Singer-songwriter-guitarist RobinAugust is running late for her interview. Her coffee maker died an untimely death, and she needs to grab a latte from the neighborhood coffeehouse before jumping on the phone with the Scene. It’s early in the morning in Los Angeles, where the onetime riot grrrl has been living for the past year, and she wants to be properly caffeinated before discussing her new single “Parasite” and her upcoming mini tour to support it.
“This is what I’m supposed to sip during the interview,” RobinAugust says with a laugh, latte in hand.
“Parasite” is the fourth single she has released for L.A.-based Position Music. Co-written with Emma Ruchefsky, it’s a sophisticated slice of pop-rock that speaks to the Nashville native’s growth as an artist and writer since her days as founder and co-leader of the all-girl teen punk band Queens of Noise. That band began as a Runaways tribute group, but soon evolved beyond that to write their own punk-influenced material. They released an EP Loretta in 2019 and a couple of singles, including “Up Against the Wall” on Ben Blackwell’s Cass Records in 2020.
Catching up with the Queens of Noise co-founder ahead of the release party for her solo album Avocado Head at Eastside Bowl
After high school, the group went on hiatus, and RobinAugust moved to Boston to attend Berklee College of Music and study songwriting. During that time, she began to move in more of a pop-rock direction, which led to the release of her acclaimed debut album Avocado Head in 2022. Avocado Head was a concept album about the end of a high school romance that not only showed her prowess as a vocalist, but also her gifts for melody and arranging.
She left Berklee after two years and returned to Nashville, where she continued to work on her songwriting. During that time, one of her best friends at Berklee, Violet Lewis, became an A&R exec at Position Music.
“Violet and I met at this event called Career Jam at Berklee,” RobinAugust recalls. “She watched an A&R [executive] speak and thought, ‘That’s what I wanna do,’ and then quite literally turned the corner and met me. We became best friends, and she became head of the A&R club at Berklee. After she graduated, she started working for Position, and I was the first artist she signed. She really championed me.”
Her first single for Position was “Bad Idea,” which the company released in October.
“‘Bad Idea’ captures the impulsive, nagging, ‘fuck it’ feeling you get when haunted by the ghost of your ex,” she explains. “At the time, I was desperate to do literally anything to stop thinking about him. It’s messy, loud and reckless — just like I was when I wrote it.”
She followed “Bad Idea” with “Slipping Away” in December and “Hospital Bed” in January. “Parasite” will hit streaming services May 27. She explains that the song is “kind of like a summary of all of my insecurities,” written during one of her first writing sessions in L.A. She was literally having an anxiety attack during the session and had to step outside to call her therapist.
“It’s about relationships,” she says. “I was losing my mind that day. I was just crying so much. I was really going through it while I was in the session with people who were, at the time, strangers. I was panicking that, because I was so anxious and sad all the time, I didn’t deserve love or that I was going to be left by the people that I wanted the most.”
RobinAugust — whose merch once included a T-shirt that read “Too Loud for the Quiet” — may be intense, but her intensity fuels her artistry. Her feelings run deep. The song starts sparsely with vocal and guitar, then builds to a full-blown arrangement. The chorus is a metaphor for her anxiety: “I’m a pill that won’t go down / Swallow me whole, then spit on the ground / I’m a pill that won’t go down / I wanna be wrong, can we turn this around.”
“The chorus is me having a panic attack about being not lovable because I’m so emotional,” she says. “I was genuinely having those emotions while singing it.”
The East Room’s NYE celebration with rockers, popsters, rappers and more offered a promising start to the new year
RobinAugust and her Nashville-based band — guitarist Lucas Johnstone, bassist Sam Johnstone and drummer Grifin DiNardo — will celebrate “Parasite” with a headlining show in The ’58 at Eastside Bowl on release day. It’s the first of a four-show mini tour that will take her to New York City, Columbus, Ohio, and back to L.A.
“Columbus is so random, but that’s where my family is,” says RobinAugust, “and we were like, ‘May as well, while we’re on our way [to New York].’”
Fans can expect to hear a lot of her new material at the show on the 27th. Her set list will include a couple of songs from Avocado Head, and she’ll be performing “Parasite” and “Bad Idea.” The remainder of the set will feature unreleased material, some of which will appear on an EP that Position Music plans to release later this year.
