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When Ithaca bandleader Djamila Boden Azzouz first entered the music business, she battled a double customary. On the one hand, she felt strain to overly feminize and overly sexualize herself to face an opportunity of being included. On the opposite, Boden Azzouz was made to really feel as if she couldn’t be female if she needed to be taken significantly. She couldn’t win. “It’s steel. It’s hardcore. You need to be one of many boys. That’s one thing I’ve struggled with my complete profession, significantly once I was youthful,” she explains.
There have been different dimensions, nevertheless, to this battle. Even because the scene has begun to heat as much as ladies, most of the time, those who have been first to be celebrated have been white, straight and skinny. Boden Azzouz is none of this stuff. “It’s at all times been actually arduous for me,” she confesses. Whereas nice progress has been made in beginning dialogues about race and queerness, fatness has been disregarded of the dialog.
“Individuals don’t wish to speak about it as a result of it’s fucking uncomfortable,” Boden Azzouz causes. “Skinny folks don’t prefer to acknowledge skinny privilege in music, significantly in steel music. No matter gender identification, being skinny is the one fixed. There isn’t any illustration for folks like me on this music scene. You’ve obtained folks like Lizzo in pop music who’re breaking floor there, however heavy music is 1,000,000 fucking miles away.”
Learn extra: Inside the subsequent wave of British heavy steel
However now, Boden Azzouz is completed with feeling overwhelmed down: “I’ve reached some extent the place I simply don’t care anymore.” That fury has change into blazing defiance on Ithaca’s second album, They Worry Us, a report that celebrates distinction and aspires to it. Brightening the metallic hardcore template with influences from new wave, ’80s energy pop and ’90s industrial, they’re right here to be a splash of colour — fairly actually, given Boden-Azzouz’s love of orange attire — in a scene that’s a bit too keen on black.
“We have been actually simply considering, ‘How can we as a band write this music that we actually love and pay homage to those bands that we actually love and make it new and recent and fascinating?’” Boden Azzouz says. “There are such a lot of bands on the market which can be simply writing the identical riffs. I don’t wish to take heed to 10 bands that sound like Botch. I’ll simply take heed to Botch. You actually must carry one thing new.”
The identical goes for visuals. “A bunch of white dudes stood in a forest? I don’t wish to take heed to that,” she continues. “I don’t care what the music seems like as a result of I’m bored wanting on the images.” The London five-piece steered as far-off from the tropes of steel album paintings as attainable — the truth is, they hoped to create one thing that wouldn’t appear to be a steel cowl in any respect. “We needed one thing that was undoubtedly extra dramatic. We needed the visible to match the depth of the report.” It sees Boden-Azzouz sitting on a throne within the huge orange gown that’s turning into her trademark, flanked by her bandmates — James Lewis, Will Candy, Dom Moss and Sam Chetan-Welsh — who’re all wearing white and grey. Above their heads, the album title is written in a curly font exported from the ’70s. It seems regal because it deserves from a band who, on its title monitor, ship a mosh name as highly effective as “Bow earlier than your gods.”
The duvet can be designed to faucet into one of many report’s key themes — what Boden Azzouz phrases “divine female energy.” As an antidote for the trimmings of a patriarchal scene, Ithaca are right here to display that femininity ought to not be scorned, however embraced. “Lots of people affiliate that phrase with very particular concepts, however there isn’t a proper means to have a look at or describe femininity,” she asserts. “One of many huge issues is that embracing femininity isn’t just for girls. It’s one thing everybody can and may check out. Males assume that feminism is an assault on them they usually’re lacking the fucking level. All of us profit from feminism. Nobody loses. What we’re doing is placing divine femininity and female energy on a pedestal.”
It is a important train when Boden Azzouz finds herself continuously pissed off by what she perceives to be a relentless present of performative feminism inside the scene. “I discover it actually irritating that bands and folks love to speak about feminism and say they’re a feminist, however they don’t truly follow it. I’d quite they didn’t. I’d quite they only fucking go away. It’s simple for bands to say that they’re feminists and stuff, however then let me see your [tour] lineups. Who’s in your crew? Who do you’re employed with? A lot of folks like to connect themselves to it as a result of it’s the factor to do, and so many individuals don’t wish to be seen as not doing the appropriate factor, however then they don’t truly do [anything].”
Finally, Ithaca wish to each push open the gates to steel, inviting in individuals who didn’t assume steel tradition might be someplace they’d be welcomed. They wish to look out on the crowd once they play and see a extra numerous array of faces. (In reality, the extra ladies Boden Azzouz can see stage diving, the higher). They’re simply as glad to achieve past the scene and get into the ears of people that may need ever encountered the genres during which they play.
“By getting a bit bizarre with it, and placing all these completely different influences into the report, I do really feel prefer it has the potential to achieve individuals who wouldn’t name themselves a steel fan,” Boden Azzouz says. “My hope is they may hear it and notice there are different methods of doing this music, and also you don’t have to stay to the confines of the style. We actually wish to diversify the scene, but additionally diversify the music itself. Steel is for you, and there’s house for you there.”
