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Music

Ex Hex's Mary Timony Is Not to Be Fucked With

At least that's the theme of most of her songs.

One of the most influential women in indie rock, Mary Timony has added a new chapter to her storied career: Ex Hex. After forming the seminal 90s band Helium and spending time with the post-punk supergroup Wild Flag, she’s joined forces with Laura Harris from Aquarium and Betsey Wright from The Fire Tapes to play fun-as-hell party music.

Their debut full-length album Rips is 35 minutes of power pop where the riffs are clean and the hooks are huge. Channeling The Runaways and Cheap Trick, Rips is something you might have heard on the radio in the early 80s, late 70s—those halcyon days of pure, uncut classic rock. “Don’t Wanna Lose,” a song that captures the feeling of blasting the doors open on the last day of school, punctuated by stop-star riffs, and the girl group doo-wop-throwback “Outro,” are the closest Timony’s come to creating rage-all-night jams in her two-decade-and-some career.

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Timony took a minute to chat with us from the tour van about basement shredding, the secret to the perfect sound, and how she’s not to be fucked with.

Was there a moment when you, Laura, and Betsey decided to be a band?
We all know each other from various bands. In DC the music community’s very small, actually, so everyone knows each other. I was writing songs and looking for people to play with, and I always loved the bands Laura was in and thought she had a good style, so we started jamming and that was really fun. And then Betsey moved back to town from Virginia, and I’d always heard really great things about her, so we all got together and jammed and it seemed like a really good combination. It was pretty natural.

You’ve all been members of a bunch of bands—what’s different about the Ex Hex dynamic?
We had a pretty clear vision of what we wanted to sound like. Recording actually played a really big part in writing the songs. We could record in my basement so we jammed on songs then tracked them in my basement, listened back, and then changed things around and rearranged and cut parts. That was different than I had ever worked before. It was a new style of working. I think that really played into the songs being pretty whittled down and pretty short. We just left in the stuff we liked.

You mentioned having a clear vision of what the sound would be. You guys are channeling a lot of late 70s, early 80s classic rock. Was that a conscious decision?
It just kind of happened. I think we were all on the same page with the kind of music that we liked, and bands that we liked from that time period. With the songs that I wrote, I was definitely thinking a lot about music that was on the radio when I was 12 and just starting to listen to rock music. It was natural, because the songs that Betsey wrote sound like they’re from the same era, that style. It was a natural progression.

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Do you all collaborate on the songwriting or is there a primary songwriter?
Yeah, it’s collaborative with arranging.

You’re singing a lot about lousy relationships and lousy people who come in and out of your life. Is that what Ex Hex is—the curse of the ex coming back into your life?
For me, personally, I don’t think really think about lyrics. I’ll concentrate on all the instrumental stuff, and then I just write the lyrics once. But I know they’re the first thing that people actually hear, so they are important, but there’s no theme like that. I mean, for my songs I think a lot of them are like, “Stop fucking with me.” That’s the theme of the song.

Is there a reason that the band shares a name with one of your solo albums?
When we were thinking of names for the band, we were thinking of ten words we liked. We just liked those two words together.

What was the editing process like?
It was really crazy. We were really busting our asses trying to get it done by a certain deadline. We were all really sick, working from eight in the morning till two, every day for a week. We had the album mixed by Bobby Harlow, and he’s really good with leaving microphones out we didn’t need. We probably recorded with 16 drum microphones but he ended up using like three of those tracks. So yah there was a lot of editing going on.

What’s the secret to a really satisfying guitar riff?
If it sticks in my head, that’s when I know if an idea is good. Well, actually, sometimes you keep remembering something and it’s just annoying. But if we’re recording on the tape recorder and we go back and listen to the ideas, it’s a lot easier to tell once we’ve had a couple days. Then you can tell what’s good.

You’re on tour now. What can people expect at an Ex Hex show?
Crazy, rock insanity.

Jolene Torr is on Twitter and will be seeing Ex Hex live—and you should too. Dates below.

10/16 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios #
10/17 – Vancouver, BC @ Electric Owl #
10/18 – Seattle, WA @ Barboza #
10/19 – Olympia, WA @ Capitol Theater Backstage #
10/23 – Fargo, ND @ The Aquarium #
10/24 – Minneapolis, MN @ 7th St Entry #
10/25 – Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle
10/26 – Detroit, MI @ PJ’s Lager House #
10/27 – Toronto, ON @ Horseshoe Tavern
10/28 – Montreal, Quebec @ Il Motore #
10/29 – Winooski, VT @ The Monkey House #
10/30 – Allston, MA @ Great Scott #
10/31 – Hamden, CT @ The Space
11/01 – Brooklyn, NY @ Glasslands #
11/02 – New York, NY @ Mercury Lounge #
11/04 – Philadelphia, PA @ Johnny Brenda’s
11/05 – Baltimore, MD @ Ottobar #
11/06 – Richmond, VA @ Strange Matter #

^ = w/ Mount Moriah
! = w/ The Julie Ruin
# = w/ Speedy Ortiz
* = w/ Hospitality