Beloved indie band announced it will be ‘coming to an end’ nearly a decade after they formed
Screaming Females, the beloved DIY band, is breaking up. “After 18 years we have decided Screaming Females is coming to an end,” the band announced on social media Tuesday. “A lot has changed around us over those 18 years but at our core we operated pretty much the same throughout.”
Led by singer-guitarist Marissa Paternoster (whom Rolling Stone recently named one of the greatest guitarists of all time), the band began self-releasing records in 2006. The group arose out of the hardcore and punk scene in New Brunswick, New Jersey. “The first time I went to a basement show, I had a weird panic attack,” Paternoster told Rolling Stone in 2012. “It was too much. It was like, ‘I found it! I fucking found the Holy Grail!’”
By the mid-2010s, they’d built a steady audience with releases like 2012’s Ugly and 2015’s Rose Mountain, which Rolling Stone compared approvingly to “a souped-up, punked-out station wagon.”
As the band noted in its farewell statement, Screaming Females remained a rare holdout in their commitment to a DIY ethos during an era where streaming took hold and most of the music scenes surrounding the group became increasingly corporatized. “The band has since prided itself on its DIY mindset,” Jenn Pelly wrote about the band for Rolling Stone in 2009. “They’ve spent the majority of their time as a band playing DIY shows, self-releasing albums and booking all of their own shows.”
Over its 18-year tenure, the band released eight albums, toured with everyone from Kathleen Hanna’s Julie Ruin to Waxahatchee to the Dead Weather, and fostered a legion of fans all over the world. “We tried to build and celebrate community the best we could,” the band concluded their statement.
