.

“She is so out there, so controversial, she’s almost garnering respect. When I first saw Miley on the VMAs I thought, ‘This is going to be a joke’. I didn’t see the worth in it at all. You have to look a little deeper and try to understand what this means to her. It’s all about her trying to establish something different, to distance herself from her Disney Girl image. She paid for a lot of that show – the dancing bears for example – out of her own pocket. This is her vision.”

Wayman has been thinking about the position of women in music a great deal over the past four years. With the release of Warpaint’s debut album The Fool in October 2010, the Los Angeles four piece – all of whom happen to be female – was catapulted into the spotlight. At the time, "girl" bands were a rarity. In certain quarters, Warpaint were regarded as a novelty act practically: four hippy-ish West Coast chicks who – well look at that – could play guitar too.

“It truly is an all-male world,” sighs Wayman, who is dating dubstep singer James Blake. “The house engineers are male. The techs are male. The majority of producers are male. Most people in bands are male. There’s a lot of opportunity for women if they want to be pioneers in that environment.”

She’s open about the fact that the all-girl angle helped boost Warpaint’s profile. The downside was that the media latched onto their look, not their music.

“We were offered lots of fashion spreads in magazines. We cut that out at the beginning. Our management and labels know to not even bring those requests to us. It’s awkward when fashion mags start to ask about your image. That’s a grey area. It’s not like I don’t care about that stuff. I do care – your clothes express who you are. That is a valuable thing. I’m not against fashion. However, the fashion world articulates that in such a cringeful way.”

Wayman formed Warpaint nine years ago with Emily Kokal, a school friend from Oregon. They’d relocated to LA and their Tinseltown connections ran deep: their original drummer was Shannyn Sossamon, a sometime actress better known to the wider world as romantic lead of the Heath Ledger vehicle A Knight’s Tale, a role she won over Kate Hudson. The late Ledger, for his part, was an early cheerleader alongside Billy Zane, the villain from James Cameron’s Titanic.

From the beginning, Warpaint were sensitive to any attempt to portray them as an adjunct to the movie industry. Speaking to Hot Press in 2011, Kokal was already fed up with the Hollywood angle.

“I don’t know why journalists always bring it up,” she complained. “Maybe they think they’re doing us a favour. It just gets repeated and repeated. Hopefully it will die off once people hear the music and see us play. Then the stigma will go away. It gets annoying. I think the more interesting story is the relationship between the four of us and our music.”

While musically ambitious, it was never Warpaint’s goal to conquer the world. Their accidental break-out moment was the single ‘Undertow’, four minutes of retro indie that suggested the Cocteau Twins lost inside early ‘90s Sonic Youth. With its success, in 2010 they became the proverbial overnight sensation.

“For the first year or so it was exciting,” Wayman resumes. “Maybe too exciting. It was fun to go and play all over the world and meet other musicians. The downside is that, after a while, you’re itching to go back to the thing that brought you to this in the first place – you want to go back and write. Playing the same songs every night starts to feel sterile.”

There were other adjustments too. Wayman counts Kokal, bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg and drummer Stella Mozgawa among her closest confidantes. Nonetheless, the context of their relationship changed as they spent 18 months traveling the world in a succession of cramped tour vans.

“We’re close. You’ll find that we hang out a lot of the time anyway. However, it’s a different thing when you’re in a mini-van and literally sitting across from each other. It reaches a point where it starts to feel strange. We were all a little shocked about that. You can start to put up walls, stop interacting. Or not. Ultimately it brought us closer.”

The biggest lesson they received was that they should take care of what they say around the media, the gossipy UK press especially.

“The people who’ve portrayed us worst are the NME,” she charges. “They love to take something that sounds provocative and turn it into a headline. They like presenting statements out of context – there’s definitely a ‘gimmick’ angle, to do with beauty or ‘wild girls’. All of those less deep traits. I wish they would focus on our music.”

Warpaint is a departure from The Fool. There are less Breeders guitars, more clattering synths, spooky bass fugues and out-of-phase time signatures. The veer leftfield, it ought be pointed out, owes nothing to Wayman’s relationship with Blake. Fans may be surprised to hear avant-garde electronics have always been part of what Warpaint are about.

“We didn’t want to completely change our sound,” Wayman concludes. “However there were a lot of elements we always intended on incorporating into our music, such as keyboards and drum machines. For various reasons, that side of our aesthetic didn’t make it onto The Fool. After touring for so long, it dawned on us that we’d tried to cram too much into our music. We were determined to simplify. That’s what this record is about.”