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HEARTSREVOLUTION Talk Pop Culture, Feminism, and Michael Jackson's Crystals

"This is our love letter to this generation. It’s an invitation to a conversation…"

The first time I met the band HEARTSREVOLUTION was on set for their music video

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. Wearing a neon pink wig, a big white t-shirt, and crazy colorful printed leggings, lead singer Leyla Safai cursed like a sailor as she professed her love for Yeezy and leapt around the Lower East Side apartment that she shares with her bandmate Ben Pollack. In other words her personality and style precisely mirrors the music the duo make together: their output is a powerful take on electro-punk, but delivered with pink cotton candy and ice cream. Sure, Leyla's a fairy, but don't be fooled, she's got fangs too.

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In fact I'd been listening to HEARTSREVOLUTION long before I came in contact with the noise pop duo. "Digital Suicide" soundtracked my angsty grade school afternoons spent perfecting my MySpace account, and the track "C.Y.O.A."—standing for "Choose Your Own Adventure"—was a mantra I repeated often in my head. Their music is emotional and visceral; you can feel Leyla's rage about the mistreatment of women in tracks like "$EX" ("Like all the girls before me/You want to pimp and whore me) and the Strokes-sampling, Just Blaze-produced "Not That Hard To Explain" ("If I was a dude you'd be sucking my dick/But I'm just a girl/So all you see is tits and a clit"). But the lyrics aren't mere complaints, they're a call to arms: "I'm on a mission/I wish you would listen/You want to change your life/You better change your position."

HEARTSREVOLUTION's intent is clear, and between their crystal-covered ice cream truck filled with stuffed animals and their addictive songs packing punchy, political lyrics, they more than get their point across. Now their long-awaited debut album, RIDE OR DIE is finally out and I talked to Leyla about making music in the digital age, being a girl in a male-dominated industry, and getting all of Michael Jackson's Swarovski crystals.

Noisey: What does "Ride or Die" mean to you?
Leyla: "Ride or Die" is a hip-hop reference—it can be your girl, your best friend, it's the person who is with you through thick and thin. Having the album have that title, well we weren't really concerned with the perceptions of the record as a whole or as us as artists. This is us wearing our hearts on our sleeves, and if you want it, we're here with you, ride or die, and if you don't, well we're in this for what we wanted to do, not for what you wanted us to do.

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A lot of people have asked, "Why has this album taken so long?" But it's just because you have this perceived trajectory you have to be on—you go to school, you get a job, you get married, a woman has to have a baby by a certain age, you know what I mean? It's all projected bullshit that doesn't mean anything. So when they ask, why is this taking so long? It's takes so long because it's takes as long as it takes to make something you believe in. This is our love letter to this generation. It's an invitation to a conversation.

Your track "Digital Suicide" first came out in 2008 on Switchblade EP, but I noticed that it's also on the new album. What kind of headspace were you in when you wrote that song, and do you find that it's still relevant?
When we were around back in the day, it was the dawn of the blog era. We rode that first wave of, "Wow, there's this Internet and we can connect with people all around the world in a matter of minutes, and we can upload an mp3 to MySpace and have a fan base," all based off of humans connecting in this new way that hadn't been done before. And at that time there wasn't that massive wave of EDM, so making music on your computer was still pretty foreign. It's something that had been happening in Europe for a long, long time, but not in the US. "Digital Suicide" was one of the first songs we wrote, and it was just us trying to do it to the best of our ability, in a room with a shitty microphone. We had no instruments, just GarageBand. That song had legs in a way that most artists wish their songs had reach. It's really interesting, over the course of however many years, there's been a large number of kids who write to us and tell us they love that song. It's connected with people. So when we had the opportunity to record it properly, we felt that it should be included.

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People seem to forget that their generation isn't the only generation. There will be some kid who was on the internet at 14 and found that song and liked it, but now they're older and they think, "They already did that song." But now there are 14 year olds who were 10 years old when the song came out and weren't online. We didn't make our record for jaded 25 to 35-year-olds who are so above things being magical; we made the record for teenagers and those in their early 20s. I think it's a really vulnerable song and that it brings a good balance to the record.

Last time we spoke I discovered you're a big fan of The Strokes, and recently I found the song and music video for the track "Not That Hard To Explain," which samples "Hard To Explain" off Is This It.
People in hip-hop are always sampling beats, they do their thing over it and it's okay. So I was like, I wanna do that! And I wanted to do it with The Strokes because no one had done that and I thought it would be really cool. For the video, I really liked the idea of killing all these internet-famous hipsters who had created their identities and personas solely based on their clothes and their choice of hair color. So I invited all the kids in LA who were internet icons, and was like, "Hey! So everyone thinks we're really sweet and nice because we have this ice cream truck and it's all pink with unicorns, but actually we have a sinister side that really wants to kill the empty nature of our current pop culture. So I'm going to poison you all with popsicles, and at the end of it we better all start a revolution or we better run for the hills, because this shit is fucked up!"

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And they all showed up! I was totally surprised, because if someone told me that they wanted to kill me in their music video because they didn't like what I stood for, I'd be like, "Huh?" But they all came, and they're all really nice people.

A lot of your lyrics are feminist and politically charged. The instrumentals are very vibrant and positive, but the lyrics are extremely honest in both describing and questioning the current state of the world. I try to always be conscious of what I'm saying, and still allow this collaboration with Ben where the music is fun, poppy, dancey and accessible, but still plant the seeds of intention for the next generation. The opening line on the first song of Ride or Die is, "Excuse me I've got something to say/Nobody puts baby in the corner/If you try to do it, do not say I did not warn you." And then the last song of the album goes, "Thank you/You see I had a lot to say." So you can't escape the fact that this is an album where the lyrics do matter.

There's a lot of subject matter and it's all through the [lens] of an ice cream truck and crystals and unicorns and hearts, but at the root of all of it, it talks about so much crazy shit—celebrity obsession, or how everything is just about style and image, how the world at large lacks substance, especially the music industry, human trafficking, holy wars. There's so much stuff crammed in in there, so much you wouldn't even know was in there unless you actually listened, which I hope kids do. We always try to find a balance so that it's not so preachy and so riot grrrl and angry. It's toned down from where we originally started, because I'm like a pretty angry person, but we still need to make it accessible. At the end of the day there's something very hopeful about our entire project.

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What do you think the hardest thing about being a girl in the music industry is? What about the best?
It's really interesting to see women of power, because once they're in power, people will say, "That girl is no nonsense." On an indie front it would be Lorde; in a pop star way it would be Beyoncé; in a mogul way it would be Oprah. They're these fucking powerful women, and people say, "They're no nonsense, they get what they want." I would like to know how they got there and how they were treated up until that point. Go back to the trajectory that put Beyoncé where she is. You have these women showing you that you can have what you want, but they almost become novelty, just like placeholders, and that's all there is. Nicki Minaj talks about it in Pink Friday—that's my go-to record—she says, "Fuck you, I've always been Nicki, I've had to fight to be Nicki, I've had to pretend I wasn't Nicki." It's a constant battle.

Sure, you can see you want to be a feminist icon, but when you actually have to live it, it's so different. You want opportunities and people say, "No, that's not for you." But I want that piece of cake, I want to be the girl with the most cake. People just want the idea of a powerful woman rather than the bullshit that comes with breaking down those walls on a daily basis. And the walls that exist in the industry for girls are fucking real. One you might have to swing over like Tarzan with a vine, and the next you gotta power through with your drill, and then you gotta talk to the gatekeeper to open the next one. But until you get to that point, it's all a challenge.

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At the same time, I wouldn't want to not be a girl, because a woman who is successful automatically has gone through more adversity than any man. You're like an Olympic champion when you make it. I feel like I already won! I don't even care what happens to my record. I got to do what I wanted to do. I got to create the world's first Swarovski crystal ice cream truck that's so magical. And maybe some dude won't get it, but when a kid sees it, it opens their eyes to thinking that anything is possible. Dream some crazy shit and you can do it!

Are we choosing our own adventure or are we fated to our destiny?
When Ben asked me to do vocals on "C.Y.O.A." I said I didn't want to do it. But he convinced me, and in the song we put this little phrase, "kishi kaisei," a Japanese phrase that means to resurrect from death and have sudden victory. And I was like, okay, if we do this song and we're invited all around the world then I'll be in a band with you. And then that happened, but we were like, oh shit, because we didn't have a live show or a drummer or a plan or an album or a manager or anything. But we thought, this is what we want to do, let's see if the universe supports it. And it took time for us to flesh out what our vision was and what we wanted to create. We've chosen what we've done, but along the way there have been this weird markers of if we're supposed to be doing something.

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When we went to Swarovski, we'd just gotten our record deal with Kitsuné, and we asked for all of these crystals that were gonna be thrown away because they were second-rate and imperfect, so people thought they had no retail value. So here is this band with no album, no plan, no manager, nothing but a big dream really, and they gave us all the crystals. Like hundreds and thousands of dollars worth of crystals. And when we ran out, we started putting in our own money to keep crystalizing it. But that was the year that Michael Jackson passed away, and they allotted his entire collection to us. I remember getting an email from them saying, "Michael wanted to make the world a better place for music and for children and so does HEARTSREVOLUTION. Here are your Neverland crystals, go finish this and see this thing through." This kind of weird synchronicity and magical things happen. We set our attention on what we want to do, and then the universe tends to take care of it in a really magical way.

When the world is the way that it is, when it's really lacking magic and substance, that's all we want to bring to the table. Kids deserve another option.

Shriya Samavai is patiently awaiting her copy of Ride or Die, which comes with coloring book and a neon pink crayon. Buy your own copy here and then go follow Shriya on Twitter - @shriekeliene.

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