It’s Pinksqueeze’s world, and we’re just living in it. The queer femme indie four piece, with their endlessly catchy hooks, magnetic stage presence and reverence for gang vocals and the caps lock button, have spent the (gay) lion’s share of summer 25’ on stages in Chicago and beyond. Friends of the Roadhouse team, it’s a pleasure to catch the band in one of their rare quiet moments for photos and a quick interview. Read on for insights into Pinksqueeze’s maturing process, community in queer joy and other squeeze-isms.
Can you tell me a little bit about how Pinksqueeze came to be?
Ava: So April and I met in 2017. We just met on Chicago Exchange, the Facebook group, and we realized, we were like, whoa, we’re the same person! We always had the vision of it being a full band project that took a while to find the right members.
Can you tell us how Logan and Anna ended up coming along to the band?
Anna: I saw Ava and April play as a two piece, and I went up to them after their show and said, “do you need a bassist?”
Ava: And we said yes! <Laughs>
I met Logan through Tinder, right after the pandemic kind of, or the height of it? Logan was new to Chicago and said they were a drummer in their profile, and I smashed him up.
What was it like going from a two piece to a four piece band?
April: We were so ready.
Ava: It was so right. I remember the first time we jammed with Logan, we sent them some of our demos that just had like a garage band drummer. And the second we started playing, Logan just started playing the exact beat from the garage band demo track that we sent, and like, we all immediately clicked. What do you remember about that day?
Logan: That turned into our song U-Haul.
You know, I remember them asking me, “you’re not in five other bands,” and I was like, “no, what do you mean?” And then now I understand.
Describe Pinksqueeze’s music in one word. Just kidding, how about one phrase.
Ava: I feel like it’s gotta be, be gay, have fun! When people ask like, what genre? I’m just like, it’s gay. That’s, that’s what we want to inspire people with our music just to embrace queer joy. Um, and I think we’re hoping to expand on that in our next record with how Joy is an act of resilience and protest and how we can change the world.
You guys were one of the first bands that I found like in the scene that was just very actively just gay and I love that.
April: [That’s] why Ava and I took our time letting the project blossom into the right people. Starting as like a two piece guitar group is, I don’t know, kind of weird, but, um, it felt really, really important to us that we specifically wanted to make sapphic music, not only for what we wanted to create and put out there, but for the experience we wanted to have as a band.
Ava: Yeah. We, like, one of the first songs April and I wrote together were Straight Girl Crush. Yes. And it was like, it would be untruthful for like a cis straight man to be singing the, to be a part of making this song, you know?
Logan: I just think it’s also important to show that it’s not just men out there doing this. That there’s a lot of fems and thems and we’re out here doing this too, and we do it well too on our own.
Anna: There’s not as many non-men instrumentalists out in the scene as well, and so it’s cool to be like, we all do sing and write, but it’s not a band where the backing band are [all] dudes because they’re really good musicians. We were able to have what we’re making represent both our identity and also like, we’re all talented instrumentalists.
One of my favorite things that I’ve seen during your shows is nobody really seems to take the “front man” spot. Everyone shines. Logan in the back on the drums, like we’ll have just the spotlight on them for like an entire song. Any comments on that?
April: [It] goes along with the vision of not having a front person, we just [want to] show that we’re just a group of people, a group of close friends who are making music together and have this shared experience and we have things to say.
Ava: I think a lot of bands, it’s like really one person’s project, you know? And other people are in the band. This is all of our project, so we all have our voices in there.
Anna: That feels very rare and really special. And I’m very grateful that we have this where we’re like, yes. Also in like, all of us are so invested and, um, like all of us prioritize this project and I feel like, um, that’s a big reason why is because all of our voices are centered, which doesn’t always happen.
It’s been about two years since Be Gay, Have Fun came out.
Anna: That’s crazy.
Ava: Don’t tell us that.
Logan: We’re old!
How has the reaction been from the scene two years on?
Logan: Really positive. I mean, we won album of the year with the Chicago reader. To me, like, I don’t know, that’s just wild. That’s so cool to me. I never dreamed that something like that would happen, especially for an album called Be Gay, have Fun, you know? so that felt just like incredibly supportive and welcoming to me.
April: We just wanna portray that like, community is really important to us. Like to the point where, you know, we were involving a lot of people from the community on the album. People singing in our Pink Squeeze Tabernacle. Choir. But yeah, we never wanted to be a band that ran away from the community the first chance you get, you know, we wanted to still connect to DIY, we want to like be a part of the community and support the community as well.
Anna: We worked with really great local engineers for recording and mastering. John Micensky at Ohmstead Collective, and then Simon Small [from] Tunnel of Reverb Did the mastering. John recorded and mixed.
What do you have to say about the Chicago scene in general, like the state of it and why it’s so special?
