Chicks Who Love Guns have been kicking around Sydney for a few years now with their smartarse brand of punk. But for their new track “Pencil Neck,” they’ve moved in a new direction with a brooding sound and a killer video to match. Lead singer Cass Navarro is responsible for their snarly sound, he's also apparently a part time browser of fetish websites.VICE: Chicks Who Love Guns are known for their energy, but your new track “Pencil Neck” seems more thoughtful and calculated.
Cass:I guess the difference in the new track is that we’ve been doing it for a lot longer now. When we get together in the studio to write songs we have a better feel for it, it’s not as rushed, it’s more of a conscious process. It’s not like: this is the first thing that sounds good so we use it. We used to finish a song in one rehearsal; a couple of hours and that would be a song.With this one there was a lot more tweaking involved, we spent a few weeks on it. We were all talking about how we wanted a change; I guess the sound is a big part of that, different from a few years ago. We wanted everything to go out the door except the name and the people. It’s like a breath of fresh air for us to be playing something different. It’s still got elements of our old sound, but there’s something a little more mature about it—something better about it.In your last clip for “Moon Eater” half of you were in drag while you re-enacted The Breakfast Club, it’s fair to say this clip is a departure from that. In fact, “Pencil Neck” is strangely mesmerising.
We wanted to do something that was like controlled chaos. Visually it’s really nice and clean, but the content of the clip is quite full on. I think rather that being like “look at us, we’re these five crazy young guys who play loud music and yell at you,” we wanted to step away—we didn’t even want to be in it at all.It’s more like a piece of art that compliments the music. It was all part of changing things up and not doing what people expected us to do. We made the clip with Manuela Leigh, who is our guitarist Mody’s girlfriend. She makes films for a living so she was the perfect choice. She wanted to do something different, and most of it was her genius.How did you convince so many attractive people to let you throw spaghetti and baked beans at them?
I guess we have attractive friends! There were a few friends I asked that were like no way, but most of them were pretty cool about it. Everyone in it is either a friend of the band or a friend of Manuela. We just hit them up on Facebook and asked them to come down to a warehouse for us to throw spaghetti on them.How did you decide what foods to throw? Was it all about looks?
Pretty much. We had a few ideas and when we were researching the clip we came across this fetish website, I think it’s called “Splooshing”. Basically it’s videos of girls getting covered in food, like as a fetish thing, guys subscribe to this site.We watched a few videos to see what looked good on camera, and they used all sorts of stuff. Basically the girl is there for twenty minutes and they go “Eggs!” and throw eggs on her, then “Spaghetti!” and throw spaghetti on her. After a while it ‘s a big mess, but we wanted to separate them so everyone had their own food they were going to get covered in. We went to Costco with a $100 budget and grabbed some syrup, some ice cream, whatever looked good that we could afford.What was the colourful goo made from?
That’s made from cornflour, food colouring and water. We needed a lot of cornflour and it felt fucking terrible, I would not want that poured on me.Chicks Who Love Guns are playing the VICE Presents party on the 31st of July. RSVP here.
Cass:I guess the difference in the new track is that we’ve been doing it for a lot longer now. When we get together in the studio to write songs we have a better feel for it, it’s not as rushed, it’s more of a conscious process. It’s not like: this is the first thing that sounds good so we use it. We used to finish a song in one rehearsal; a couple of hours and that would be a song.
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We wanted to do something that was like controlled chaos. Visually it’s really nice and clean, but the content of the clip is quite full on. I think rather that being like “look at us, we’re these five crazy young guys who play loud music and yell at you,” we wanted to step away—we didn’t even want to be in it at all.It’s more like a piece of art that compliments the music. It was all part of changing things up and not doing what people expected us to do. We made the clip with Manuela Leigh, who is our guitarist Mody’s girlfriend. She makes films for a living so she was the perfect choice. She wanted to do something different, and most of it was her genius.How did you convince so many attractive people to let you throw spaghetti and baked beans at them?
I guess we have attractive friends! There were a few friends I asked that were like no way, but most of them were pretty cool about it. Everyone in it is either a friend of the band or a friend of Manuela. We just hit them up on Facebook and asked them to come down to a warehouse for us to throw spaghetti on them.How did you decide what foods to throw? Was it all about looks?
Pretty much. We had a few ideas and when we were researching the clip we came across this fetish website, I think it’s called “Splooshing”. Basically it’s videos of girls getting covered in food, like as a fetish thing, guys subscribe to this site.We watched a few videos to see what looked good on camera, and they used all sorts of stuff. Basically the girl is there for twenty minutes and they go “Eggs!” and throw eggs on her, then “Spaghetti!” and throw spaghetti on her. After a while it ‘s a big mess, but we wanted to separate them so everyone had their own food they were going to get covered in. We went to Costco with a $100 budget and grabbed some syrup, some ice cream, whatever looked good that we could afford.What was the colourful goo made from?
That’s made from cornflour, food colouring and water. We needed a lot of cornflour and it felt fucking terrible, I would not want that poured on me.Chicks Who Love Guns are playing the VICE Presents party on the 31st of July. RSVP here.