Decades from now, critics will look back on Spite Will Save Me – the second full-length effort from Melbourne-based “bubblegum punk” duo Cry Club – as a touchstone of queer and trans culture in the early 2020s.
From the moment you look at the cover art, you’ll notice a bold shift in tone from Cry Club’s 2020 debut, God I’m Such A Mess. While that record stood out on shelves for its (intentionally) gaudy clash of brash theatricality and piercing lime green, the Spite Will Save Me sleeve shows Cry Club as brooding demons: guitarist Jonathan ‘Jono’ Tooke lords over singer Heather Riley – blood seeping down his cheeks, antlers primed for warfare – while Heather stands under him with their tongue stuck out and a teacup raised, thirsting for his tears.
Sonically, it’s loud, raw, angry and driving, brimming with as much venomous snark and nascent rage as dizzying colour and whimsy – a sharp left turn from the glittery pop-rock of its predecessor. In that respect, Spite Will Save Me is ambitious and exciting, but also tangibly momentous; with the mainstream war against trans and queer rights ever raging on, Heather and Jono are fighting back with their rallying cries of resistance, empowerment and liberation.
Sweet, Sweet Spite
At the heart of Spite Will Save Me is its lead single, ‘People Like Me’, a snarling anthem about the radical act of simply existing as a trans person, taking the power back from bigots by refusing to cower in their shadows or submit to their brittle and archaic binary. Heather says this is where the album’s core narrative comes from: a concerted effort to “create a space that’s not just about accepting yourself, but embracing the fact that other people will not be able to change who you are – that by force, we will make sure we are free to live openly as our true selves”.
It’s rooted in a deep, almost instinctive frustration, which most queer people will instantly relate to. As Heather explains, “So much of being queer and trans is about being made to feel shame, and it’s exhausting. I’ve been made to feel bad about almost every part of myself – especially the queer and trans parts – and I think that’s just a running theme in the community.”
So much of one’s formative queer/trans activism often hinges on efforts to appeal to our oppressors’ humanity – to somehow persuade them that we’re deserving of basic human decency because we are, in fact, humans. But there’s a reason most older activists don’t bother fighting these battles. “I just got so sick of trying to convince everyone that we’re good people,” Heather says. “There’s no point in being all like, ‘Pwease don’t be twansphobic! uwu!’
“There’s a huge amount of pressure placed on trans people to look good so the cis people in power won’t look down on us. But it doesn’t fucking matter – they’re going to look down on us no matter how perfect we look or how pure we are. And if it doesn’t matter, then I’m just going to let people hate me. It takes up so much energy to be nice, and we get nothing out of it in the end – so what do we have to lose by being mean?”
“And you know, people hate being made to feel stupid. Calling out white supremacists for being white supremacists, they don’t care – they’re just like, ‘Yeah, I’m racist, whatever.’ But making them feel like idiots? Or egging them on a bit, like, ‘Oh, I’m so sowwy, does dis upset you? Does my wittle jester hat make you wanna punch me?’ It’s like a drunk-on-power moment. As soon as we let ourselves go from the weight of being responsible for my humanity – to project a perfect message or be perfectly aspirational… It’s so freeing!”
That freedom is exactly what Heather and Jono capture on Spite Will Save Me. It’s in the title – “spite” as a tool for survival; a coping mechanism; a weapon to fight back with. Being visibly trans amid the current political landscape is audacious. Going virtually anywhere in public invites sneers and looks of judgement – it’s more surprising when days out don’t involve copping at least a few microaggressions. And when you live in a world where every casual trip to the shops can be a life-or-death situation, spite really does come in clutch. To survive, you need to adopt the mindset that you’re living authentically not despite your oppressors’ opinions, but in spite of them.
“It’s armour,” Heather avows. “People are going to find reasons to push you down and hate you for who you are, no matter how nice you are. So it’s like, ‘Well, I might as well be completely unapproachable.’
“I had to shave my head for a second-year show I did in uni [sidenote: Heather studied a bachelor’s degree in performance] and it was like doing a speedrun of queer gender presentation. It was so wild – people really just want to start shit with you when you look differently. And I think they’re just used to always getting away with it, so being bitten back isn’t something they ever expect. You can do a lot by… Not inviting that kind of reaction from people, but just being like, ‘I fucking dare you to project your rancid vibes on me.”
