Photo by Jordan Millington“We know you’re supposed to enjoy your senior year and I appreciate it and everything, but to be honest, we just can’t wait to graduate,” says Clementine Creevy with a laugh. Not that you can blame her. The 17-year-old frontwoman of LA-based band Cherry Glazerr is busy getting things together for their 10-day tour later this week, and she really has other things to think about than homework. Besides the tour, Creevy and her bandmates, drummer Hannah Uribe (also a high school senior) and bassist Sean Redman (who’s the oldest of the trio, at 23) are gearing up to release their new seven-inch on Suicide Squeeze. The pair of tracks includes “Had Ten Dollaz,” which Saint Laurent designer Hedi Slimane featured in the recent Fall/ Winter show, and the B-side, “Nurse Ratched.”As the kingpin of the music-fashion crossover, Slimane has been a longtime champion of the band. He recruited Creevy to model for the Saint Laurent campaign in 2013, and, following in the footsteps of fellow Slimane indie muses like Sky Ferreira and The Garden, immediately became a proponent of their sound.“I had done a bit of modeling for Hedi’s Saint Laurent campaign in the past, and one day he was just like, ‘I love your band. Would you be interested in making the music for the runway?’” Creevy remembers. “I was like, ‘Oh shit! Yeah, we’d love to.’ I was trying to keep it cool, but on the inside I was flipping out.” Creevy, Uribe and Redman had been working on “Had Ten Dollaz,” but nobody had heard it yet. Once they played the song (which was still in its early stages) for Slimane and got the OK from the designer, they expanded it into a 20-minute runway soundtrack. They recruited their friend JooJoo Ashworth from the LA band Froth for an extended guitar solo in the middle. “It’s sort of funny because the runway version of the song actually came before the single,” remembers Redman.Since they formed in 2013, Cherry Glazerr have near-perfected their sinister brand of garage rock, one that comes ridden with a haunting undertone beneath the coos of “oohs” and “aahs.” These are tracks that leave you feeling a little bit woozy after they’re over, and there’s no better representation of this than the group’s latest release, “Nurse Ratched.” Inspired by the eponymous character from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, it delivers far more than crushing guitar riffs, explosive percussion, and sing-along melodies. But, as Creevy explains, you might want to revisit your high school reading list (or at the very least, Sparknotes) in order to truly get the context. “I guess the book really resonated with me; she’s such a dynamic character. I guess I wanted to exploit her character a little further, given the storyline and the fact that she’s very manipulative and makes her patients feel like children,” she says. “But you know, ultimately she is the insane one.”It takes a special band to be able to weave high school literature seamlessly into their music—without losing a shred of credibility, we might add—and clearly, Cherry Glazerr fit the bill. Creevy and Uribe may lament the “bad timing” of their career success pre-graduation, but if this seven-inch is any indication, senioritis sounds pretty damn good.Listen to the premiere of “Nurse Ratched” off Cherry Glazerr’s seven-inch below.
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Liza Darwin is a writer living in NYC. She's on Twitter.