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Music

Harsh Crowd Is Not a Girl Band

...but they are a band, made up of four 13-year-old girls who are kicking the crap out of whatever you’re doing in your basement.

All photos by Samantha Marble

Harsh Crowd is not a girl band, but they are a band, made up of four 13-year-old girls who are kicking the shit out of whatever you’re doing in your basement. Rihana, Dea, Willow, and Lena met at the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls in 2013 and became very fast friends. They make clean punk music—musically basic yet often lyrically complex—and the girls are interested in everything from Led Zeppelin to classical music.

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They met when they were 11 years old, and have been a band for two years now. All four of them currently studying some type of music or instrument in various schools around New York City. I met up with them to talk about their songs, being a band, and going to school, and then later that weekend, caught the premiere show for their new EP, Don't Ask Me, at Union Hall in Brooklyn.

“Follow the music!” the receptionist told me through a smile when I arrived at their practice space, which operates as a preschool during the week. I turned a corner, opened a door, and was immediately hit with the sonic energy of their presence, aka it was really loud. They hadn’t started their next song yet, but the energy of four teenage girls plus their coach, Caryn, who was trying desperately to corral them, was enough to make coffee seem too weak. “Don’t hide away from the world/it will be ok little girl/they’ll try and try and try/ and fight and fight and fight” Willow croons during the beginning of ‘Four Walls,’ a song the girls wrote while noodling around in their practice space. “We wrote the song without ‘Keep standing up tall’ [the chant/chorus all four girls repeat throughout the song, which they later added after a weird encounter with a foot fetish guy on Kik] and it was just kind of a ‘Don’t feel down’ kind of song” explained Lena, the drummer, “Don’t try something because you think you’re not going to succeed, keep pushing.”

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“I think it’s also really important for us because there aren’t a lot of bands that are our age,” Dea, the main guitarist, piped up. “So when we have a song like that I think it makes us seem more relatable for kids who are our age who want to be in a band or feel like they can’t play music or that they can’t do stuff. “ “This is an age where people are really self-conscious and shy about things and they just really care what people think,” explained Lena. “This song is important, especially if we have an audience of people who are the same age as us, I think they can relate to it a lot more than adults probably.” It’s hard to talk about this EP without focusing on the fact that they’re thirteen. Not because it sounds like they’re thirteen (okay, "DRP" aka "Dirty Rotten Parents" is a stark reminder that they still live at home, but honestly it could be a song sung from the POV of someone who just moved back in after college), but because they’re so sonically tight and their lyrics are so mature that it sounds like it's coming from 20-somethings who are just barely starting to launch their attack on the music industry. It’s also a good reminder that teens are way more capable than we give them credit for.

Though the crowd at Union Hall was made up mostly of parents and supportive family members and you could tell the bartenders had anticipated a different kind of crowd, the energy was nonetheless high before Harsh Crowd took the stage. At first they appeared nervous, but once they got started playing the nerves melted away. They were charismatic, entertaining, and seemed pretty fucking psyched to be there. At first they appeared nervous, but once they got started playing the nerves melted away. The five songs off their EP, a few newer tracks, and an absolutely killer cover of Radiohead’s "Creep" later, they seemed pretty fucking psyched to be there. The crowd seemed just as excited for them to be there too. Parents and siblings, cousins, friends from school, all crowded around the four girls as soon as they walked off stage, hugging and congratulating them all.

The girls, though young, are brilliant, savvy people who don’t let things like ‘They’re good for a girl band’ or ‘They’re good for a bunch of kids’ get past them (or get them down). They know when they’re being demeaned and when they’re being legitimately praised, and the Willie Mae Rock Camp For Girls is probably the place to thank for that. The camp, a place for girls and women to meet, learn to play instruments, and become leaders, is an empowering place that the girls speak of fondly. They wouldn’t have met each other without it, of course.

As far as the band’s future? They really just want to keep making music. And maybe (definitely) meet Joan Jett.

Annalise Domenighini would also like to meet Joan Jett; she's on Twitter.