British punk band Lambrini Girls’ debut album Who Let The Dogs Out hops from gentrification to nepo babies to Kate Moss’s famous eating disorder quote to harassment in the workplace to ACAB — and singer Phoebe Lunny and bassist Lilly Maciera couldn’t have seen it happening any other way.
“It's very hard to write about anything which isn’t inherently politically charged when your frame of reference is a world around you which is literally on f*cking fire, and we see late stage capitalism f*cking crumbling and people being blown to bits and dying every day,” Lunny, 27, a blunt firecracker of a conversationalist, tells Teen Vogue during an early January interview over Zoom, both in the U.K. between their seemingly relentless touring. 28-year-old Maciera is just as quick as Lunny with a barb as a laugh, though she spoke slightly less than her bandmate.
As we speak, the Los Angeles fires are ongoing, burning through homes and schools, while billionaires post conspiracy theories. Though the band didn’t set out to write songs with “a particular sort of message,” says Lunny, “It's impossible to really write about much else… [when] what you know, the inspiration you're drawing, everything around the world, is f*cking horrible and terrifying.”
To Lunny’s point, the arrival of Lambrini Girls’s hard-rocking screech propelled by Maciera’s bass has been a welcome one for the industry. The band first blew up after their 2023 EP You’re Welcome, which inveighs against trans-exclusionary radical feminists and mercilessly tears apart narcissistic and crappy men in the scene. Simultaneously they were becoming known for their barnburner live sets, where they aggressively call out and shame crowd harassment — a subject in their music as in their sets — and where it’s normal for them to get involved in the moshing.
By January 2024, they were on the cover of Kerrang! in a joint conversation with the iconic band Sleater-Kinney, originally a part of the nineties’ Riot Grrrl movement. Later that spring, they made headlines after the band spoke up in support of Palestine at a set in Hamburg, resulting in them kicking out half the crowd for “reacting aggressively,” per their December 2024 NME cover story. The band’s Instagram profile is awash in trans and Palestinian flags.
The connection with Riot Grrrl – and their clear political positioning – has been a difficult one for them to navigate; as Lunny opines in our conversation, “Riot Grrrl [was] inherently very transphobic.” For example, when Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein mentioned the era’s saying of “girls to the front,” Lunny responded they interpret it now to mean anyone but cis white dudes to the front.
There currently isn’t a scene they neatly fit within; meanwhile, media loves to talk about “women in music,” leading to coverage that can make them feel tokenized, or like their music is all about the politics, rather than the art itself. (Lyrics from “Big Dick Energy”, sneeringly impersonating a “nice guy” feminist: “Oh my god, hi do you remember me? You reposted that thing I wrote about women in music/Thank you so much for doing your bit!”)
I saw Lambrini Girls perform at a small Brooklyn venue last July, with opener Ekko Astral, fronted by my friend Jael Holzman (“F*cking legend,” says Lunny of the band and its frontwoman). It was a special pleasure to see a lineup of bands led by trans and queer women. I hadn’t known what to expect from Lambrini Girls, but I watched them blow the roof off with “Company Culture” and “Terf Wars,” during which they led a chant of “shut your stupid f*cking mouth, you stupid f*cking TERF!” that shook the venue. I woke up the next morning with an aching neck from head-banging and moshing.
For Who Let The Dogs Out, Lambrini Girls wanted to flex their muscles, lashing back against any suggestion that the politics supersede the music. Lunny and Maciera point to more personal songs, like “Special, Different,” which is about Lunny being neurodivergent — both her and Maciera’s favorite off the album — as an example of the wide range of topics and themes the album navigates.
“If I had had that song when I was a teenager, I think I would have probably had an inkling to be a lot more compassionate towards myself,” says Maciera, who is also neurodivergent. It’s also one of her favorite songs on the album from a musical perspective: “I'm really proud of what we did with it, and part of that is the fact that I, for the first time in my life, actually play all four strings on my bass. So to all the f*cking wonky gatekeepers are gonna be like, [you’re] just playing one note, f*ck off.”
Another, more lighthearted standout is album closer “C*ntology 101,” a cheery spiritual sister to Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon.” The list of things that falls into that category includes “doing a poo at your friends’ house,” “prioriti[zing] my own needs,” “having an autistic meltdown,” and “setting boundaries.” They see no harm in having a ton of fun while being pissed-off.
On the other hand, Lunny and Maciera are slightly underplaying their polemical nature. The 17-second interlude “Scarcity is Fake (communist propaganda),” wedged between the anti-gentrification “You’re Not From Around Here” and the rollicking shriek of “Filthy Rich Nepo Baby” (which is exactly as you’d expect), is literally a recording of the Black Power icon Kwame Ture, otherwise known as Stokely Carmichael. “I think that was the only place where we were kind of intentional about the actual topics of the song, in terms of track listing,” Maciera admits.
“We don't want to shake people by the shoulders and be like, ‘f*cking wake up sheeple!’” Lunny continues. “Message-wise, we want people to question that privilege and bias by listening to the music; but also, if you're affected by any of these issues, to feel affirmed and feel less alone.”
Maciera remembers posting “passionate” screeds on her accounts when she was younger, regardless of how many people saw them then. “Having this platform that we have and writing about things on social media, speaking about things now, feels like such a privilege, to have that platform and to know that certain people are listening,” Maciera says.
“If you have that platform and you care about things that are going on around you, which you should, regardless of whether they affect you or not —” here Maciera lists off queer people, people of color, and poor people — “If people with privileges stopped hiding behind that privilege, and educated themselves on the struggles of real people around them, then it these issues would be so much easier to tackle, and people would feel so much less alone… To not do that is an awful shame, and it's an awful waste.”
When I ask if they have anything else to tell Teen Vogue readers, they’re ready: “F*ck your president-elect. F*ck Project 2025. F*ck America, f*ck the UK,” Lunny says immediately. “Trans lives matter.”
“Free Palestine and all occupied countries,” Maciera chimes in.
“F*ck colonization,” Lunny picks up. “F*ck the patriarchy and the capitalist social system that we've built which is detrimental to everybody who is not a straight, white cis man — and even to them, it is detrimental, they just don't know it.” In a move representative of their overall vibe, they concluded their list with invective against Ben Shapiro, Nick Fuentes, and Elon Musk that we can’t print here — but if you want to hear it, their US tour starts April 30 in New York City.
