THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Montreal modern-punk outfit Nobro’s debut full-length Set Your Pussy Free is a caustic, celebratory, glorious party-punk fireworks show. Produced by Dave Schiffman (Pup, Rage Against The Machine), it’s a record about the ecstatic pursuit of personal escape and liberation even as the walls are closing in, a 21st-century power-punk analog of Born To Run that rages against modern life’s restrictive pressures and dares them to a game of chicken. If a hurricane is bearing down on Nobro, they’re spitting into it, arm-in-arm, with middle fingers raised.
Bandmates Kathryn McCaughey (vocals/bass), Karolane Carbonneau (guitars), Lisandre Bourdages (keys/percussion) and Sarah Dion (drums) make clear that they aren’t interested in playing by whatever rules have been set around them. Nobro were playing a show the day after the United States Supreme Court overturned the right to access an abortion in the country. The four women were shaken and furious, but that night McCaughey led a righteous toast against the decision: “This next song is dedicated to setting our vaginas free!”
It was a spur-of-the-moment response to the news, but the phrase stuck with McCaughey. It began to feel like something more than a throwaway slogan. It felt like something deeper, a defiant rallying cry to kick against the exhausting struggles of life. “As a musician or artist or even a woman, you have to throw off the weight of societal pressures and expectations, especially as you get older,” says McCaughey. “You have to take risks and chances.” Nobro is the space where the quartet gets to take those risks and chances. It’s a place for cultivating power and happiness in a hard, mean world. That means the stakes are high. “Music is where we lift each other up,” McCaughey continues. “I wish it was more like a fairy tale. We just want this fucking thing to work. But we’re all gonna succeed together, or we’re all gonna fail together.”
Nobro wrote most of SYPF with Toronto producer Thomas D’Arcy (July Talk, Sheepdogs, Yukon Blonde), and Schiffman joined the band in Montreal for nearly a month to prep and record at Mixart Studios in the dead of winter. “We allowed ourselves to go in crazier directions, just to see where it would take us,” says Bourdages. She adds that because of how it was recorded — live off the floor, all four members playing at the same time, mistakes and all — this new LP represents who Nobro are more than any other release.
Where My Girls At follows tongue-in-cheek romp Let’s Do Drugs, which has crashing percussion, gnarled guitar lines, and raspy vocals. It’s “a ‘dumb’ rock song about getting older,” McCaughey states, adding “it’s about wanting to have one more wild night, while having no business doing so and failing miserably. Musically it’s a middle ground between maybe (You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party) and Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, but only the dumbest bits of those songs, distilled into something even more dumb. It’s like shotgunning a beer then immediately puking on yourself.”
Accumulating years of work, hundreds of shows, and thousands of miles since 2014, McCaughey, Carbonneau, Bourdage, and Dion have been building Nobro into one of the most fierce and exciting bands in Canada, now riding the momentum from a string of blazing singles and EPs, capped with 2020’s Sick Hustle and 2022’s Live Your Truth Shred Some Gnar. Aside from taking their raucous live shows to every dive bar across Montreal, they have toured North America and Europe with Pup, Alexisonfire, Billy Talent, Fidlar and The OBGMs.”
