Friendship and Underground Community - The Vovos

With a focus on creating radical inclusivity, The Vovos' commitment to the Naarm/Melbourne underground music scene is a ride-or-die relationship. Since starting in 2018 at fifteen, they have been playing their hearts out on pub and festival stages, showcasing their musical evolution.

The Vovos is a labor of love. All the members have taken on specific roles to facilitate the band's growth. 

Lu Galante, bassist of The Vovos, broke it down, "[Our] DIY ethos is we do so much of everything ourselves. In the last few years, we've slowly let other people into our little team. But we have just done so much of it ourselves. Ada makes the art for most of our merch, covers, and posters. And I literally mail you the shirts myself. Beth is there emailing people, and every single show we've done up until now [June of 2024], we have booked it ourselves [by] just [talking] to the venue. It's just taking ownership of our project, our little baby." The Vovos organized 120 shows independently and only recently hired a booker, letting one more person into their collective project.

The Vovos are an all-women and queer band local to Naarm/Melbourne, Australia; Bethany Feik, Ada Duffy, Ruby Ayliffe, and Lu Galante have been playing together since 2018. Mika James joined the band on drums during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

I sat down with Lu to learn how The Vovos' punk ethos and "often genre-less" sound formed. We also discussed how the band's longevity allows them to champion new voices in the Naarm underground music scene. 

Lu was born in Argentina and came to Naarm when she was six, "Which gives me a little bit of a different edge [from the rest of the band] in some ways." Everyone else in The Vovos is from the outer suburbs of Naarm's central business district, where Lu also grew up.

Lu's musical journey began at age five when she joined the choir. "My mum loved singing, so growing up, I was always watching her sing in choirs. And I really wanted to be in a choir because she was in a choir, obviously." 

Lu "wormed" her way into rock late and instead used to play woodwind instruments. Lu played the flute in school bands because "I thought it was a beautiful instrument. It was shiny. And I think like a little seagull, I like shiny things. And it was a beautiful sound. It was just clear and high and little. It was a very princessy kind of instrument." Lu also played saxophone for years in school bands such as jazz combos, saxophone groups, and concert bands. 

However, the community created around rock 'n' roll swept Lu into something new. Lu explained, "Truthfully, as much as I like the instruments [flute and saxophone], I liked the energy and the community of rock more. And I even like the way rock bands work. It's smaller and freer, and people are from all walks of life." 

Lu explored her interest in rock at the first-ever Girls Rock! Melbourne (now known as Amplified Victoria) in 2017. The camp aims to empower young girls, transgender and gender non-conforming individuals.

The Vovos began to form at that same camp when Lu met Ada, who's on vocals, guitar, and sometimes bass. Lu shared, "I was thirteen, and it was the first ever Girls Rock! Melbourne camp; Ada and I were put in the same band together." The camp brought together the first members of The Vovos and introduced Lu to the bass. "I had never played or even touched a bass guitar [before]." Girls Rock! Melbourne was an incredible opportunity for Lu to come into the rock community in an inclusive atmosphere. While also pushing her and Ada to make music and get on stage without worrying about being perfectionists.

The Vovos began to perform in the Naarm underground music scene once the whole band was together in 2018. It's very punk to be a group of young girls who build the confidence to perform on pub stages, sharing their thoughts, opinions, and feelings with the audience.

Unfortunately, in those early days, their audience was not the group of people they wanted to play for, and that made it quite weird for them. "It was like, these songs are not particularly for you. I'm glad you like them, but we're not really able to play to our people, our preferred audience." The Vovos would have preferred to play for teenagers, specifically teenage girls, because they were teenagers when writing those songs. However, playing in pubs in those early days, their audience was made up of adults. 

Those early years were crucial in other ways. While in high school, everyone would ride bicycles to each other's houses and hang out for hours after school. These band practices blended as a time to build their budding musicianship and hang out, becoming close friends.

These numerous afternoons and weekends laid the groundwork for their writing to have the vulnerability fans hear on The Vovos' second and outstanding album, Lilla Gubben, and for their rock shows to be fun and make the audience feel warm and fuzzy when it's over. "We just are best friends, and I think you can tell when we're on stage that we love each other," Lu emphasized.

In March 2020, a week before the world went into lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, The Vovos recorded their first album, Jana. In total DIY fashion, Adam Corcoran-Smith of PINCH POINTS, a Naarm/Melbourne-based post-punk band, recorded Jana at his house. Lu said that Jana was a "sketchbook kind of situation." The Vovos recorded everything they had written while hanging out and practicing their craft as teenagers, "popped it on a tape and called it a day."