The Making (And Breaking) Of Heather Riley
Heather knew they were queer from “around ten or 11 years old”, and growing up, they pined for the kind of bold and defiant queer representation they and Jono offer their fans today. “I think part of the reason I was so obsessed with My Chemical Romance was the way Gerard openly played with queerness,” they beam. “It never felt like a punchline. The way he would interact with Frank onstage, I was very much like, ‘Oh my God, they’re in love! They’re gay!” And obviously it’s all an act, but like, I cannot tell you how obsessed I was with finding any sort of queer media to connect with.”
“I would wake up at 4am to watch this American soap opera called As The World Turns because there were queer characters in it, and I wanted to watch it live with all the other people in their LiveJournals… Yeah, how much did I just age myself? It was like the only places you could get [positive queer representation] were either trashy soap operas or LiveJournal. I was always on LiveJournal, writing prompts and stuff, just desperate to see queer people, because it felt so inaccessible to me in real life.”
Heather notes that queerness wasn’t entirely elusive – “we did musical theatre,” they quip, “so my parents had so many openly gay friends” – but growing up in Western Sydney, where being loud and proud about your queerness in public would be a veritable deathwish, they felt isolated. Things only got worse for Heather in high school, when their PDHPE teacher sparked a lesbian witch hunt. “We did the sex ed thing,” they say, “and our teacher was like, ‘On average, ten percent of the population is gay, and there’s 30 people in this class, so mathematically speaking, there’ll be three of you who are gay.’”
“That’s probably the worst possible thing you could say to a group of Year Seven girls. It just started this cycle of girls being like, ‘Stop looking at me, dyke! Is it you!? Who’s the lesbo!?’ So I was getting changed for sport in the toilet cubicle the entire way through high school, because I was just terrified of being caught out.”
That experience planted the seed for what eventually grew into ‘A Bit Of Hell’, the chaotic, math rock-infused second track on Spite Will Save Me, which saw Riley seek to answer the question, “What if instead of being scared about my queerness, I had just been proud of it?”
But fear is understandable. As the frontperson of Cry Club, Heather embraces their role as “the queer villain”, snappy and snarky and truly unfuckwithable – the human embodiment of a Sky News presenter’s worst nightmares – but away from the spotlights, the make-up and Jono’s impassioned riffage, they admit they’re “so scared”.
Fiddling with the paper straw in their iced latte, they open up: “On a general level, I have anxiety – diagnosed social anxiety, specifically which is so funny; you look at me onstage and it’s like, ‘That!? Social anxiety!?’ But as a person, yeah, I am absolutely scared – all the time. I’m scared for myself. I’m scared for my friends. I’m scared that I can’t do enough for people, that I can’t protect my friends or be there for them as much as I want to be… It’s endless scenarios of ‘what if’s and the worst-case outcomes.”
As a trans person, it’s hard not to feel scared right now. Things are dire. On Sunday March 18, 2023, notorious TERF Posie Parker held an anti-trans rights rally outside Parliament House in Naarm. A group of self-avowed neo-Nazis showed up to support Parker and her deplorable cronies, and of course, they were met with open arms.
VicPol officers swarmed the scene, but they didn’t protect the nonviolent trans rights activists that showed up to protest the rally – instead, some of those activists were beaten, thrown around and pepper-sprayed by police, who appeared to forcibly target anyone visibly queer while shielding the neo-Nazis from harm. Those neo-Nazis threw Sieg Heil salutes on the steps of Parliament House without an inkling of consequence.
Seeing the events unfold online, Heather says, “My heart sank. It was dread. Sheer dread. It felt like something changed in that moment, you know? Like, ‘We can’t really bounce back from this.’ When people feel emboldened to show up somewhere and be like, ‘Nyeh, we’re Nazis’ – when those people feel like they can come out and do that shit in public – that’s it. We got the bad ending, man. Can we go back to the start of this little visual novel and try again!? But it lit a fire inside me as well – real ‘doomsday clock countdown’ kinda vibes.”
‘People Like Me’ was written some three years before that incident – a landmark moment in Australia’s fight for trans rights, for all the wrong reasons – and yet suddenly it was more relevant than ever. “We write songs based on what’s happening in the present,” Heather says, “and I’d fully assumed that by the time ‘People Like Me’ came out, it wouldn’t be relevant anymore.
