Interview: Lena (Secret Shame)
On Saturday, Nov. 4, Eulogy — Burial Beer Co.’s new music venue — will open its doors to the public for the first time with legendary experimental rock trio Xiu Xiu drawing the premier headline slot. Local post-punk quartet Secret Shame will be providing opening support, just as it did when Xiu Xiu last came to town in 2019. That explosive set at The Mothlight three years ago was my introduction to Secret Shame, instantly hooking me with the band’s potent concoction of gloomy atmospheric guitars, propulsive rhythms, and the soaring, impassioned vocals of Lena (the members prefer to use only first names).
At that point, Secret Shame had been a band for roughly three years and was working on the songs that became its debut album, Dark Synthetics. In the time since then, the group has undergone lineup changes, gained national exposure, toured extensively, and released a second full length album, Autonomy [for which, full disclosure, I photographed the cover artwork].
Lena and I recently met up to discuss the early days of the group, as well as the complex psychological journey behind Autonomy.
In 2016, Lena had been performing solo around Asheville when a friend suggested her as a fit as the vocalist for a new band.
“I think it was seven years ago now. I was 18 and I was redoing my senior year of high school. I had a really good friend who was in this punk band called Prick Bigot. Matthew, our bassist, was trying to start a band with his friend, and they knew my friend. They were like, ‘Do you want to sing? And she was like, ‘I don't really sing. You should ask Lena.’ I was doing acoustic singer/songwriter type stuff at bars around [Asheville]. So then they listened to some of my stuff and asked me. I had been trying to be in a band for my whole life. I started going to places like Static Age [Records], and The Odditorium when it was The Get Down, when I was 12. I was thinking about moving away and then I was like, ‘Sure, I'll try this band.’ And then it ended up working.”
Although it ended up working out for Lena and Secret Shame, things got off to a rocky start.
“"Lights Out" was the first song that I ever heard,” she says. “The first band practice I went to, they were playing it and I was so hungover [that] I threw up in the bathroom. I didn't sing at all.”
The early days of the band would eventually lead to the release of its self-titled EP in 2017. A gloomy six-song collection that draws from the classic goth rock sounds of bands like Christian Death, Bauhaus, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, the band’s first recordings give a glimpse into the band it would later become.
“At that time we were trying to be spooky, goth, whatever — which we don't really try to do any more — but I had never really listened to anything like that,” she says. “Our first guitarist [Nikki] and I would meet up, and they would help me write stuff. So they wrote ‘Revolution,’ the melody and the words.”
Pretty much as soon as Secret Shame began playing shows, Lena found herself being compared to Siouxsie Sioux. Though she grew up with, in her words, a “cool mom” who’d long listened to The Banshees, The Cure and similar bands, when Lena joined Secret Shame and started drawing those comparisons, she wasn’t nearly as familiar with the goth icon as she is currently.
“I feel like no matter where I turn, people are always comparing me to her because she's like the woman of goth music,” she says. “And so I think that that's really the main correlation I have to her still at this point is that we're both women or whatever. So people are always trying to be like, ‘You're just like her.’ And I'm like, ‘I really don't know if that's the case.’ At least not anymore. I would say most people probably don't want to be compared to other people anyways.”
If you’re a woman fronting a goth or post-punk band, Siouxsie’s name is almost guaranteed to show up in anything written about you. Lena has been doing her best to separate herself from that shadow by carving out her own distinct voice.
The quartet’s 2019 debut album, Dark Synthetics, found the band growing leaps and bounds sonically, leading to a stream of positive press from the likes of New York Times, Bandcamp, and post-punk.com. A relentless tour schedule followed, with the band developing a confident stage presence that elevated the songs to greater heights. Though heartfelt personal expressions, Lena’s lyrics at that point were still cryptic in relation to where she’d take them a few years later.
“I was writing vulnerable lyrics, but they were all just sort of shrouded in metaphor,” she says. “I was too afraid to say any of these things, really. And also too afraid to put them in the context of ‘I’ and ‘this happened to me.’ And then when we released [Dark Synthetics], people just kind of ran wild with their own interpretations, which I realized hurt more than just being vulnerable and admitting to that stuff.”
