Girl Ray, a London-based all-female trio, is the local high school band that made it out of their hometown. The band performed at Brighton Music Hall on Saturday night, in the first few days of their five-week American tour with indie rock band Porches.
Band members Poppy Hankin, Iris McConnell and Sophie Moss met while in high school together in North London. As young teenagers with no musical experience, they decided to start a band.
“We all pretty much just learned our instruments when we got together at ages 15 and 16 to be in the band,” Hankin said in an interview with The Daily Free Press. “We learned together and made [our] sound together … We knew we needed a drummer so Iris just learned drums.”
Despite a lack of experience on their instruments, the band had a working knowledge of the art world that inspired their name.
“Girl Ray was a play off [of] … Man Ray,” said McConnell, the drummer. “Because, you know, we’re girls. And we thought it sounded cool.”
The band was able to develop their unique sound together, Hankin said, because they all started from the beginning with their skill levels.
“We all like different bands, but we also like a lot of bands collectively,” she said. “We all bring different stuff to the table in terms of what we like.”
Moss, who plays bass, said that Girl Ray’s sound could be described as indie pop.
“Even though we’re quite different than Porches aesthetically, at the end of the day it’s kind of just disguised pop,” she said.
Girl Ray’s lo-fi sound, recorded without advanced technology and not highly edited, features Hankin’s whimsical soprano voice countering a strong bass background.
The way Girl Ray came to tour with Porches is, in Moss’s eyes, “kind of an annoying industry story. It’s just that we have the same agent.”
When Girl Ray first signed to their agent, they wrote a list of bands they were interested in. Many of their favorite bands were American, and they wanted to tour in the United States, though the opportunity to tour with Porches came somewhat out of the blue, Moss said.
“It pulled through kind of last minute but it was really great because we’re such massive fans of theirs,” she said.
Moss said it was difficult to break out of London’s city limits at first, especially since they started performing in high school. But she is glad that they were able to get their feet off the ground in London, where “there’s always been a good music scene.” She said it probably would have been harder to be successful had they started out in a small town.
“You go to some places and people just don’t get it, at all,” Moss said. “[A city] is a great place to start rather than a town where people don’t understand what you’re doing and don’t have a platform for your music.”
From the beginning, the band was featured on popular radio stations in the UK, which helped them get off the ground, Hankin said.
“They caught onto us quite early and played us loads and that got us quite a nice fan base,” she said. “[From there,] we played a lot of shows, got a European agent, then an American agent. It was all just kind of step by step.”
Moss said the band’s lack of testosterone was not exactly intentional.
“It kind of happened in a way because at our school, it was a lot of boys in bands,” she said. “I definitely felt that when bands were being formed at school girls were always the ones watching.”
In high school, Hankin said, they often dated boys who “would always make us go listed to them at their practices.”
“We were just as good as them,” she added, with a laugh.