“I was like, ‘It’s probably not gonna hit as hard as it does now, but it’ll still be fun when we get people in the room and we’re all singing!’ But the way things have gone down since then… Things are so much worse than I thought they’d get when we wrote it – they’re even worse now than they were when we released it – it’s like the song just keeps getting more and more relevant… Which is scary.”
Cry Club Vs. The World
Heather and Jono are no strangers to the art of protest music: their very first release, 2018 single ‘Walk Away’, was about the fight for the legalisation of same-sex marriage – a fight Australians only won in December of 2017. Considering it took so long for something as basic as that to be enshrined in law, Heather isn’t optimistic that anti-trans rhetoric will fizzle out from the mainstream anytime soon. “It’s harder to feel hopeful as time goes on,” they say pensively. “We [as trans people] are instinctively valued less by a lot of people, so we’re always last to be thought of [in political movements].”
Heather reckons that if anything could spark a chain of events to bring the trans rights movement to the mainstream, it would “probably be another Stonewall”. They explain: “I don’t think things will change without people doing… Illegal activities. There has to be a revolution, you know? We need to make people know they can’t do anything about us. We’re not going away. It’s not that trans people are more or less prevalent than we were hundreds of years ago, it’s that we now have the power to connect with each other, and we have the language to explain what’s going on with ourselves.”
“The eradication of shame has to play a huge part in it. There’s always this trope of homophobes being secretly queer – that their shame stops them from expressing who they are, because it comes from this deep-seated place within them. So there needs to be this absolutely defiant love for our community and ourselves, stepping up and protecting people who are vulnerable in our community, and using our voices to speak up when people are made to feel unsafe.”
The idea of being a “queer icon” makes Heather feel “a little impostor syndrome-y”, but they’re proud to be the role model they so desperately yearned for as a young queer. “If the songs inspire bravery in people and make them feel welcomed and accepted,” they say, “then that’s gorgeous.”
In allowing that to happen, Heather says, Cry Club’s songs are instantly and infinitely malleable. ‘Somehow (You Still Get To Me)’ is a great example, particularly as Heather sings in the chorus: “I’m so sick of yearning, don’t deserve this/I want you to know I just can’t let go.” There are multiple ways you could parse this, the most obvious being with the perspective from which Heather wrote it – the time-honoured trope of two queer people oblivious to their mutual want for each other.
But in keeping with the album’s overarching anti-TERF narrative, you could also read ‘Somehow’ as a comment on the ways being trans in a cis world slowly eats away at your self esteem: the narrator is “so sick of yearning” for acceptance from the cis people in their lives, and they know they “don’t deserve” the transphobia they constantly face – and even though they know they should, they “just can’t let go” of the innate need to feel accepted. That’s not how Heather intended the song to be analysed – however they openly welcome such drastic reinterpretations of their text.
“The most valuable thing I learned in acting school,” they say, “was Roland Barthes’ whole Death Of The Author approach to art, which is that as soon as you publish a piece of art, it’s in the hands of the audience. There is no definitive authority on what it means – every interpretation is the right interpretation. And I’m a very big believer in that. Someone recently asked me if ‘Nine Of Swords’ was about migraines, and I was like, ‘Well, it is now!’ Every song we write is in the hands of the people who listen to it, and that’s more important to me than whatever the song means for itself – the lyrics are just a vehicle to deliver the emotion, you know?”
It all comes down to Heather and Jono being driven by the community they’ve fostered over the past five years of performing as Cry Club. It’s that which emboldened them to make Spite Will Save Me this raucous and defiant soundtrack to the revolution. It’s that which emboldened them to make their second album so much heavier and more aggressive than the first – to transcend the boundaries of pop and fully embrace this concept of “bubblegum punk”.
And if Heather has any say in the matter, this is just the beginning. “I have a hunger,” they say, one eye twitching as they clench their fists determinedly. “I have this insatiable hunger, like really deep inside me – this drive to do this for as long as I can, wherever I can, until I keel over and die onstage.”
…What were we saying earlier about brash theatricality?
Cry Club’s new album Spite Will Save Me is out now.
Ellie Robinson (she/her) is a music and pop-culture writer based in Naarm/Melbourne. She’s on Twitter as @ellierobins_etc and Instagram as @ellierobinsonwrites.