CAT VALLEY
From left to right: Kristen Stanovich, Melanie Sehman, Whitney Flinn, Abby Hegge. (All photos by Rachel Bennett.)
When the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022 and stripped the constitutional right of any American to have an abortion, they presented concrete evidence (in an era rife with hyperbolic doomsaying and anxious hand-wringing) that the U.S. was moving backward.
The decision was nonsensical: a shock to the system and a slap in the face to the progress the country had made in establishing gender equity for its citizens over the last century. After the decision, some of the states for whom abortion is interpreted as a mortal sin outlawed it completely, while others set term limits that would essentially make the procedure impossible to perform legally. In the process, they indirectly sentenced many of its citizens to death, and to fates worse than death. Those with severe pregnancy complications could no longer access the procedure that would save their lives, while many others, including rape victims, would be forced to carry their unwanted children to term.
The backlash has at least been heartening - for all the rejoicing by a significant portion of America’s leaders, it ceased right quick after the results from the 2022 midterms - but it doesn’t change the diabolical precedent we could be dealing with for decades to come.
This is the anger you hear pulsing through Cat Valley’s “My Body.” Written within weeks of the overturn, the single sees the Bellingham garage punk band railing against the sentiment behind the Court’s decision with more righteous vexation than anything they have done since they started the band seven years ago.
There’s no buildup at all, just immediate clamor like dust clouds kicked up in the wake of lead singer Whitney Flinn’s voice. A lot of the time, this is the way Cat Valley operate: lyrics are cannonballs of plainspoken honesty, and the sounds they conjure are the gunpowder for their firing.
Here, Flinn lays down the terms in a piercing, direct fashion. There’s a “you,” and it's every misogynist - active and passive - contributing to a culture that would relegate women to second-class citizenship, robbing them of bodily autonomy. “My body, my choice” has been a feminist slogan for over fifty years, but in the call and response chant with which they introduce the chorus, Flinn and her bandmates imbue it with fresh potency. You can hear their voices pushed to the limits by its end, the state of emergency buried in their fraying vocal cords.
WHITNEY
Playing that song
and getting people to scream
and yell along with you
is awesome.
And it never gets old.
I never get tired of it because
it's a reminder.
It's a continual reminder.
Bingo Queen, the band’s third EP in a row and their first offering since 2021’s excellent Feral, is fittingly straightforward. Unlike Feral, which spends its energy early on the raucous “Dive Bar Fight Song,” before largely simmering and sulking, Bingo Queen starts in bop mode and doesn’t stop, finishing on adrenal highs with both “My Body” and “It’s Over.” Its refocusing on straightforwardness leaves less room for stuff like the campy humor of “Red Sea” and the gentle cuddlecore of “Last Year” (the stakes, after all, are higher now) but gleeful fun still abounds in the assuagement of “Mean Girls” and the sway of “Not Me.” It’s Cat Valley streamlined, sharpened, and ready to cut down whatever forces stand in their way.
My chat with Cat Valley takes place near the beginning of August right outside Conor Byrne Pub, where the four-piece are opening for Family Worship Center and Dining Dead. As the day cools amid the bizarre early autumn we’ve been experiencing, I’m sitting with both Flinn and Abby Hegge, the band’s founders, guitarists, and main songwriters; the other two members are en route from the north. Their words are full of wit, humor, and warmth, and the strength of their bond is easy to observe. Occasionally they break away from the topic at hand to reminisce about the time they played livestream festival with a handful of Philly bands during the pandemic, or played “Womanizer” in a Bellingham brewery and caused a few bruised egos to walk out of the show.
WHITNEY
You can see it!
You can see them trying to sort it out.
Some of it is them being like
Oh, what am I hearing?
(Because not everybody listens to the lyrics)
But you can tell
sometimes
the moment where it hits them,
Wait, what are they talking about?!
The band started, as most bands do, at a house show. It was 2016, and a mutual friend named Tyson had booked Hegge to play at Flinn’s birthday party. At the time, both Flinn and Hegge were playing acoustic singer-songwriter fare (for her solo sets Flinn played the harp, an instrument she elected not to bring into the band given the energy of the project) and after making each other cry with their songs, they decided to start jamming together. The jams revealed a musical chemistry between the two, along with a shared interest in making louder, angrier music about topics they felt necessary to write about. When the jams turned into a more serious endeavor, they christened the act “Cat Valley” as a jocular antipode to another rising Bellingham band, Dog Mountain.
The first EP from the group, Cat Valley, features just Flinn and Hegge alongside Sam Bolt on drums and future producer Eric Wallace on bass. As such, it’s a nascent version of the current band, but its songs can still be traced back to the area’s legendary reputation for powerful femme bands rippling from Olympia’s riot-grrl movement. In the humid temps of “Summertime,” and “Fuck Off,” you hear a legacy-defining act like Sleater-Kinney in tandem with a more recent torchbearer in La Luz.
After Bolt left, the duo came across Melanie Sehman during their time volunteering for Bellingham Girls Rock Camp, and she agreed to join the band on drums. For a time, Autumn Marceau (from electronic project GLITCHLETTE) accompanied the band on bass until Tyson’s partner, Kristen Stanovich, stepped in to complete the final lineup. That’s the band you hear on 2021’s Feral, which was recorded in the living room that Flinn and Hegge shared back when they were roommates.
