“What’s the most chaotic thing Scene Queen can possibly do?” This was the question Hannah Collins contemplated while making her debut album. Not an easy answer as chaos lies at the epicentre of the pink Catherine wheel that is her music, both in its audacious genre-hopping and the unhinged, outrageous lyrics that come together to form what’s lovingly known as bimbocore.
Such a question of disorder came from the mind of a woman who’s claimed to ‘put the ho in hotel’, threatened a “bastard” catcaller in a song by suggesting she ‘put a knife up to his boner’, and finished a song with the outlandish sing-along refrain, ‘Gays with ADHD, listen to me, I am your Scene Queen’.
And still, Hannah was going to find a way to top all of that. She was going to write a country song, but make it bimbocore – throwing in some metallic riffs and hypersexual lyrics that would have conservatives scrambling for their pearls. Debuted live on the brilliantly-named Bimbos Beans & Toast Tour across the UK last month, MILF sets out to put the ho into hoedown (‘Ooooh, man I love fucking / Tickle me pink, smack my ass till it’s blushing,’ anyone?) and is as outrageous as it sounds, but also makes far more sense than it might first appear.
“Country is an extremely gatekept genre in general, and so is metal,” Hannah explains over the phone from her boyfriend’s house in Nashville. “I feel like both have these people that are like, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this, you shouldn’t be [in this genre].’ I was like, ‘This would be the perfect storm of irritating the people that I want to irritate.’
“It’s always been the joke of it all, [being] a conservative person’s worst nightmare. In general, metal, for whatever reason, has shown itself to be very conservative – it’s very not what rock is about, so I don’t really understand it. We were like, ‘Let’s be the antithesis of anything those people want to hear.’”