The undesirable experience of having her words misinterpreted would inform her creative process as the group began to write new material.
“Now I'm just like, ‘Well, fuck you. This is what the songs are about,’” she says.
This new vulnerable approach was on full display on the group’s 2022 sophomore LP, Autonomy. “Hide,” the lead single and album’s opening track, laid everything out in the open. Over a catchy bass rhythm and winding distortion-heavy guitar riff, Lena openly confronts her struggle with body dysmorphia with a shimmering vocal performance that simultaneously aches and soothes.
“When we released the song "Hide," that was the first time that I ever openly really said to most of the people in my life, or even publicly at all, this song's about how I have an eating disorder. And since then people have come up to me and been like, ‘Oh, you must be better,’ or, ‘Well, I struggle with that and it's really bad for me because I've never been able to recover at all, and you look like you're at a healthy weight,’ or whatever. Even people who struggle with similar things are still going to judge or perceive something, which makes sense because it's also very competitive, but people tend to forget that it's a mental illness first, and then like anything, if it's not treated, then it gets worse. So there's this weird perception that you have to look one way in order to be sick.”
The opening track is really just the start. Each of Autonomy’s 11 tracks finds Lena expressing the depths of her struggles with a fierce fragility. The words, powerful as they are, might not have the same impact if not for the tight sonic framework initially supplied by her bandmates Matthew (bass/synth), Nathan (drums), and Aster (guitar). With years of playing together having the group more creatively in sync than ever, the ambitious tunes explore a wider dynamic range of styles than ever before, allowing for the full emotional range of Lena’s lyrics to shine through.
The frantic force of the verses of “Accelerate” accentuate the theme of intrusive thoughts, while the dreamy melody of the song’s chorus offers a sympathetic counterbalance. Later on in “January,” a claustrophobic mix of a brooding bass tone and noisy shoegaze guitar wailing closes in on manic vocals about self-destruction and self-hatred. On perhaps the prettiest songs on the album, the vocalist asks, “Why do I romanticize my own problems?” only to answer with the melancholy, “Cause it only helps to hurt when you’re in pain.” Unlike when Morrissey achingly crooned on The Smiths’ records, there’s little indication of romanticization in her vocals. No better proof is in the closing track “Zero,” where Lena takes an abusive tone towards herself. It’s a dark place that many have found themselves in, but few have so earnestly conveyed in song.
Of all the powerful songs on the record, the one that perhaps stands out most to me is “Persephone.” Several years ago, my wife’s Master’s thesis focused on the Greek myth of Persephone — Goddess of Spring and Queen of the Underworld — and its relationship with sexual trauma and body dysmorphia. In her song, Lena takes on the power struggle of overcoming her own eating disorder. Considering the parallel, I asked the songwriter to elaborate on the background of the song and her own connection with the myth.
“Persephone has always been a figure that I've been really interested in, but it's also... basically, it's the name of my eating disorder,” Lena says. “It's not so much even a name as it's a literal figure. It's like an image and a person. It's like a version of me, I guess. And, for some reason, she has that name and she talks to me a lot, and I just have known that her name is Persephone for a while.”
Although the writing and recording of Autonomy may have been a necessary cathartic exercising of personal demons, Lena has had a much more complex relationship with performing the songs night after night. Towards the end of the band’s set at The Orange Peel on Feb. 28, the vocalist took a moment to express the emotional toll it’s taken. In our discussion, she opened up about the reality of a scheduled expectation of revisiting trauma publicly.
“That's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately: Catharsis versus retraumatization. I wrote the songs as catharsis, but also because I was doing so badly that the only thing that I could even think to write was about my literal experience at that time. It wasn't even necessarily for the goal of releasing it or feeling better, it just was sort of, ‘This is where I'm at.’
