Ready to feel old, 90s kids? Everything you love is dead. Or worse, reanimated: stitched together with swatches of hot neon and cool pastel, jumbled into a cruel parody of the human form, staggering down your street in the rain, rapping harder and harder against your door now, begging to be let in, to return home. You glance over at the monkey’s paw on your desk, only one finger raised now; it’s turned back into a Brat Award. The banging won’t stop, but you know that thing at your door isn’t EMF – or at least, not as you remember it. It’s James Atkin performing Schubert Dip in full. Don’t answer it.
Not that you’re likely to find Dream Wife compromising their youth for a weekend in Minehead. Even if they were old enough to call it nostalgia, those kind of line-ups would be wasted on the Brighton-based trio; one suspects they harbour the good taste to pick Shampoo over Shed Seven all day long. But their heart lies in a particularly American 90s: one that revolves around David Lynch, Kathleen Hanna, Carrie Brownstein, mixtapes, fanzines, anything shrouded in ambiguous hues. (“We only dream in pastel colours,” they literally said in an interview last year.) In fact, the Brighton-based act initially started as a parodic art project, three feminist art students picking apart the key girl group signifiers and piecing them back together in their own way. More Derrida than Frankenstein though, right? We caught up with Alice, Bella and Rakel to get their hot take on art, music and feminism. And boy, did we get some big answers.
Matthew Neale 