Warpaint Interview – War And Peace

Outside the Wonder Ballroom in the city of Portland, Oregon, Warpaint singer Emily Kokal is relaxing in the sunshine before performing the closest thing her band gets to a hometown show. “For some reason Eugene doesn’t welcome us!” Kokal says of her nearby birthplace, where she met musical comrade and best friend Theresa Wayman as a teen.

“We can never pull an audience in our hometown," she adds. "But tonight’s going to be great. Theresa’s father is going to be there. Family and friends from ages past.”
A blissful stop-off on the American leg of the world tour for Warpaint’s second, self-titled album, it arrives just at the point where Kokal feels they're “dialled in” to the new material. There’s plenty to celebrate. So why then, has Emily's co-front woman Wayman been taking to Facebook to apologise for something “heartbreaking and painful”?
According to Kokal, the band recently gave an interview to Q, and snippets of Wayman’s thoughts have arrived online under the headline: “Warpaint: ‘Rihanna and Beyoncé do not need to look like sluts’.”
Upset at her words being taken out of context, the Warpaint singer responded by expressing her adoration for both artists and explaining her true meaning. Apparently, the Beyoncé remarks were aimed solely at the risqué promo for ‘Superpower’, which she felt undermined the song, and the Rihanna debate was based on hypotheticals. You suspect Kokal’s role over the past day has been to shake her friend out of a funk.
“She was having a passionate opinion about two of her favourite artists,” says Kokal. “She really loves those two women, so I think to have it displayed in this kind of way – very ‘anti’ – she just felt that she needed to say something.
“It’s funny, the quote that comes before that is me talking about how the media sensationalise things to distract people from the real news. And then that’s what happens! People follow drama and it had a very dramatic tone to it. We’re very different from that though. We’re peacemakers.”
The trouble is, in 2014, not only are female artists being compared for tenuous reasons (gender shouldn’t be a genre), they’re also being pitted against one another. Kokal has spoken before about how being an all-girl group might lend certain qualities to the music. Today, she notes how it certainly doesn’t inspire the kind of posturing and competitiveness you get with boys in bands.
“I’ve been in a band with two guys before and one thing I noticed was that they’d have more competition between them than they did with me. Whereas we’re all on equal footing as women in a band with each other. There’s an intensity to it – but I think that’s also what propels the music and pushes us to where we are. Creative conflict and resolution. Ultimately the challenge is to collaborate and not be competitive, and that’s really healthy for our own personal growth. It’s almost like the icing on the cake is the music and the process we go through as people is the real experience.”
Let’s talk icing. Since Warpaint’s inception in 2004, the band has racked up almost Spinal Tap numbers when it comes to drummers, but the addition of Stella Mozgawa to the core line-up of Kokal, Wayman and bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg five years ago marked a turning point. She played on celebrated debut The Fool but hadn’t been involved in the writing: when the mammoth tour for that album finally ended, they were eager to correct that. After being in close quarters on the road for so long, they quickly decided to shack up together again to write in the fabled Californian desert haven that is Joshua Tree.
“At the end of touring we were pretty sick of each other,” Kokal admits. “It’s like a relationship too. If you’re always with your partner, then you don’t really get that ‘quiet time’ to just be alone and be in your relationship. I think that was happening – it was the four of us together with tonnes of people the whole time. The prime objective of going to Joshua Tree was the opportunity for us to reconnect and just really honour the musical relationship. In a sense, it refilled the well. Especially being in a natural environment, that’s so beautiful and inspiring and has no distractions. We were able to reset everything and start from a new place with each other.”
That eponymous album title was a nod to Mozgawa’s impact.
“It wasn’t even a question. We weren’t a touring band before Stella joined. We came into ourselves with her, throughout the 300-something shows we played for that tour. And so when we came to write this album, we’d never been a more solid unit. Warpaint had never been more defined. One of our friends who plays drums with Ariel Pink said that Stella’s like the Tommy Lee of our band! She does have this outrageous, Australian, amazing personality.”
Another big personality putting their stamp on the atmospheric, initially unassuming psych-rock of Warpaint was in-demand producer Flood.
“We were initially pretty apprehensive about even using a producer, because we hadn’t ever relinquished control... or spent that much money! He was the only person that we had thought of, based purely on the fact that he was so eclectic. He was an engineer for so long underneath Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, working with these large personalities. And he's very diplomatic. He was really good at dissipating tension. Even at the expense of him absorbing it himself!”
Documenting the whole shebang for posterity was pioneering video artist, and husband of Jenny Lee Lindberg, Chris Cunningham. By all accounts an absolute gentleman, and someone the band have clearly taken to their collective heart, there must be moments when they look at him, remember he was the dark genius behind nightmarish Aphex Twin music videos like ‘Come To Daddy’, and wonder what kind of twisted mind they’ve allowed into Camp Warpaint.
“Oh for sure!” Kokal jokes. “He’s such a sweetheart. Part of what makes him such a sweet, loving guy is that he gets all of his darkness out in his art. If you think about renaissance art and you go back into the dark ages, so much religious art is so disturbing, yet it’s supposed to depict something beautiful. It’s controversial, it’s grotesque, it’s symbolic. Very connected to nature, very connected to spirit.”
Kokal sees parallels in Warpaint’s own beguiling yet occasionally ominous sound. As for its roots, well with the Irish lineage on her mother’s side, it seems that good ol’ guilt affected her as a kid.
“Sometimes you get pushed through society to be provocative because of the limitations and restrictions you feel placed on you. Or you feel shamed. Being raised in this Catholic aura that was around my family, there were parts of me as a kid that were designed to be overtly sexual. I’d do something like draw a lot of naked women: get the perversions out! You just have to get them out of your system or they can make you feel shame. That’s what makes it interesting, because it’s something you almost feel like you shouldn’t be doing. I like that about Chris, he gets out his perversions and he’s really healthy.”
This is all good news for this journalist, who was conflicted when he found an album described by the press and the artists themselves as “sexy” to be more than a little eerie and, in the case of the Warpaint-do-Wu-Tang, forebodingly brilliant ‘Disco//very’ is like the soundtrack to a Lynchian zombie apocalypse flick: Freud would have a field day with those crossed synapses. Luckily, Kokal sees the overlap.
“We don’t want to play anything that you can’t groove out to and sexy is our buzz word for that,” she explains. “I think Wu-Tang is some of the sexiest music. If you listen to ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath, which is ominous and spooky – you can put that album on anywhere. It’s never heavy metal bashing you over the head. It’s very tasteful and there’s a lot of sexiness to it. Music that’s sexy is music you can have on anywhere. It’s below the belt and you can move to it. Who isn’t attracted to that?”

Warpaint play Forbidden Fruit on the Sunday