Introducing Nasty Cherry, The Grunge-Pop Band Of Your Teenage Dreams

The first time Gabbriette Bechtel met Charli XCX, she was dressed as a zombie, tearing out someone’s throat.

Bechtel, who was working as a model and dancer in LA, was enlisted by Charli for the video for her 2016 hit, ‘After The Afterparty‘. “You probably wouldn’t recognise me in it,” she laughs now, sitting next to her bandmate Chloe Chaidez in a bright corner of a West Hollywood Hotel. “I was just flailing about in the background.”

The zombie part may not have launched Bechtel to stardom, but it did introduce her to Charli, a meeting which would prove fruitful a few years later, when Charli invited her to join the new band she was putting together on her label Vroom Vroom Recordings. Bechtel immediately said yes, despite the fact she didn’t play an instrument, or sing.

At the same time, Charli was hitting up Chaidez, guitarist for indie outfit Kitten, asking whether she would also like to be in the group. Chaidez said yes instantly — as did London musicians Deborah Knox-Hewson and Georgia Somary.

And suddenly, with four members now tugged together from across the globe, a band called Nasty Cherry was born.

“I always wanted to put together a girl band, not really in an X Factor, pop-type way, like ‘The Runaways on Instagram in 2019’ kind of way,” Charli XCX tells Music Junkee. “I put this band together because I thought these four girls are so cool, and I would have literally died to have a girl band like that when I was growing up.

“Of course there were the Spice Girls — and amazing female artists like Britney and Christina — but there wasn’t anything for me in the left-of-centre, rock and roll trash bag space. Nasty Cherry for me are that. I wish I had them growing up.”

It was also a way for XCX to indulge her love of punk driven pop — which she had flirted with during her Sucker phase; plenty of those tracks sadly ended up on the cutting room floor.

“I didn’t quite nail it [during Sucker],” she says now. “It was cool, and the idea was there. One of the reasons it never got released was because it was never quite right, so I suppose in a way Nasty Cherry is a way for me to relive a part of that side of me, that side of my writing style with four girls who are super into that world and also write in that kind of space. I’m almost vicariously living through them, I guess.”

It’s not uncommon for bands to be thrown together by an external force — Nasty Cherry join a rich historical list featuring the likes of The Runaways and One Direction — and thanks to the modern wonders of DM slides, it’s a lot easier to forge those tentative first connections. Nevertheless, there was more than a little trepidation when they came together for their first writing sessions.

“We were talking on Skype and just messaging each other — followed each other on Instagram to see each other’s faces,” Bechtel says, dunking a tortilla chip in the bowl of guacamole that suddenly appeared on our table. “But I didn’t know anybody else. So that was a little bit scary.”

“Finding your voice in the band, who you’re going to be to the band, was the scariest part for me,” she continues. “Even just having the courage to speak up and say ‘No, I want to change that’. Having no musical background, in my head I thought ‘They’re not going to take me seriously yet, until I do something to prove my place here’. But it wasn’t like that at all.”

“That’s exactly how I felt,” Chaidez says. “We literally didn’t know each other at all.”

The group have spent the last six months deep in writing sessions (“It’s like camp,” Chaidez quips drily), throwing everything they had at the wall in the hope that something stuck.

“As far as the process goes, it’s always different,” Bechtel says. “Like sometimes, Georgia will come up with some lyrics, or Debbie starts off with a drum beat. It works best when we’re just all in the mood together, instruments in hand…shit just happens. I always have a bank of things that I’ve written down throughout the week, it always just comes together.”

The first taste of those sessions came in March with ‘Win’, a swaggering pop-punk track co-produced by Charli and Justin Raisen (Sky Ferreira, Angel Olsen).

“Chloe was on her roller skates, with the guitar in hand, and had a riff, and then just said ‘I need a win,'” Bechtel explains. “Charli said “Hey, I really like that.” So she immediately got out her phone and ten seconds later she was like ‘Let’s go in the band room.’ And then I think by the next day, we had all the lyrics rounded out.”

“‘Win’ came about through that process of the five of us all just sitting in a room and jamming,” Charli adds. “Oh god I hate that word. I can’t believe I just said jamming. Yeah, whatever. Writing. We loved the song, and it kind of just went from there really.”

The single propelled them into the tastemaker sphere of the internet — helped liberally by XCX, who for six months had been dropping cryptic hints all over her Instagram (prompting Halsey to ask: “Who the fuck are Nasty Cherry?“)

They’ve now returned with their second single, the decidedly slower and sultrier ‘What Do You Like In Me?’.

The track — this time written alongside French production trio Planet 1999 — feels like a careful and deliberate step by the band, one which suggests they are taking their time to carve out exactly where they want to sit in the music landscape.

“I would be fucking depressed if I were doing this to get on the charts,” Bechtel says. “I used to dance, and for me that was a way of expressing how I feel. Now I’ve learned this completely new way of doing that, and it’s so much more real to me. I can listen back to the songs and feel how I was feeling when I wrote them. I’m just trying to get that feeling over and over again.”

“You just can’t really plan anything,” adds Chaidez. “I was signed to Atlantic Records when I was 15, and [she snaps her fingers] I thought that was it. I thought the next day I would be Beyoncé. As Gabbriette was saying, all you can plan is just writing the next best song.”

For now, that’s what the band are focused on — that, and their debut New York City show next month. Beyond that, it’s a case of one day at a time.

“I think us just working hard and doing the best we can do is my goal, at least,” Bechtel finishes, before laughing. “I don’t care. I don’t care because I’ve never done this before.”

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‘What Do You Like In Me’ is out now through Warner Music Australia. 

Jules LeFevre is Junkee’s Music Editor. She is on Twitter.