Why Dum Dum Girls Mattered: I Will Be Turns 10
At the start of the last decade, music was only getting harder to define. Bright and brash electro-pop and hip hop were dominating the mainstream radio charts, and indie bands began toeing the line between music blog acclaim and mainstream attention. Most of the biggest indie bands at the time, the Grizzly Bears and Nationals and the Vampire Weekends of the sort, were packing their albums with lush instrumentations and chamber orchestration. The industry across the board was obsessed with excess.
In response to all the extra sounds tacked on, the underground-underground (since Vampire Weekend was packing arenas and still considered “indie”) rebelled under the guise of “chillwave.” Slacker chic became very in vogue at the start of the decade, as people try their damndest to look as if they didn’t give a damn at all. The aural component of this trend was signified by the low fidelity punk bands that began to rose to prominence in the blogosphere; fuzzy guitars, buzzy vocals and bass layered with reverb, and Phil Spector style harmonies that become equally sweet, dreamy, and disorienting.
Chillwave was adopted by a variety of bands in a plethora of different genres. Punk leaning bands like Wavves and Vivian Girls to C-86 style indie pop in the form of Crocodiles (also husband of DDG Kristin Gundrend) and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, even electronic acts like Washed Out were bolstered by the trend on early music blog sites. By 2009, southern California songwriter Kristin Gundred adopted the name Dee Dee for her solo project Dum Dum Girls, a reference to both Iggy Pop and The Vaselines, as a vehicle to write her own songs and teach herself guitar. She gained early attention due to her noisy debut EP and singles released on burgeoning labels like HoZac and Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks- the labels first release was her debut EP, but by 2010, it all began to snowball.
The band, still just one sole member, signed to the indie legacy label Sub Pop, enlisted the help of three other girls to fill in the space as well as the legendary songwriter Richard Gottehrer, co-writer of the eternal classic “My Boyfriend’s Back” and producer of seminal albums by the likes of The Go-Go’s and Blondie. While bands across the genre from Best Coast to Wavves were lending from the sounds of ’60s Brill Building girl groups, Dum Dum Girls had an artifact from the era, helping them become an icon of early ’10s indie rock, and Dee Dee a poster child for a new music cover star.
Released on March 30 2010, Dum Dum Girls’ debut album I Will Be unknowingly set the vibe for what would become the sound of the summer as chillwave’s buzzy guitar became synonymous with a heavy summer haze. Led by the single “Jail La La,” the band ripped off layers of noise to expose Gundred’s knack for writing simple melodies that became incessant ear worms. No longer just a lo-fi band, the song became a concept track based off of the Italian prison film 99 Wives, but Dee Dee’s delivery had listeners believe she spent the night in a foreign jail cell, “covered in shit and high as a kite.” The anxiety is palpable from the first lines, “How did I get here, I do not know. I just woke up at this strange show.” The song disorients listeners with a driving, tinny drum machine and rounds of la-la-las to round out chorus, and rarely relents across the album’s ten tracks.
Equally inspired by girl groups icons such as the Shangri-La’s as well as original punk rockers like the Ramones, Dum Dum Girls became originators of the vintage sound and aesthetic before hipster enclaves across the country ran rampant with imitations. With the help of Gottehrer, the band had an added sense of authority and credibility to the trend. The band leaned fully into all of it’s inspirations and melded them together in perfect harmony. Heavier, noisier songs including “Oh Mein M,” sung entirely in German, to the album opener “It Only Takes One Night” aspire to get listeners lost in it’s buzzing guitar riffs and dreamy, smoky daze. Those songs are played off with sweet and slow love songs that still charge with anxious energy. “Rest of Our Lives” sounds like a slurred drunk confession of a love that hasn’t faded (“Your eyes consume me, they always have,”) but still teters on the brink of demise (“Still savor each day you’re mine.) “Blank Girl” sounds more romantic with its boy-girl trade-off in the vocals, and the closing track “Baby Don’t Go” turns a Sonny & Cher cover into a modern love tragedy.
Perhaps even more influential than the band’s songwriting is Gundred’s unrelenting commitment to her aesthetic. Adorned in a black bob, leather jacket and cherry red lipstick, the character of Dee Dee took on an effortless cool reimagining the ’60s girl gang image with ’70s punk and ’80s goth fashion. Clothed like Ronnie Spector meets Siouxsie Sioux, with a cool, commanding don’t-fuck-with-me stage presence and smooth contralto recalling Chrissie Hynde, Dee Dee became an inspiration for goth-afflicted indie girls and punk rockers with a bit more class as she became a cover star for music and fashion magazine layouts. I still can see her influence on modern trends in music and fashion today. Collaborator of the band, Sune Rose Wagner of the Raveonettes, summed up their appeal, “Dark, sexy, dangerous, yet delicate and refined–everything you want from a rock ‘n roll band.”
As the band grew in notoriety, Dee Dee’s backing band steadily took more control in the band’s later releases as they grew more harder into their goth inclinations on later releases, all done with the help of Gottehrer, but their debut managed to capture the energy and aesthetic that people would be coping for year after its release. Gundred reinvented herself in 2016 as Kristin Kontrol, adopting a more synth-pop sound that she couldn’t explore with her original band, but it was I Will Be that made her an early icon for 2010s indie rock. Even if based in music from 50 years prior, the band could not have come up in any other time.
