The Lambrini Girls effect

Lambrini Girls are wasting away in an office basement, licking envelopes and filing papers until their brains feel like TV static. Their boss leers, HR passes the blame, and they’ve still got hours to go. “Michael, I don’t want to suck you off on my lunch break,” vocalist/guitarist Phoebe Lunny fumes, a declaration that deserves its own T-shirt. By the end of the “Company Culture” video, they’ve acutely, perhaps depressingly, described the toxicity that women and queer people face in the workplace.

Just a year-and-a-half ago, the duo quit their jobs to commit to the band, no holds barred. “We’ve been on government benefits since then,” bassist Lilly Macieira says over the phone at the beginning of February. “It’s only in the last three months that we’re paying our rent from the band. Any extra money we have to scrounge for. There was no way of doing this band without doing it full time.”

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Up until they left their jobs, Macieira was a sales administrator for Fender, while Lunny sold advertising space to car dealers. “I’d just shout at men down the phone until they’d buy our product,” she laughs, revealing that she’d make calls from the back of their van while traveling to shows. “I didn’t tell my job that I was in a band, so I was pretending I was unwell and couldn’t come in and had to work from home. But in reality, I was in the north end of Germany.”

On the surface, Lambrini Girls are a nuclear duo whose songs swerve between biting political critique and delirious fun. They say the word “cunt” possibly more times than any other band in the last decade. They scorn Kate Moss. They sound like old-school heavyweights when they reveal how much they can drink in the liner notes of their debut album, Who Let The Dogs Out, released in January via City Slang. When you dig a little deeper, though, you’ll find that the band are a reflection of deep friendship, mutual respect, and admiration — a duo who make the time and space for one another, whatever the circumstance. For all the pleasure they have onstage, though, dousing fans with beer and delivering ridiculously quotable lines, their messages are searing and complex, advocating for a less fucked world. This is, in all realness, their most important gig yet. “Being in a band is the most all-consuming, all-encompassing job I think you can really have,” Lunny reflects. “You don’t have a life outside of it.” Thinking of those office job days gives them perspective and gratitude to make a life out of being a career musician — and thus able to be entwined in each other’s day-to-day for the long haul.

Their initial meeting travels back to 2018, when Macieira worked as a bartender in her hometown of Brighton, England. Lunny was a frequent customer, and a shared taste in music and politics led to playing in the same bands and, eventually, the cutting, satirical punk of Lambrini Girls. “Our strengths and weaknesses are opposites, Macieira explains. “I’m quite methodical in my thinking. I’m gear-focused and logistics-focused, and Phoebe has a real talent for understanding the industry and networking, and she’s very bold.”

Sometimes life just hands you exactly what you lack when you need it. “I’ve described it before, but if the band was a hot air balloon, I’m the basket that people can stand in, and Phoebe’s the fucking propane gas, propelling it up into the air,” Macieira says. “Without Phoebe, I would just be a basket. And without me, she would just be a flappy balloon.”

“A flammable rocket going nowhere,” Lunny adds, laughing. 

That explosive urgency is revved up by producer and Gilla Band bassist Daniel Fox, becoming vital to their sound. Lunny feels the words in her bones, spitting out barbed observations and vulnerability that echo the bands that introduced her to punk as a teenager: Bikini Kill, L7, and Huggy Bear. On “Big Dick Energy,” she’s loud and matter-of-fact, skewering toxic masculinity. On “You’re Not From Around Here,” she leads listeners through the complications of gentrification. On “Bad Apple,” she rips through the verses while slamming police corruption, galvanized by the murder of Sarah Everard in 2021. Through it all, Lunny mirrors the precision and velocity of a sublime MC while Macieira fills up the low end, providing a rhythmic foundation to her fury. “I think he’s dated and an asshole, but I did listen to a lot of Eminem when I was growing up,” Lunny says. “[But] I don’t want to accredit him at all for the satirical nature of his lyricism because I think there’s also a lot of artists that do that and do it better than him.” She’d rather point to Odd Future and Ol’ Dirty Bastard, both of whom built their reputation on rowdy absurdism to offset deeper sentiments.

“Special Different,” both Lunny and Macieira’s favorite song on the LP, loses none of the intensity but turns introspective, expressing being “good in small doses.” Specifically, it unravels the experience of being neurodivergent. “[There’s] just a bit more of an earnestly emotional touch to it,” Macieira explains. “I can hear the pain in the lyrics when I listen to them, and I can feel the pain because I also relate to it so much.” It also remains vastly overlooked. The dynamics are heightened, the lyrics lack a punchline, and the parts are more challenging. “I like sad music, probably more so than angry music,” Macieira says, telling me that she listens to “more of a variation or an evolution from punk, rather than actual punk.” She gravitates toward Steve Albini bands (Shellac, Slint) and in recent years got into Fugazi, which come alive in the song.

For all its raucous brilliance, though, the duo got stuck performing a mind-numbing abundance of vocal takes while recording the album. “It drove me fucking bonkers,” Lunny admits. “I never want to do that again. Just drop me in, give me one take, and that’s that.” She approximates that they ran through each song about 20 times, much to her dismay. “I loved everything, but I think that that is something we’re going to do differently in the next album,” Macieira adds. “We’re going to take it slow vocally throughout the songs and pay more attention to detail.”

Lambrini Girls are already taking the songs on the road, playing them to packed-out rooms, and come April, they’ll bring them across North America and festivals like Punk Rock Bowling and Shaky Knees. “[Festivals are] definitely prime time to hammer in a lot of education and visibility over certain issues because that’s where you’re going to have a chance of reaching the most people who are either apathetic or unaware,” Lunny says. “It is really nice when you speak to people after shows, and they’ll be like, ‘Oh, I need to look this up’ or, ‘I didn’t think of it that way.’ And that’s the desired effect.”