“I’m always on a sad-song kick,” says Julia Shapiro, singer of Seattle lo-fi pop band Chastity Belt. “Just in general, I don’t really like happy music that much. I like to listen to music to make me feel something, and if I’m listening to an upbeat song, like, that’s fun and all, and I can dance to it, but when I’m alone and I’m just trying to listen to a song and I want it to be emotional, usually that means sad.”
That might seem surprising if you know only the band’s early work. Chastity Belt introduced themselves to the world in 2013 with a promo pic that immediately had people talking. In the photo, Shapiro stands confidently in the center of the frame, with her bandmates Gretchen Grimm, Lydia Lund and Annie Truscott at her side. They’re all wearing cute spring dresses, looking like a group of polished backup singers you’d expect to see behind Lana Del Rey. Shapiro, staring directly into the camera with a “Goddamn right, we’re doing this” grin, is lifting the front of her pink dress to reveal the band’s namesake: a chastity belt, fashioned out of chain, a padlock and raw steak.
“We got a lot of really strong reactions,” Shapiro told Seattle radio station KEXP in 2014. “I guess a lot of people either love it or are disgusted. I just think it’s funny.”
Chastity Belt’s debut album, No Regerts, echoes that carefree attitude. Over surf-tinged, guitar-driven pop tracks, Shapiro sings chill lyrics about dreaming of being a giant vagina and seeing a drunk friend’s nip slip. No Regerts, paired with that hilarious band photo, had just enough earnest moments to keep Chastity Belt out of “joke band” status, but they walked a fine line.
More sincerity started peeking out on 2015’s Time to Go Home, but the band has jumped head-first into heart-on-sleeve territory with their latest release. Last year’s I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone is a collection of haunting and haunted songs about some of life’s more uncomfortable emotions, all wrapped in the band’s signature pop jangle.
In “This Time of Night,” Shapiro sings: “Fucked up, anxious / Full of fear / How, how did I get here?” over restless guitar lines. In “Complain,” she recalls a bad night when nothing goes right: “I just fall on my face when I’m trying to have fun / Do you ever dream about what it’s like to give up?”
It’s a remarkable shift from the old Chastity Belt, as well as Shapiro’s work outside the band. Her numerous side projects include Childbirth, whose songs include “I Only Fucked You as a Joke” and “How Do Girls Even Do It?,” the latter of which was inspired by dumb guys who have to ask how lesbian sex works.
“I get all of my jokey-ness out with those bands,” Shapiro says. “[Chastity Belt] tours a lot, and we’re playing the same songs every night — it doesn’t feel great to be playing joke songs over and over again. It’s like they lose their humor after a while.”
But even with a more earnest approach to their music, Chastity Belt isn’t against goofing around.
The rest of the band and director Bobby McHugh were game for Shapiro’s hilarious idea for the video for “Different Now,” the first single from I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone. It’s a lighthearted homage to Temple of the Dog’s ultra-serious “Hunger Strike.” In it, Chastity Belt horses around at Discovery Park in Seattle, visiting the same spots where Chris Cornell & Co. filmed in 1991.
“My favorite part of [the ‘Hunger Strike’ video] is Eddie Vedder in the tall grass,” Shapiro says with a laugh. “I just love the tall-grass scenes. Those are really good. After filming that, it was like, ‘God, I wonder if they were as uncomfortable as we were?’ It was so cold when we did it. It was freezing.”
