for that matter. She doesn’t smile cutesy for the camera, and she’s not the kind of gal who “sings” in a metal band. (“I couldn’t sing my way out of a cardboard box,” she admits.) Instead Perry emits a range of feral growls and shrieks that might have listeners imagining that her death-metal band has a rabid pit bull for a vocalist. And seeing Perry live won’t do much to dissuade anyone from that impression, as she jumps off the stage and rips through the crowd, head flailing, teeth bared.
Recently, Perry and her bandmates took a break from assaulting audience members to finish tracking their third full-length, Sovereign Defense, which is due out early next year on Prosthetic Records. We caught up with the vocalist on a sunny summer afternoon in Phoenix, shortly after she finished working a shift at the county library.
REVOLVER Wow, Grace, you’re a hot
metal chick and a hot librarian.
GRACE PERRY [Laughs] Well, a real
librarian has a master’s degree
in Library Sciences. I’m just a
circulation librarian. So I’m pretty
much the super-mean asshole that
sends you to a collection agency for,
like, 25-cent fines.
Yeah, we had Casio keyboards playing preprogrammed songs at 1,000 beats-per-minute. And we would scream over them and play as fast as we could. One time we dressed as two bloody flight attendants and a terrorist, and we almost got kicked out of the venue. Another time we dressed as an abortion, and we threw plastic coat hangers at the audience. We wanted people to hate us— and most of the time they did.
and passionate. Whereas there are so many stigmas and stereotypes surrounding so many other genres.
You must meet lots of creepy dudes at the library and on tour. At the library it’s the crazy homeless person that tells me the same exact Vietnam stories every day, and I’m super-nice just to appease him. Then he tells me I have cute dimples and gives me a penny. And then I have the over-confident metal dudes that approach me and hit on me and ask for my number, and I essentially laugh and ask if they want to buy a CD.
What do you like about death metal? There’s no apologies. You can do whatever you want onstage and no one thinks twice because it’s so extreme
What’s your first musical memory? I was at some summer camp singing and I fell off the stage and almost broke my neck. I had to wear a neck brace the whole camp session.
“I COME HOME FROM TOURS
AND I’M BRUISED DOWN
MY ARMS AND LEGS
AND I HAVE HAIR RIPPED
OUT AND BLOODY LIPS.”
Do you ever get hurt onstage? All the time. I come home from tours and I’m bruised down my arms and legs and I have hair ripped out and bloody lips. I get a black eye almost every other week. After the Revolver photo shoot [for this article] I was playing a house show and I was totally into the music and thrashing around. Some kids picked me up and threw me against the ceiling. Then one dude leaned back and bashed his head right into my nose. Two songs later I realized I was bleeding, but we didn’t stop the show. Blood was running all down the front of my white shirt and all over my mouth and I had two black eyes. It hurt like crazy, but the thing about a broken nose is you can’t really do anything about it. You just have to let it fix itself.
—GRACE PERRY FOR OUTTAKES AND VIDEO, VISIT REVOLVERMAG.COM
That explains a lot. Were you a troublemaker as a teenager? Oh, yeah. I got pulled over 14 times and got in three wrecks. I T-boned a cop car in the middle of the night. I got arrested but not convicted for shoplifting when I was 15. I stole a toe ring, which was so stupid. I’ve never worn a toe ring in my life.
Back up. You T-boned a cop car? Yeah, I was totally oblivious and went straight through a red light. Of course, the only fucking car on the road is a cop car, and I totaled both cars. The cop and I were both fine. When he got out of his car he just pointed at the light, which was still red. He didn’t ask if I was OK. They Breathalyzed me three times. My mom was convinced I was on drugs. And I was like, “No, I’m just a bad driver.”
TK TKTK TK TK TK TKTKTKT
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