And then I didn't really think about the part where I would have to perform those songs. It felt really good to get them out in the way of like, OK, this is what it's about, and now I don't have to hide it.’ And I can't really [hide it] anymore because anybody can see any number of things I've said and know what all these songs are about. There's freedom in that. But then also, we had to cut our last tour short because I've been dealing with a lot of physical issues and it seems to directly correlate with my emotions.
I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia. It's basically when your body has been in fight or flight mode for so long or something happens like you get into a bad car accident, and then [your] nervous system pretty much gets fried and it sends pain signals throughout your nerves, and it tells your brain that things hurt when they don't, like somebody touching your arm or the wind.
So, touring has been getting increasingly more difficult. And it got to the point last tour where I went to the doctor and he basically told me, ‘You might have a slipped disc, but really it also seems like you really just need to rest.’ So we did and we drove home and had to cancel things. And the unfortunate side of that is that I feel great now. Which is great.”
She’s been presented with the awful reality that this important aspect of her life and profession is taking a toll on her well-being, forcing Lena to seek a healthy balance.
“It's like, OK, so how much of this constant touring for the past two years has been emotionally affecting everything for me and my body?’ And now I've been trying to take a step back and reassess how to go about it without destroying myself essentially.
I've felt pretty dismissed throughout most of my life. So because of that, I think I just really wanted to not hold back any more. And now I'm like, ‘Oh, what did I do?’ I love the album [Autonomy] but yeah…It's been two or three years now since we even started writing it, and basically I'm just crying every night on stage. And then people are coming up to me and they're like, ‘That was so beautiful. I could feel your pain’.”
Like a martyr, Lena bares her trauma on stage to an audience who relates and experiences their own catharsis in those moments. For some fans, there’s a deeply nuanced beauty within the trauma.
“This is one time that I had just a full on breakdown at the end of a tour where I was just thinking like, ‘Oh, I've put myself in this place again of doing this thing for everybody else instead of for myself.,” she says.
With the precedent set, she feels a certain expectation to continue to deliver songs with the same quality of emotional depth and openness. She’s had to deal with the pressures of creating for an audience rather than for herself. It’s something she’s also dealt with in terms of the newfound reality that having a social media presence is part of being a band, regardless of how toxic social media is.
“I feel like I've had to relearn how to have humility and relearn just how to exist in a lot of ways. There was such a long period of time that I spent, and still do spend, caring so much about things I said, the things I did, my body movements, the way my face looked like, how I dressed and presented to people. And at this point, it's too much. It's like existing for other people doesn't really feel like existing at all. And I realized one day that I hadn't done art for myself. I realized this a year ago or something that I hadn't done art for myself in — I couldn't even remember how long — where I wasn't thinking while doing it. ‘Is this what people want to see, basically?’ And when I realized that I had been doing that for who knows how long, I guess I tried to work on it or something.
A friend of mine was writing in her journal one day and then she was writing over it and writing over it over and over again, and I was like, ‘What are you doing?’ She was like, ‘This is just so I'm getting it out. I never have to read it. I'm never going to judge myself. I'm never going to let anybody else read it. Nobody can ever read this, including me.’ And I was like, ‘Wow! That is fucking great.’ And then I've been doing that with journaling and with art in general, and just painting something — painting over it, painting over it again.”
Although the rigors of touring have taken a toll on Lena, she’s still looking to the future with a bit of optimism.
“We're taking a touring break right now, mostly to write and kind of figure that stuff out,” she says. “I love performing these songs. I love being in that place, which is not the healthiest thing. It's like, ‘Oh yeah, I want to be tortured,’ or whatever. Even just admitting a lot of this stuff is a step in the right direction, I think.”
This is all to say that you should go to Eulogy’s opening night, and get there early to catch Secret Shame’s set, which is sure to blow you away. And then stay and have your senses annihilated by the confrontational post-industrial sounds of Xiu Xiu.
IF YOU GO
Who: Xiu Xiu with Secret Shame
When: Saturday, Nov. 4, 7 p.m.
Where: Eulogy, 10 Buxton Ave., burial.com
Tickets: $26.45
(Photo by Terra Hilton)
