Pom Pom Squad Brings the ’90s Sound Up to Date

Pom Pom Squad’s new release, Ow, builds on the post-grunge, “quiet grrl” punk sound the Brooklyn band established with their first EP, Hate it Here. Lead singer and songwriter Mia Berrin tells Brooklyn Roads that her music is “deeply rooted in lyrical introspection and ’90s influences” and draws inspiration from her personal life.

“I was an obsessive journaler growing up, which made me very good at processing my emotions in words,” she tells us. “As a teenage girl, I had a lot of trouble finding a place for my anger.” Then Berrin discovered  punk and grunge, which “provided me a sense of comfort.” Courtney Love was an especially strong influence, she says, noting that Love’s  Live Through This “is an album I always go back to.”

Pom Pom Squad On Stage/ photo by Cherie Bugtong

Recording Hate it Here “was a tough process for me, [having] never played a show with a band or recorded anything outside of my bedroom,” she says. By the time she was ready to make Ow, however, she had studied music production and engineering at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and had also “fallen madly in love with playing live.”

Ow, which Pom Pom Squad introduced to Brooklyn audiences at Baby’s All Right and Rough Trade this past fall, came together after Berrin met and started practicing with her current bandmates, Shelby Keller, Mari Alé Figeman and Alex Mercuri. “It was important to me that we captured the live sound of it. I think the two EPs have a similar heart, but Ow is a little rawer, a little more fleshed out, and feels closer to my current voice,” she says.

Mia Berrin / photo by Michael Todaro

Berrin tells us that living in Brooklyn “made me have to learn fast. I played my first-ever show almost four years ago. Pom Pom Squad is my first and only band, and to start off playing for the toughest crowds is a really quick way to toughen up.” There’s so much music being made in our borough, she adds, that “I don’t take it for granted that people have noticed me and care about what I do.”

The band’s name and Berrin’s cheerleader persona had their origins in her experiences as “the new kid” and a non-white person in a predominantly white Christian prep school in Orlando, Florida. “I hated everything so much that I had to force myself to love it,” she tells Brooklyn Roads. “Cheerleaders emerged to me as this terrifying icon of femininity that I was supposed to aspire to, fear, loathe, and worship. They have such a complicated portrayal in media as these frivolous or weak characters.”

Berrin herself is the antithesis of such characters, which, as she tells Brooklyn Roads, is exactly the point. “I like fucking with people’s expectations,” she says. “I like the way making art under that name or in that costume lets people underestimate me.”