Ballet School Is Putting the Pop in Dream Pop One Million Stickers at a Time

Photos by Sophie Allen

Ballet School’s debut album, The Dew Lasts an Hour, opens with honeyed flutters that feel like teenage kisses. Once the electric tension is broken, the guitars smash into an array of sounds that suggest the most pastel spectrum of colors and the perfect form of careening pop melodies. Singer and guitarist Rosie Blair’s vocals are optimistic and majestic. They demand attention with their diva-like intensity yet work in tandem with the dream pop instrumentals that surround her. It’s a novel push in the world of ethereal music, which is generally inhabited by vocals so hushed they may as well be multidirectional whispers. This approach makes sense given Rosie's appreciation not only of Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser—whose band's influence is clear in Ballet School's balance of pop and shoegaze—but also of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, the two “people in pop music who really influenced our modern idea of good singing,” Rosie explains.

Rosie describes the process of forming her own band as something drawn from a Riot Grrl paradigm and a precise vision less commonplace than it might seem: to make pop music backed by a band. Ballet School came together in Berlin in 2011, after Rosie relocated from Ireland with the goal of pursuing music and taking advantage of the city's relative affordability. She headhunted the other members, Michel Collet (guitar) and Louis McGuire (drums), and Ballet School released its single “Heartbeat Overdrive” last year to almost instant acclaim. The band found a fitting home with Bella Union Records, and The Dew Lasts an Hour came out earlier this week. It's a release that has been bittersweet for Rosie, as it coincided with the passing of her father, but the joy from the album coming out was evident in her voice.

On the whole, The Dew Lasts an Hour is dazzling and full of the kinds of pop sensibilities that are more often relegated to songs with Swedish house beats. People often think of pop music as a commoditized vehicle for popular sexuality or heartbreak, but rarely as a medium which grants meaning in and of itself. Ballet School seems in love with pop music; this album is its love letter, sealed with sterling kisses covered in stick-on earrings. I spoke with Rosie from her family’s home in Ireland about Berlin as a modern-day arts haven, the expression of feminism through aesthetics, and why boys just don't get it.

You talked about learning about feminism from Riot Grrl, and there's a Riot Grrl influence in your music. It’s dream pop, but it’s putting femininity out there unabashedly and saying “this is what it means to be feminine,” which is sort of a punk thing itself.
I’ve always been compelled to do that. One thing that is true about Ballet School is that more than anything I am music fan. I get excited about music and all the little details.

I was reading this anecdote about how Tobi Vail started Bikini Kill. She was watching the documentary Another State of Mind. They went to the Discord House in Washington DC, and there’s a very short scene [with] a sign on the door that says “No Girls Allowed.” And [she] was like “I’m not fucking having this, let’s make our own movement, let’s make our punk rock.” The fucking door of the mecca of punk rock of and there’s a fucking sign that says “No Girls Allowed.” And it was probably some stupid boy who wrote it.

But the point is: It was there, and she saw, and it got her fired up, and she created this community.

And it became what it became.
Little tiny things like that kick me off. Whenever you really love music, you’re always looking for stuff that gives you strength and makes you feel empowered. It doesn’t have to be Beyoncé standing on a stage in front of a fucking massive FEMINISM sign. It’s the consistency of those women who continue to do this right up to the present day. Kathleen Hanna is tweeting Miley Cyrus.

It really signifies a big change in the movement. If you think back to like ‘93 and ‘94, there was a feminism media blackout. Feminism was very anti-assimilation. “Do not fucking talk to the media, do not engage with the mainstream,” and that’s totally changed, and I think that’s a good thing. It’s made feminism populist, which is a significant change. Like Brooke Candy, who seems to have a head on her shoulders.

Especially stylistically, your music is very feminine, but self-aware.
I really felt that naturally there is a softness about femininity that I wanted to communicate because that has merit. There’s something comforting about it. Music shouldn’t have a closed-off toughness all the time. There’s a spectrum of emotion in life. Even though I identify with women having strength, I also identify with women being carers and being protectors, having grace and being gentle. I wanted music to put that in the context of guitar music.

That doesn’t really exist nowadays.
It doesn’t. And the ephemeral world of girls, like where you collect stuff—little notebooks and kawaii stickers all over everything and dying your hair pastel colors. I always thought there was real merit in that because whenever you’re a girl, one of the key things you want to communicate to other girls is the right to own your own body.

Don’t let anyone tell you should be thinner or should be fatter or less girly. Give girls agency over their own selves.

In the music video for “LUX” there’s this scene where you are topless and your chest is covered in stickers. The first thing I thought of was Meadham Kirchhoff, these fashion designers based out London. They’re also very influenced by Riot Grrl. They once sent models down the runway with stickers all over their hands and face.
We only ended up finding a couple packets of the specific stickers that I wanted. They’re not crystals or rhinestones, they’re smooth and domed. They were sold in the early 90s. The stick-on earrings!

I fucking loved those. I always thought as a kid, “abundance! Imagine if you could cover your whole body in these!” And now I did it in a music video. I could have used more if I found more. I had to stop at the torso.

Are you in charge aesthetically with Ballet School? What does the Ballet School world look like, if you could close your eyes?
Whenever you start a band, you start thinking immediately, “what are colors, what are the vibes?”

I’m thinking about starting a band too, and all of that stuff is coming to very quickly. I told a male friend in a band about it, and he said “no, that’s not important, you need to think about the music.” Maybe it’s a guy thing?
Exactly! The only reason they’re fucking saying that because that is the bit that boys don’t do well!

There’s so many bands with awful aesthetics and I’m just like, “what are you even doing?” Aesthetics matter!
That part is something that girls do incredibly well. Like dancing in high heel shoes, it’s one of the things in entertainment that takes skill and talent but doesn’t get any props ever because its not presented as important in terms of “what good music is.”

Any big band will tell you… like Coldplay sits in a fucking room and thinks like “what is the aesthetic of this album? What is the graphic style that ties together this release?” Huge bands all do this, all the way down to the lowest bandcamp band. Everyone is thinking about branding. FKA twigs’s image is already a monument. When you see her videos, or even a picture of her, you feel moved and can’t put your finger on why. And she is 100 percent doing that herself. People will say “it’s all image.” But it’s not. It’s an equally important part of what it means to be an artist right now. Of course you have to be able to back it up with amazing live performances and well-written songs. None of the women who do this are disputing that! We want to write the best songs we can!

With Ballet School, we try to draw out the aesthetics of grunge and 90s Riot Grrls aesthetics. And I consciously wanted to make something that looked really pretty on a computer screen. And with the album cover, Nova Dando, who is an art and music video director, we went to [Central] St. Martens together, she is one of my best friends, she worked on this with me all the way through. And her team is this amazing all-girl tech fucking pro team.

Working on this thing as a group was really important because I’m not sure how helpful it is to scream in people faces “I’m doing absolutely everything myself!” It’s fucking cool to give as much credit as possible to the people whose careers can be helped by getting that credit. What fucking credit am I going to get? How is going to help me to say that I cut the pattern for this piece of clothing that we used in one scene? I’d rather give to someone else so they can use it for their styling career. We all come up together. It’s like New York in Downtown 81.

It’s not like that anymore in New York.
It’s not! In Berlin, the community is so fucking small, it’s can’t be one person that makes it, it has to be everyone coming up together.

Meagan Fredette is a writer living in Chicago. She's on Twitter - @meaganrosae