Interview: Dum Dum Girls

Kristen Gundred, aka Dee Dee Penny of Dum Dum Girls, is a hard one to box in. Raised in California, now based in New York, she’s the creative backbone and frontwoman of a band that could just as easily fit with the washed-out, lo-fi garage of Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls as it can with the LA punk scene she’s commonly (and erroneously) associated with. The Raveonettes’ dark take on fifties and sixties rock’n’roll can also stake a claim in the mixed bag of Dum Dum Girls’ musical influences, while the band’s name calls to mind Iggy Pop, The Vaselines and the candied bubblegum of other all-girl pop acts from the past like The Shangri-Las. That’s not to mention a long-term working relationship with producer Richard Gottehrer, best known for penning classic hits ‘I Want Candy’ and ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’.

The 28-year-old Gundred is a picture of reticence when we meet at her UK management’s office in west London. Clad in black with dark sunglasses — indoors on an overcast afternoon — she says this is a brief, impromptu trip to promote her new album following time in Berlin with husband Brandon Welchez and his band The Crocodiles.

“I didn’t really want to do this, but part of me knew that if I didn’t, it would be worse when we went on tour. Also, I got Sub Pop to spring for the hotel for a few nights in exchange.” She laughs. “I ran out of money, so it worked out.”

Despite her immaculate presentation, one perceives that Gundred isn’t so comfortable with attention. Her tone wavers when under scrutiny, while a faint physical manifestation of her anxiety is evident in slightly shaky hands. Eventually, though, things become easier, and she reveals a sharp sense of humour and strong personality.

“I’ve always been really, really drawn to pretty out-there, charismatic frontpeople and I’m certainly not like that in my daily life, as you can tell,” she says. A wide grin ripples across her face. “But I try to amplify my personality when I’m on stage. I don’t put a tonne of thought into it, because I don’t want to do anything that feels fake, but I think that I’ve become more comfortable with that over time and I think it shows.”

Dum Dum Girls debuted with 2010’s I Will Be, which featured an image of Gundred’s mother on the cover. She’s since passed away from a terminal illness and become the key focus of new album, Only In Dreams.

“I don’t deal with things very well, so some of the only therapeutic grieving that I did was writing songs,” explains Gundred. “It’s not enough, certainly, but I think that it allowed me to process things in a way that was comfortable.”

You can hear this grieving process in songs like ‘Heartbeat’, where Dum Dum Girls’ signature jangling surf-pop is offset by denial as Gundred coos, “I’ll stick my thoughts on a shelf till tomorrow.” But pain lurks behind the cheery shimmer of summery psychedelic. “I don’t know where to go to get away from this sorrow,” the song continues, until inescapable sadness reaches a crescendo in the contrastingly upbeat repetition of the phrase, “Take it away.”

Given Gundred’s private nature, it might seem strange that such a deeply personal issue could become the core theme of the album. But, as she explains, when something is so all-consuming, as an artist, it becomes a subject one really can’t escape: “It wasn’t the most ideal thing, to write a record that deals with grief, because it exists in a public forum and it was a very private drama. But I didn’t really have a choice. It would have been, ‘Okay, I wrote these songs and this is what they’re about,’ or, ‘I don’t have any songs because the only songs I wrote are about this.’”

At the same time as Gundred was dealing with her mother’s illness, she found herself caught up in a hectic touring schedule, as well as enduring long periods of separation from husband Welchez, busy with his own band.

“It was the ‘when it rains, it pours’ thing. I look back and I’m trying to process things… I have a shrink now, you know,” Gundred says, laughing, “But it was such a whirlwind, because there were all these new opportunities presenting themselves with the band and there was that moment where I had to decide, ‘Am I going to pursue them or take a year off?’”

Gundred continues, saying that despite having her parents’ blessing in pursuing those opportunities away from home, they didn’t make her feel any less guilty.

“It’s been almost a year since she died and I’m only now starting to register things and see how I should have dealt with them,” she muses. “There’s no, like, book… oh no, there probably are so many books! But, you know, sometimes it’s hard to know what to do.”

Related: