The release of their album is timely, beyond the ways in which their U.S. fanbase will understand it. In the UK, as the two major political parties signpost their future campaigns, trans rights – or the lack of – appear to be a leading policy point of their drives. As a trans member of the band, Maxine certainly feels the palpable political tension around her identity when she is over in the UK.
“It’s a weird obsession and typical fascist playbook scapegoating, and politicians use fear to get what they want: personal gains for them,” she says.
Again and again the album blows its clarion call for freedom, most notably on the penultimate track, Aching, on which they call out, ‘I got to / I got to / I got to / I got to be free.’ Even on the album artwork, a nude figure embraces (or restrains) a pig: the person feels free and it’s uncertain whether or not the animal is. “I think repression of your personal freedom is a cardinal sin of humanity,” says Maxine, now serious. “It means everything to us.”
It’s easier to feel free in your 20s, buoyed by hope. Missy believes that wide-eyed wonder is lost in your 30s because you develop pattern recognition and are suddenly aware of the difference between coincidences and tactics. Depressingly, in both the personal and political, much of what plagues us is a tactic of some kind – our own, other people’s, governments and institutions.
“We as a people have progressed faster than the very governments we live under, where we’ve developed the pattern recognition for the way they act, but we’re not powerful enough to change their ways because they’ve got all the power,” says Missy.