Logan: Just thinking about some of the younger college folks that we were seeing going to a lot of our shows, and then getting to go to their release shows and hearing them say that like, “oh my gosh, we would have not been able to do this without Pinksqueeze.” Hearing that was just like, what?!? But like, we’ve been seeig them at our shows for years. And that’s what the community is about, it’s that supporting each other and being able to get inspired by the new folks coming in. I think that’s a good indicator of a good scene as well, is that it’s a cycle and you’re seeing a lot of really cool new badass bands coming in as well, and you can learn from eachother.
Ava: Yeah. I think that’s something so unique about Chicago compared to a lot of other cities is the lack of competitiveness. There’s room for everybody here, and we will all show up for each other’s shows.
Anna: I think bands show up to each other’s shows in a genuine, like, fan way. We are fans of our peers in ways that I don’t see as much in other cities and other scenes that I’ve been in. I think that people are like genuinely really excited about what’s being made around us. I think that people are like genuinely really excited about what’s being made around us. We are inspired by the people around us, and that’s a really cool place to be in. It doesn’t feel transactional. It’s very genuinely supportive.
You’ve maintained a cohesive sound and vision throughout all of your releases. How do you keep everything so unified?
Ava: The longer you’re making art and making music, and as you’re maturing as a person. As time goes on, like your art and music kind of matures with you too, and grows with you. And I think it’s like, yeah, the art expresses itself that way, but also the experience, like, you know, more about how to get that sound to like get what’s inside your head to sound like that, you know, just the experience of it.
Any favorite moments from the tour?
Ava: We were in Fort Collins some Colorado, driving between cities. It was kind of [a] late night after the show. We just slept at a gas station. We got some snacks and as we were in the gas station, I went in and the guy working at the gas station, he’s like, “Hey, you know, I gotta get rid of all these hot dogs and donuts, do you want them?” I was like, “yes.” I run back to the van and it’s like, “Guys, they’re gonna give us all the free hot dogs and donuts.” And so then we go back in, we get all the stuff, we load up. And then as we were leaving, the gas station employee goes “[Looks] like a bunch of beautiful women.” And we were like, “us?!” And then he messaged us on Facebook. And yeah, it wasn’t too creepy, but [I] somehow accidentally was recording on my phone so we have it on video.
Anna: So I feel like the opposite instance of that was Newport where we walk into a Dixie Chili in Newport, Kentucky and every single head in the restaurant turns and this old woman goes, oh my lord. Oh my Lord. We’re like, “We’re the evil gay sluts. Hello, Kentucky!”
Going back to the album, do you have a favorite Song that you wrote?
Ava: It’s like picking your favorite child, Justin. How can you ask that?
Logan: Why don’t you tell us your favorite.
Honestly, What The Fuck Is Bubblegrunge.
Ava: So,that’s a song that has become such a fan favorite, but like, we literally like just kinda had the concept and just kind of threw it together in the studio and we were like, is this bad? <laughs> It like, almost didn’t make it on the album.
Logan: I think it was our first chance at like, calling something out that we thought was dumb too. And letting us kinda be of like, “you know what, we’re just gonna talk about how this is not a real genre of music.”
Ava: But, if you like What The Fuck Is Bubble Grunge, get ready for the new album. Okay. A lot more like that.
From here then, we can go to the future. Is there anything you can tell us about the new album that’s coming out?
Ava: I think it’s the same kind of combination of all these different genres and sounds that we have been doing, but like you were saying earlier, it’s to another level. The highs are even higher, the lows are even lower. The sounds we’re exploring are.. wider.
Anna: We have it all recorded. We just need to finish mixing and mastering and figure out how we’re gonna put it out. But it exists, which is exciting.
April: We have some finishing touches to record but yeah!
Logan: I like to think of like the first album like, you know, “be gay, have fun.” The second album is like, “be gay, do crime.” It’s just, with the world that we’re living in right now, we just can’t make art without calling out [what] we’re seeing.
Ava: We had band practice after the results of the election, and we were trying to write something positive and inspirational, and it was literally like, we can’t.
We have some really cool stuff from the emotions of that time, but its still with the queer joy lens on it, and how those two can exist together.
Anna: I think Ava said this earlier but queer joy is resistance, and thats very much the lens of this form of queer joy.
I feel like queer joy is very much a brick through a window.
Ava: You haven’t even heard it yet, but that’s, that’s it.
Do you have anything else you want to say?
Ava: Sign up for the email list, Fuck Zucc.
Anna: If you wanna know the stuff you gotta know, like know when we’re releasing new music, that’ll be the best way to get that, coming right to your email inbox.
Logan: It’s important to say that, like, we wouldn’t be able to do what we do what we do without the work of all the queer and trans people that came before us. Some gave their lives and some, you know, the world that we’re seeing feels like it’s retracting a little bit, but a lot of people worked hard to give us what we have now. A lot of really cool bands that were doing really cool stuff before us, and were gonna keep doing it.
April: Fuck Trump, Free Palestine.
Logan: Yep thats right, free Congo, free Sudan.
April: And we’re playing Edgewater Music Fest.
<Group laughter>
To see the full set of images, check out our Substack.
