Dum Dum Girls is a fuzzed-out pop band fronted by Dee Dee, the stage-name of 27-year-old, Los Angeles-based Kristin Gundred. Gundred used to front San Diego punk band Grand Ole Party, and started Dum Dum Girls as a lo-fi home-recording project. After a string of blog-friendly MP3s and obscure vinyl/cassette releases, her debut album, I Will Be, was released by Sub Pop Records in 2010. Gundred turned Dum Dum Girls into a four-piece band after recording it.

Interview: 25 March 2010

When did you first start making music?
"When I was a very small child, in pre-school and kindergarten, I used to record things. I don't really know what they were about, but those must qualify as my beginnings. I played violin in elementary school and middle school, I sang in choirs and studied voice through college. So, I had a pretty significant vocal background. When I was 20, I felt very strongly that I wanted to be in a band, but I wasn't really sure how to; I’d never been in one, I didn't play instruments. For a long time, I was pretty dependent on other people to write songs I could sing over. I had boyfriends, and I sang in bands where they wrote the songs. I picked up the drums, and played the drums for a long while. But, I only really started to write proper songs the last couple of years, when I finally picked up the guitar. It took me a while to know that I could this myself. I learned the hard and slow way."

Why do you call it 'the hard and slow way'?
"Because!

I didn't realize it on my own, and no one told me that if you want to play music in a band, just get a guitar and learn like five chords, then write a song. I don't know why, but it seemed so much more complicated than that to me."

Did you have a sound in mind?
"It was a really great day when I recorded the first song, when I got the sound. I'd just been recording things acoustically on guitar, and they were sounding like folksongs. And I didn't want to be a folk musician. When I finally figured out how to amplify everything, make it electric, it kind of dialed in the sound, and I was really thrilled. No one was listening but me, but I would spend hours every day writing and recording tons of songs. It was so much fun to me to have total control over every single aspect of it. I could lay down the drum-beat, play guitar, pile on five vocal parts. It was a glorious time-killer. I had a lot of free alone time. My husband [Brandon Welchez of Crocodiles] is also a musician, and he was on tour for about ten months of [2009]. I'm not an extrovert, I'm closer to being a hermit. I'd go to work, come home, and have nothing to do for the next eight hours. I hate feeling like I'm wasting my time, so it was important for me to figure out something to do. An outlet."

How soon did it feel like the project had an identity; that it became Dum Dum Girls?
"It really was just a month or two of recording things acoustically, with no real direction. From the day I decided to add drums, it really came together. It was so instantaneous that I then applied that formula to every other song I had in the song pile. It happened really quickly."

Did people respond to the music just as quickly?
"My memory's a little foggy about that. But, at some point I had a few songs up on Myspace, and had shared them with a few friends' bands, and maybe started reaching out to a few labels who I thought were cool. Someone at Hozac Records found me, and then Mike Sniper from Blank Dogs found me through Hozac. From there, it seemed to sort of take off in New York, where I know virtually nobody. That had a lot to do with bands over there tapping into similar influences and references. It did seem to snowball from that; soon after someone from Sub Pop found me on Myspace as well. It's the kind of weird thing you encounter in this age: every thing I’ve ever released essentially came about through a Myspace message."

How soon thereafter did you and Mike Sniper start doing the Mayfair Set? How did it feel taking this newly-found identity of yours into a collaboration?
"Mike wanted to put out an EP as the first release on his record label [Captured Tracks], which now has like 50 releases in a year. I was a big fan of Blank Dogs, and I thought it would be cool to do a collaboration. He told me it was a bad idea, because it was supposed to be my EP. In lieu of that, we just started sending songs back and forth, and we did that enough times that it warranted putting out an EP. It a collaboration completely via the internet. We met for the first time at practice, the day before we played our first show. It's very different from what I do; I would never write songs that sound like Mayfair Set."

Did you set out to make the album different to the singles?
"I did want there to be continuity, which is why Sub Pop and I decided that I'd continue to record the songs myself, and that the progress would come from having someone on board to do a great mixing job, maybe some kind of post-production. Which is essentially what Richard Gottehrer did. The fact that it was him, not some engineer, was important. I wanted to take as much advantage of his talent as I could, to go into the production of the songs as much as he could given they were already recorded. I sent him my mixes of the songs, with references, and he used that as a springboard to improve the sound on his end, focusing mainly on the vocals. That was the big progression I wanted to make: to bring them out of the murky compression that was on everything I had mixed myself."

How much is that lo-fi aesthetic part of your sound, and how much is it something you hope to escape from in future?
"I don't think I'll ever outgrow my preference for heavily-reverbed vocals, distorted guitars, and fuzz bass. They're stylistic preferences. I'm not interested in singing through a distortion pedal; I pride myself on the vocal melodies and harmonies that exist in the songs. They're things I hope to bring out, not to hide. I don't think I'll ever put out a completely 'clean' record in that sense, but I would assume that, over time, my sound is something I'll refine. I loved recording everything on my first album myself, but I look forward to making the next one more traditionally, with my band."