Pumarosa Want to Cast a Spell on the Patriarchy

It's a cold December evening in southeast London, and in an old squat tucked away behind Peckham's perma-bustling high street, everything is collapsing. Wind tears through the barely-there ceiling, sending sheets of music twisting into the air. Meanwhile, the sweat-sodden crowd are stood arse-to-elbow, deftly twisting their spines and ankles as they try to get even a glimpse of the stage through gaps in the walls. At one point, the power fails. On paper, the space is most bands' worst nightmare – but to this day it remains Pumarosa's favourite show.

"It was basically like performing in a bombed-out living room," Pumarosa singer Isabel Muñoz-Newsom says 18 months later, laughing. "It was brilliant, and in a way, it was the opposite of what you'd want: the sound was really fucking weird, and there was way too many people all crushed and squashed. You'd think everything was going completely going wrong… but actually, it was going right!" Now she smirks at the memory. "The vibe was there and everyone was inside of it. It felt amazing. Those gigs can happen where you'd least expect them, really."

Pumarosa thrive under the influence of the unexpected. From chance encounters with mad-hatter characters, to 6AM strikes of inspiration on the rooftops of east London raves, their music is a patchwork history of happy accidents and hazy memories. The four-piece – completed by Tomoya Suzuki, Nicholas Owen and Jamie Neville – have sat outside the norm since day one. Releasing a slow-burning, eight-minute debut single like "Priestess" is a statement in and of itself, pushing back against a world we're so often told is plagued by ever-shortening attention spans. Theirs is a constant tug-of-war between their abstract ambitions and more real-world practicalities – from having to chop and change their live line-up due to work commitments, to relying on freebie recordings from friends to get their first ideas off the ground, to Isabel helping the rest of the band hop the Glastonbury fence because they were so desperate to play any tent that would have them.

A blissed-out, balearic jam, "Priestess" proved to be the perfect introduction to Pumarosa's otherworldly sound, each subsequent track fusing industrial energy to a softer, almost improvisational sense of melody and explorative soundscapes. There's a constant anchor at play though, with the band's ferocious socio-political outlook keeping things consistently grounded in reality. At the heart of it all, Isabel is keen to document "the thoughts of women, or a woman addressing another woman – ideas, or fantasies about women," as a tool to combat the male-dominated worlds of high culture and politics. It's this tension, between escapism and everyday anxieties, that drives Pumarosa's kaleidoscopic debut album The Witch.

Packed full of strong female leads, the stories Isabel tells on The Witch are a response to that male-heavy real world that constantly nips at her ankles. "Priestess" is inspired by Isabel's own sister and her love of dance; "My Gruesome Loving Friend" is an ode to the "nerves of steel" of a dear female friend. " It's not human nature, it's what they made you," Isabel coos on the album's title-track, offering open arms to "The Witch" – a typically knobbly-fingered, haggard and vilified female figure. It's a sympathetic unravelling of female archetypes that's confused some early listeners. "We were talking to a woman in Paris recently, and she said, 'Oh, so which one of your characters would you rather be: the powerful Priestess, the Gruesome Loving Friend, or the spooky Witch?' and I was like, 'Spooky witch?! It's not about a spooky witch'," Isabel says, cackling. "It's kind of about all women. She looked really horrified that that song might have something to do with her."

In keeping with Pumarosa's cinematic sonics, The Witch's split personality first reared its head beneath the curved ceilings of an abandoned theatre. Built into the cliff-side of a tiny Italian seaside town on the Calabrian coast, Isabel whisked herself away when the pressures of London got too much. "The acoustics in there were just exquisite," she remembers, regaling me with tales of chords reverberating around the walls, enveloping her with sound. "It's all a bit fucked because it was derelict for about 20 years," she explains. Picked up on the cusp of ruin by a local man named Giuseppe, the space has since been turned into a creative hub, temporarily housing a near constant stream of artists, musicians and more.

"He's gone in there and he's sort of got it into a vaguely habitable situation… but it's still very open – some of the windows don't have glass, and you can hear the birds and seagulls outside, and you can hear the waves." It's the kind of space that can't help but leave a lasting mark on whatever may pass through; listen closely to "Priestess"' B-side "Original Sinner" and you can even hear the studio dog, yapping in the background. Eyed with some suspicion by the conservative townsfolk, there was a brutal mirror image to that escapist's idyll. "It was pretty rough as well," Isabel admits, "a very tangible kind of place. It was exceedingly hot and sweaty, and we were sleeping just on the floor of the cinema. It wasn't idyllic in every sense of the word, but all those things kind of wrapped into making it even richer, in a way."

On their return to London, the group found themselves turfed out of yet another practice space. In a city increasingly hostile to all but the most creatively void breadwinners, Pumarosa's ambition was grounded once more by life's dull practicalities. "Obviously it's quite a shock getting back," Isabel shrugs. "Lots of these pieces or passages that we'd written at the time just felt so beautiful, and then suddenly you play them in your little low-ceilinged London rehearsal room and it almost sounds like nothing." She peels off with laughter. "Like, 'That's just two chords, played really slowly – what?!' In that space it was this really exquisite, undulating sound," she half-sighs, half-sniggers.

Nevertheless, as The Witch began to take its final form in decidedly less opulent London town, Pumarosa found their balance. Confidently straddling that tightrope between the otherworldly and the palpable, there's far more at play than a simple two-chord wonder here. A debut that takes real-world woes and sets them free in an alternate universe of hypnotism and fantasy, you can hear the likes of "My Gruesome Loving Friend" and "Lion's Den" wrap Isabel's day-to-day drudgeries in a heavenly fog.

"In The Witch, the things I'm saying I've really felt, since forever, like I'm being pushed into this mould that doesn't seem to fit," she says. "I don't look like that beautiful woman; I'm not that silent creature – who is? They are things that I've genuinely felt, but then I suppose the words I'm using, and the way I phrase them, is poetic and strange… So it doesn't sound like colloquial language, you know?"

Colloquial language has always had its limitations, for Isabel. "There is this weird thing sometimes with the art of conversation where it just feels like, 'Fuck, why is this so hard? I'm just trying to say what I mean!'" The Witch seeks to combat that perceived lack of a feminine voice in public spaces, whether through the communicative girl-on-girl dance of "Priestess", the vision of kicking off the high-heeled shackles of inner-city life at the heart of "Barefoot", or the crazed, defiant yelps of power on closer "Snake". Though the frustrations are tangible, each tale is told through a fantastical lens. "It's genuine feeling," Isabel explains, mixed with… I suppose… the Bible or something."

In a way, that off-the-cuff remark is the perfect encapsulation of Pumarosa's identity. Equal parts tangible and ethereal, they're the plastic bag caught in a gust of wind; a sense of escape grounded in cold, hard, modern day slog. Isabel shrugs off the contrast between the two worlds. "I think the idea that these things can only happen in sanctified, perfect spaces is quite a new idea – and not necessarily a good one. I think we should try and do this stuff wherever we want."

Follow Tom on Twitter .

(Lead image by Marco Righo)