Zoë Dominguez
Not that long ago, there was a promising all-girl teen punk band in Nashville called Queens of Noise. The group went on indefinite hiatus in 2022 after most of the members graduated high school and went off to college. Several members continued to write and produce music on their own, including lead singer Zoë Dominguez. Now Dominguez is poised to make a different kind of noise with the release Friday of her solo debut Out the House.
Dominguez recently graduated from Rhodes College in Memphis with an English and urban studies double major. During her time there, she developed the material for the album.
“I wrote a lot of these songs my freshman and sophomore years of college,” Dominguez tells the Scene by phone from Memphis. “Then I recorded it my junior year, and it’s coming out my senior year.”
Dominguez co-produced the album with Eric Fritsch, who is the father of her Queens of Noise bandmate RobinAugust. Dominguez and her new band — lead guitarist Mason Romanak, bassist Coral Dawley and drummer Jake Sanders — recorded the basic tracks for all but one song during sessions in January 2024 and over the Easter 2024 holiday weekend at Fritsch’s Eastwood Studios in East Nashville. Then Dominguez, who played acoustic guitar and sang all the lead and backing vocals, worked on overdubs with Fritsch in July. She recorded one more song for the album — the first single, “5-10-100” — in October at the historic studio Easley McCain Recording in Memphis with co-producer Matt Qualls.
Out the House is the kind of impressive debut few artists can claim. While her punk roots can be heard on the record, particularly on “5-10-100,” Dominguez serves up a captivating sonic mix ranging from introspective folk-rock (“Writer’s Block,” “Escape Car”) to radio-friendly modern rock (“Be Your Girl,” “Worst Guy,” “Leave Me Now”). While she’s known as a lyricist, poet and dynamic frontwoman, she showcases her gift for melody on the record’s 10 tracks. Her exceptional songwriting is what makes the album special.
“I was raised on Ani DiFranco and the Indigo Girls, and I think Amy Ray is really kind of present in a lot of these tracks, especially ‘Leave Me Now,’” Dominguez says. “But also, I wanted to have Eric help out on this record because Sheryl Crow is a really big influence for me, and he has worked with her before.”
Additionally, she cites Liz Phair as an influence on the record, especially “her ability to really get to things a lot of women experience, but are not necessarily standard-like songwriting material.”
The album’s title comes from a line in “Escape Car” — “Swapping spit’s a nasty habit / At least it keeps me out the house” — but it also encapsulates the album’s larger themes. Out the House is essentially the diary of a young woman leaving home and finding her footing as a person and artist outside the safe confines of her family and her band.
While the record is primarily concerned with a number of love interests — male and female, unrequited and requited — Dominguez addresses deeper topics within that context. “Boy I’d Wanna Be” discusses gender identity, “Skeleton Girl” looks at anorexia, and “5-10-100” takes aim at the objectification of women. Despite intentionally going beyond her punk roots on the album, Dominguez acknowledges their inescapable presence.
“Obviously, I was in Queens of Noise, so I’m gonna be influenced by some of that riot grrrl stuff. I was trying to go in a different direction for some of the songs, but then eventually I realized that I missed it.”
