A New Era For The Iconic Garage Act

Le Butcherettes found their fame, and infamy, by way of some onstage theatre. In their early years, the Texas-based garage outfit - the project of Teri Gender Bender, aka 28-year-old Teresa Suarez - employed the imagery of butchery, their aprons dowsed in blood, their singer using a host of objects, from feather-dusters to a real pig's head, as provocative props.

"The imagery and visuals were a representation of what a young, savage girl's hurt symbolised," says Suarez. "I had notebooks full of ideas, concepts, meanings of each element - mannequins, feather dusters, pearl necklace, veils, covered-up eyes, apron, butcher knife, kitchen utensils - that I was choosing. I invested a personal meaning [in them] that came from different excessive traumas. Being underestimated, discriminated against both racially and sexually, bullied, et cetera; things that are supposed to make you weaker as a person. I [used] mundane objects as empowering tools, like the broomstick. It represented the tool that I could use not only to clean, but to sweep away the trauma, the cleaning up of an old life."

Suaez grew up between Denver, Mexico City, and Chiapas, but after her father died at 13, her family permanently relocated to Guadalajara. She had obsessions both familiar (cinema, art, ballet, feminism) and strange (her "darkest obsession", she admits, was with prosthetic legs), and filled notebooks with songs from early in her childhood. Le Butcherettes were born out of her "desire to do something with all the unused cathartic energy stocked inside my blood".

Suarez was 17 when Le Butcherettes began, and 22 when their first LP, 2011's Sin Sin Sin, came out. It was produced by Omar Rodri­guez-Lopez, who brought the band out on their first-ever Australian tour after its release. A Le Butcherettes side show proved catalysing for Suarez. "It was very emotional," she recalls, "[my] first show in Melbourne and the place was packed. Before that, I'd had no idea that my music even could make it out of my city much less onto the other side of the world."

Suarez has kept raging across subsequent LPs, from 2014's fierce Cry Is For The Flies to 2015's A Raw Youth, on which she duetted with Iggy Pop. She's hard at work on the new Le Butcherettes LP, the first output of what she calls a "whole new chapter" of the band. The totemic phrase for this new era is Graffiti Amargo, but it won't be the name of the album. "It is the declaration of a new creative chapter for Le Butcherettes," she offers; the name evoking slogans in defiance of human bitterness.

Despite their bloody stage guise, Suarez says that she never wanted her band to just be provocative. "Lord, heavens, no! I have always wanted Le Butcherettes to be loved and nurtured by the rebels of societies. I wasn't looking for a provocation, I was looking for a connection. I was looking for a connection to something, to someone that could see the sweat and pain, the meaning - even if abstract - that comes from somewhere real."