Jana has a soothingly scratchy sound and sharp political commentary that feels like home in a punk, post-punk, and alternative rock genre landscape. The album starts with "Lost in IKEA," which explores the idea that individuals and artists are commodified by a capitalist society. In "Compromise," Lu's bass-playing creates the kind of thick bass lines that make the hairs on your arms stand up. "Compromise" is a diary-style story of a high school trip to Canberra, the Capital of Australia. The only instrument when the song starts behind Ada's vocals is the baseline, then the drums, backup vocals, and guitar riff kicks in as Ada sings, "It was so fucking boring." The song details the dull lows and anger you feel in adolescence when you're unknowingly dragged on a nauseatingly boring school trip. The song ends with a contrast to this anger, the weirdly retrospective finest you feel when the trip is over.

Now in lockdown, The Vovos had kept total control over their creative project and used the time to continue writing music. Lu put it like this, "Lots of other parts of COVID were really bad, but it was a really good creative challenge for us. We were very workaholic in our mindset. We were like, we're not taking a break. We are going to still do our Friday rehearsals just on Zoom every week, even though it makes very little sense, to be honest. We actually wrote a lot of the last album over Zoom."

Mika joined The Vovos on drums during one of Naarm's breaks from lockdown. Once lockdown began again, Mika was immediately required to attend band practice via Zoom every Friday, which, in retrospect, might have been quite an awkward request from the rest of the band. 

All the members of The Vovos were in their final years of high school during this time and hated it. To cope with their state of limbo between childhood and adulthood, coupled with the highly tumultuous state of the world, Lu explained, "Ada and I spent a ridiculous amount of time [on calls]... hours and hours every single week, and she would get her guitar out, and then I would just give her lyrics, and, we wrote like so much of the album that way. So yeah, it was a really beautiful creative time for us." The Vovos held on tight to their creative outlet to find a means of escape that many other people also created for themselves to get through those incredibly stressful and scary few years.

After spending lockdown writing all those new songs and with Mika now on drums, it was time for The Vovos to figure out where to take the project. Lilla Gubben, their sophomore album, was a true creative evolution. The band sought guidance from their manager, Hannah Crofts, whose main solo project is Baby Violet, and their producer, Jon Grace, who pushed them to rethink how they approached the project. Lu explained, "...Jon really pushed us to think of the project as one cohesive item. [To] think of every song melding into the other songs and making it a whole one product rather than lots of different bits and pieces." Since The Vovos had spent so much time writing songs during lockdown, they agreed with Jon that taking this project to a new creative level was essential. 

The Vovos decided to take the plunge and record the album in a studio. Lu explained, "Lilla Gubben was a little bit like waiting in a really long line. You start waiting in line, and you're like, this is easy and chill. Then, once you've been in the line for a bit too long, you can't quit because you've been in the line for so long. And then you have to just keep going. By the time we were thinking about recording, we spent so much effort writing the songs. We're like, let's just keep going. And then when we finish recording, we've spent so much effort and money recording these songs, let's spend all this money on the music videos and do a huge tour and do all the merch, and get a really good record label and do all these things that we might not have done because [when] you just keep going down the line, you can't stop going. You have to just keep going. 'Cause you've just sunk all this time into it already." After pouring so much love into Lilla Gubben, they had to champion their creative accomplishment. The Vovos combined their DIY ethos and knowledge of the music industry, organizing their tour and creating a DIY marketing campaign. While Blossom Rot Records put out their album so Lilla Gubben would reach more people around Australia. 

The Vovos, now totally enmeshed in the Naarm underground music scene and with two albums under their belt, are in a new chapter of their career. They also have friends who play in bands, which fosters a sense of community they did not have performing in pubs at 17. Lu explained, "I think we just feel a lot more comfortable [playing in pubs]. We have more friends in the crowd. [Many] people moved to Melbourne in their early 20s to study and work. So lots of people that arenow our best friends just weren't even in the city when we were starting to play. Now they're here, playing in their own bands, and coming to our shows, and it feels like, oh, there are people here who know us, and we know, and we love. It feels more calm and chill and more connected to the world." 

However, The Vovos also feel the challenges of social inequality in the underground scene. If one were to look around a pub on an average night in Naarm, they would not see a lot of diversity. The underground scene is very white, and depending on who's playing in the bands on a given night, the scales can tip to a majority of the crowd being male. The Vovos address this issue by centering their band as a political statement. Lu said, "Even just going on stage, and even just being in the room, we're making a statement because we're all women, we're all queer, and usually, we're the only women on the lineup. Or there's a band with one or two other women. And usually, I'm the only person of color. So, even just being there, we're already making a stance." The Vovos are moving culture forward through their involvement in the underground music scene. Since people of color, women, and the working class have historically been silenced, it's essential for the people who create a culture to come from an intersectional background because they're the ones who will make the noise that creates change.

It was political for The Vovos to get up on stage as young girls with the confidence to share their collective experience in 2018, and that inherent political statement carries on. Lu continued, "What we've got to say is important. Listen to us be sad. Often why we're sad is because men suck. Like truthfully, a lot of our emotional songs are like 'this boy was the worst.'" Women who create music also create a mechanism for a broad community to listen to what some women only feel comfortable telling their friends. It's taboo for women to explain the many ways, both physiologically and physically, men hurt them. The Vovos' expression of their experiences through music can create real cultural change, especially in an underground community.

