Thunder Queens Are More Punk Than You
The London, Ontario trio capture teenage restlessness in real time on Deep Below.
By Kenna Clifford
- Published on
It’s true, I think, or at least feels true to my experience while growing up and out of the suburbs, that young girls would be the bastions of unrest and cultural upheaval long before the empire. After all, if hell is a teenage girl, then rock music must be the salve; if they don’t listen when you sing at them, pretty soon you start to scream.
That Thunder Queens is still in high school is a hard point to avoid talking about, despite the knowledge that I’d have hated it at 16 to be introduced by age-number rather than track. Understandably so—above and beyond being very talented writers and musicians in their own right, Lola, Violet and Clara are making music together that feels fully realized and plainly good.
Their new LP Deep Below doesn’t try to hide the restlessness of early-selfhood or cleanly summarize it, and instead finds the beauty in its overtures. Songs like “Teenage Years” and “Birds On A Wire” lean against the dire and uncomfortable truths of self-becoming that are made in the wakes of stone skips and riding your bike into oblivion; skinning your knees on the pavement and learning the curves of your own container. Deep Below is a capsule of all this; the levity and pain realized without being an afterimage, or written under the guise of hindsight.
It’s a rare and exciting thing to see a project spearheaded by young people take off with the kind of velocity and support that Thunder Queens has, too. The trio’s artistry has garnered support from Tegan and Sara, The Beaches and Smashing Pumpkins producer Dave Schiffman, with whom Deep Below was produced and mixed. Their success is well deserved. Thunder Queens are very cool.
When I get on call, Lola, Clara and Violet are each sitting in different parts of their family homes: a bedroom, an office, on the floor in front of the couch, comfortably. Though they aren’t located in the same rooms, I can immediately see them looking between each other to fill in the blanks as I ask questions. There’s a felt sense of genuine confidence and ease the three have in talking about their project, which makes sense considering they’ve worked together for the better part of seven years.
“It feels really good [to release new music]. I think all of us are really, really happy with how the album turned out,” Lola says with a sense of pride. “It’s been a long time since we put out new music, so I think we’re all really excited to be playing our more current stuff.”
Start to finish, making Deep Below actually only took three months. The album is made to be listened to front to back, they tell me, as an homage to some of those earlier records that inspire them. Violet explains that as they move into these new stages of life, they wanted to have a project that felt more aptly suited to who they’ve become. Deep Below consists of songs made specifically for the completion of the album, as well as pieces that have been in rotation at their live shows in the years since their first album.
Still, the beating heart of the project remains their live shows and the collaborative effort of being in a room together, sharing the load of writing. The three work across the album’s tracks like a well-oiled machine, harmonizing and lapping over each other with a relentless precision and restlessness that feels apt to its subject matter. They each take turns writing and singing; even Lola’s extremely technically intense drumming is done simultaneously while she’s doing vocals. They move with a precision and onstage psychic connection that comes from growing up together, knowing each other in the weeds.
“That’s why it was so important for us to record this album almost so quickly,” Violet notes plainly. “Because the last time we put out an album, it was Strike 1 and that was recorded in 2022. I was 12.”
Thunder Queens was realized at London Girls Rock Camp when Lola and Violet were nine years old. They started playing together and found the band name through pinning together a collection of words visible on a wall littered with peeling stickers. Clara, a school friend, joined shortly after.
“It was an immediate click and it evolved our sound almost immediately,” Lola recalls. “Not to be cheesy, but it really was the last piece. I could see how the band could get better just by having another person to be able to bounce ideas off of.”
Though many of their earlier inspirations like Donna Summer and Ziggy Stardust—albums found in regular rotation on their families’ record players—remain important touchstones in their work, their sound needed to grow and evolve. As a project that’s been in the works for the vast majority of each member’s life, it makes sense that they’ve done a lot of skin shedding in that time. The difference in perspective between 12 and 17 is felt in the sharpness of their lyricism and the cumulative energy of their new work.
“Having to plan for the future and sort of knowing that you have to let go of certain things—whether you’re okay with it or not—is a huge theme [in our lives], especially in the next few years,” Lola tells me. “That was definitely a big theme throughout all of the songs too.”
It’s hard to imagine having this kind of exposure while still getting your legs, to have music journalists and listeners look at the discography you started as a child with the same kind of critical eye as someone whose first album was released at 35. As someone who grew up writing, this is a story I know well—just because you have access to the rooms doesn’t always mean you’ll be taken seriously in them.
“Now that we’re a little older we are taken more seriously, and we’re grateful for that,” Violet explains. “But being young people—especially young women in music—there’s always going to be that sort of underlying stigma against us, people being like, ‘Oh, those are just these little girls, they’re just singing their little songs.’ But I think, especially now and with our new album, we’re taking our live shows even more seriously. And that’s something that you can do regardless of your age.”
On their Instagram, the three post videos of them doing sweet, normal high school things. Going to the fairgrounds and trying all the weird fair food; playing cornhole; making silly TikToks while they’re practicing to promote their tour. The things that make up the lyrics of their album. It’s nice to see, considering how much work it evidently takes to balance being a signed band with the normal day-to-day stuff.
“We want more young people to be at shows and we want to have our younger fans at our shows,” Lola notes. A lot of their shows have been at 19+ venues, which they’ve had to immediately leave after playing. “We think it’s important to show younger people live music and for people to come out to live shows; it’s a really important part of the music community and how you become a part of it.”
It’s easy to look at a project like Thunder Queens from the outside—as much as it is other projects made by young people—and imagine these girls to be savants, plucked from primordial suburb obscurity and into the limelight as a direct result of their musical families and their special, natural predisposition to music.
This might be true in some ways; they are very good at what they do. But the truth is they exude the same kind of precision that’s honed by any band that’s played together for seven years, and who have been provided the tools and time to cultivate their practice.
The difference between Thunder Queens and other bands of similar age and talent is simply that they’ve been given the resources and found a community which has propped up their work. It begs the question of possibility for other young women making music: how much incredible work could exist in the world where lack of access is no longer a question?
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