There’s an unbreakable bond that comes with playing music with another person from a very young age. This is definitely the case with Skating Polly’s Kelli Mayo and Peyton Bighorse, who have been playing together for the better part of a decade, starting when Mayo was nine and Bighorse was fourteen. “My dad has had so many instruments in the house for as long as I’ve been alive,” Mayo told me over the phone. “Me and Peyton bonded over music. That was the cornerstone of our friendship. So we started playing around with the instruments in our house whenever our parents got together. Then one day, we were like, ‘we should start a band. Why not?’ So we just went for it.”
Hailing from Oklahoma by way of Tacoma, Washington, Skating Polly primarily takes influence from late-’90s female-fronted grunge acts like Veruca Salt, The Breeders, L7 and Babes In Toyland. However, their wide-ranging listening habits allow them to synthesize many sounds into their music, giving them an incredible breadth of sounds, both sonically and lyrically. “We love changing as much as possible,” Mayo told me. “We don’t like writing two songs that sound alike. I guess the best way to go about that is by listening to a bunch of artists.”
Skating Polly is gearing up to release their new EP New Trick, which actually saw Mayo and Bighorse working with some of the women who made the band possible in the first place: Nina Gordon and Louise Post of Veruca Salt. The three-song EP is without a doubt the group’s most defined work, with Post and Gordon’s grungy influence and mastery of powerful vocal harmonies becoming prominent cornerstones of the new Skating Polly sound. “They are so incredibly at harmonies,” said Mayo. “I didn’t think harmonies were that important until we worked with them, and I didn’t realize how much you could move a song with harmonies.”
The band has already released the haunting video for “Hail Mary,” the EP’s second track, and we are happy to be premiering a video the EP’s opening number “Louder in Outer Space.” The video features the band — which now includes the recent addition of Mayo’s brother Kurtis on drums — performing the uplifting at what appears to be a school dance. Check out the video above.
New Trick is out April 28th on El Camino Media. Pre-order it here and check out all the places you can catch the trio on tour below.
04/29 — Portland, OR @ Music Millennium
05/11 — Minneapolis, MN @ 7th Street Entry
05/12 — Greenbay, WI @ Lyric Room
05/13 — Chicago, IL @ Subterranean (downstairs)
05/14 — Detroit, MI @ Magic Stick
05/15 — Cleveland, OH @ Grog Shop
05/16 — Pittsburg, PA @ Smiling Moose
05/17 — Brooklyn, NY @ Saint Vitus
05/19 — Montreal, QC @ Pouzza Fest
05/20 — Philadelphia, PA @ Kung Fu Necktie
05/21 — Washington, DC @ DC9
05/22 — Columbus, OH @ Rumba Cafe
05/24 — St. Louis, MO @ Ready Room
05/25 — Lawrence, KS @ Bottleneck
05/26 — Norman, OK @ Opolis
06/03 — Mesa, AZ @ The Underground at the Nile
06/04 — Prescott Valley, AZ @ The Shop
06/06 — San Diego, CA @ Casbah
06/07 — Los Angeles, CA @ Bootleg Theater
06/08 — Santa Ana, CA @ Constellation Room
06/10 — San Francisco, CA @ Thee Parkside
08/26 — San Bernardino, CA @ It’s Not Dead Fest