The label punk has a few different connotations. The Vovos have struggled with being "punk enough" in an underground scene proliferating with punk bands. Lu elaborated, "We're not the most punk band in the world. We kind of write in many ways genre-less. We don't really stick to the punk genre." The diverse sound throughout their discography is excellent because fans have many options depending on their mood. 

However, this lack of consistency and the confused sense of identity that it generates was explored in their song Pink Milk, off Lilla Gubben. "[Pink Milk] is all about being women in the punk world, being told that we're not very punk, and feeling this pressure of being more, I guess, hardcore with our aesthetics and stuff. We don't really wear black; instead, we wear beautiful ball gowns and stuff like that." Lu wanted this song to be more "tongue and check" and a critique of punk being so clear cut as an aesthetic instead of the broader ethos it also holds. 

Pink Milk can also make the audience consider the differences between punk as a genre and aesthetic and punk as a community ethos. Lu explained, "There's the genre punk and lifestyle punk, and I think they're very different things. There's a sound that is punk music, and I respect that. But then there's the punk ethos, there's the punk lifestyle. Which is being political, it's being angry, it's having a point of view, it's community. It's being DIY, it's being like, fuck it all, I'm going to do my own thing. And that stuff, definitely, that's where we are. But sometimes our genre is like, we're not the most, you know, fuzzed out of the bands playing.

The Vovos punk ethos translates to a recent fundraiser they platformed for Palestinians experiencing the horrors of the ongoing genocide in Gaza and the illegal land grabs, kidnapping, and murder of Palestinians in the West Bank. The Vovos donated $500 of their earnings from an interstate show and sold old merch to encourage their community to get involved. These funds were donated to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund, and they posted the receipt on Instagram for full transparency.

Lu told me what it means to her and the rest of The Vovos to fundraise for Palestine, "It was really important to us because to not do something is like you're actively being harmful to the world. There's just no way you can ignore the problem. It's so in your face [that] people are being killed. You have to be like a dickhead to ignore that. It's an actual genocide. Yeah, it's been really great [to fundraise]. It feels good 'cause we have put in our own money and then to be like, you guys can help us put in some money and then see the community actually be like, okay, here you go." The community that punk creates becomes crucial when organizing a fundraiser or benefit concert. Often, these events contrast the mainstream's silence and complicity in mass human rights violations. 

However, the Naarm underground music community continues to have its own injustices. Privilege in race, sex, and class dictates who has the cultural capital and financial resources to pursue a career in an underground music scene. 

Lu has been thinking about these contradictions a lot lately, "Truthfully, it's a very white community, and a lot of people are middle-class born. There's just a lot of privilege that does go around the community, and there are a lot of people who kind of look the other way for some things, which is not great. I think it's important to be self-critical as well, to be like, there are problems here. And I definitely would like there to be more diversity around the community. I think we try, but we could do better. So maybe this is my call to action to Naarm. Let's work to make it better. It's something I've been thinking about recently. I sometimes look around, and I'm like, there are five people of color in this whole room, at best. And I'm the only one who's playing. It's a scary place to be working from. So, change can happen because we pushed it to have women be included." These concerns about a lack of diversity follow massive efforts to make the scene more inclusive for female musicians. The Vovos have championed these efforts by putting together diverse lineups.

Punk and the community it creates are a means of working against the capitalist system we've all been born into. Punk's ethos and the people who make it a reality step back from the competition capitalism promotes and instead work to uplift each other. Lu explained, "The way capitalism works is there's always going to be someone at the bottom of the pile. There has to be a hierarchy, and if you want to make money, live, and thrive, then you have to screw someone else over. Community is looking at me like, well, actually, I just want to help people, and I just want to make stuff with people in a way where we all are better off."  

Lu is not interested in building a career by stepping on people on the way up, even with "pillow-soled hiking boots." A community is a space to create new structures that are anti-hierarchical and don't come from that climb. It's a collective to rewire the brain. Image and create a space outside the status quo where new ideas and culture can be made. A lack of diversity can create an echo chamber, as seen in countless radical spaces throughout history. So, there is still time for the Naarm underground music scene to do the work that creates a more inclusive atmosphere by organizing diverse lineups and uplifting new voices. 

The Vovos continue to create space for new and diverse artists. Lu spoke on the importance of a lineup's makeup: "We've spent a lot of energy trying our best, specifically on lineups, to amplify lots of new voices, and our lineups are proof that you can have beautiful, diverse lineups and then also have awesome music. I always love the lineups we bring. It's the best way to open the world up. And not just play with the same two bands every time. There's enough shitty little stages we can all find a spot in the world." The Vovos use the wide-reaching platform they have developed as a band of six years to create positive change and inclusivity in the Naarm underground music scene.

Note from Sapling: This article was written by Billie Estrine, and is a repost of her original article from her zine DIY BABES. Check out the original here.

A massive thanks to Billie for being a legend for our local scene.