It’s been quite a journey since that fateful day at Flinn’s birthday house show, and a lot has changed. For one, the median age of the band is now over 30, and that shift informs some of Bingo Queen’s key themes. The title track, which opens on a summary couplet (“Too old for drugs/Too young for retirement”) paints a portrait of a person caught in the transition between staid but stable adulthood and the lingering turbulence of their 20s; instead of partying and doing drugs, they stock up on cat food, play cards and watch soap operas. It’s more positive than it sounds.
WHITNEY
The whole thing with Bingo Queen
is this idea of this badass bitch
or badass person
that just kind of loves themself.
It's about self-acceptance
and thriving
and embracing who you are.
ABBY
It’s also about
embracing what you need
even if it's not very glamorous.
As someone who has recently entered their thirties, the sentiment rings true. After years of forging yourself in the fires of adulthood, you come out with a better sense of who you are and what you need, and you’re much more confident in the quest to obtain it. That calming realization often resembles the first real glimmer of wisdom you receive in life, and that wisdom coats the majority of Bingo Queen’s tracks.
“Not Me” follows the EP’s opening title track, and on it, the band takes that sense of self-understanding and weaponizes it against the oppressive force of their chauvinist antagonists. As if in response, “Mean Girls” revolves around the poisonous habit of people-pleasing and the realization that compassion is much harder to provide for yourself than others. On it, Flinn and Hegge trade verses like a revolving choir of benevolent spirits before coalescing in harmony on the chorus.
Were that it was always easy to follow your own advice. “Imposter” opens the back half of the EP menacingly, as the band backgrounds Flinn’s musings on imposter syndrome in a series of minor-key chord patterns and a lumbering tempo. The rest of the band joins in on united vocals by the end, punctuating how it exists inside so many of us. There’s little lightness in its wake, as “My Body” and “It’s Over” finish up the EP with its two briefest tracks. I’ve talked already about “My Body,” but it’s also impressive how much of its vitriol they carry into “It’s Over,” which sees Flinn and Hegge raging from the psychic damage caused by manipulative relationships. It’s as if the band is careening towards its end, manically rushing to get the words out before it’s too late. (When it comes to an abrupt stop, you hear a final kiss-off amid the silence: “It’s over, bitch.”)
We just feel LIKE these little nerds sometimes, and so Bingo Queen was kind of meant to celebrate that: the people who do stuff because they like doing it.
-Whitney Flinn
Seven years is a long time to continue to be invested in a band, especially one that continues to operate on an underground level. But the effort that Flinn, Hegge, and the rest of the band have contributed over those years is continuing to pay off. You can observe it on Bingo Queen’s cover art and promotional materials, which are beautifully shot by Rachel Bennett and feature the foursome donning color-blocked pastel outfits and exaggeratedly leaning into a phone call, or flipping off the camera in crowns. You can also hear it in the EP itself: headed for the third time by Eric Wallace, it features harder-hitting drums, hotter-burning guitars, and a louder impact overall.
But to the band, the biggest signifier that what they’re doing is working comes from the impassioned response to their live shows. Even when the attention is arguably negative (like those walkouts), it’s still a mark of how effective their messaging is from the stage. Those also tend to be the exceptions to the rule. At this year’s Belltown Bloom, they played a late set at Madame Lou’s that overlapped partially with Pussy Riot’s main stage set; when it ended, tons filtered downstairs to catch the group, who leveraged the energy imbued by Pussy Riot’s set into a stellar showing. Elsewhere, at Treefort, they ran into people who had seen their set last year and had become fans, including one particular eighth grader.
ABBY
They were one of the ones that came last year
and knew all our lyrics
and they said
Hey, I'm a makeup artist,
Can I do your makeup before your last set?
And they did my makeup!
They also did a way better job than I ever would have done.
It was so sweet!
If you ever catch Cat Valley live, you’ll understand where the fans come from. I certainly did. After our chat ended, I left to caffeinate before heading back to Conor Byrne to catch their set, and during their time on stage I found myself floored by the band’s ability to translate the energy from their recordings into their live performances. Hegge banged her head gleefully beside Flinn’s steady pose on the mic, as Stanovich rumbled on her four strings and Sehman bashed away on her cymbals. Balancing levity with gravity is not an easy feat, but through years of practice - and that discernable chemistry - they made it look easy.
Until they got to “My Body,” and suddenly you could feel the vibe in the crowd change. In those moments when a band decides to go full protest on stage, it doesn’t become just about fun anymore. Confronted by an inconvenient reality, you start to recall all the memories you may have: of friends in immediate distress, of embarrassing thoughts and enlightening discussions, of indignant pleas and indifferent responses, of anxious prognostications about your future and the future of your loved ones.
Your heart tightens, and sometimes there doesn’t seem to be enough space for your breath. So it’s a relief that when they finally tell you to shout, you shout it back. It’s not just to release that pressure; it’s to remind yourself that a fine line separates a right world and a wrong one, and the difference lies within the words shooting out of the speakers, reverberating off the pub walls.
Bingo Queen is available on September 15th for all streaming platforms. Follow the band on Instagram!