Scene Queen: “It’s always been about being a conservative person’s worst nightmare”

MILF was one of the first ‘fun’ songs Hannah wrote for the aforementioned debut album, titled Hot Singles In Your Area, which is set to land in spring next year.

“I kind of forgot I was able to do songs that were meant to just be fun, because I was like, ‘I have all this stuff I need to say’, like with Pink Push-Up Bra,” she explains. “I get a little bit political, some of it’s about yelling at men who treated you poorly, a lot of break-up songs. The album has a lot of hot, sexy singles on it. I wrote it at a time where I was single and kind of reclaiming my sexuality, in a way, exploring sexuality, and knowing that initial timeframe in your life is going to be super-awkward and you’re going to have nightmarish stories, but that’s the whole fun of life – going through things you can make fun of yourself for later.”

Hannah jokes that the title was chosen because the album has “the hottest singles on it possible”, but it’s far more than a wink-nudge reference to the adverts on websites that you definitely don’t visit. It represents various dimensions to her Scene Queen identity – paying homage to Y2K culture, to the online world that launched her career, and also references the fact that her music “wouldn’t exist” without sex workers and how the internet afforded a way for sex work to grow exponentially.

“The twerkle-pit and those dance moves very much came from strip club culture, but now, it’s become so mainstream that women are very able to do sex work on their own terms,” Hannah explains. “I think working as a stripper is kind of how I came into my own in my sexuality. It was the first time I realised, ‘Oh, I’m hot, I can own my body and profit off of it.’ A lot of my fanbase are sex workers, too; some send me videos of them pole dancing to my songs. [The title] pays homage to a lot of people that my project could not exist without.”

Previously released singles 18+ and Pink Push-Up Bra are both set to appear on Hot Singles In Your Area, but fans are yet to pick up on the common thread between those titles and MILF, which runs through the entirety of the album.

“They’re very internet-themed porny titles,” smiles Hannah. “I feel like people will laugh when they read [the song titles] from top to bottom. I also wanted it to be kind of a nightmare for people to search my songs, because with those titles, a million things could come up. But also, you’re accidentally going to find my record 5,000 times because of the song titles. Some man somewhere who is not looking to find my record will accidentally stumble upon it. I want it to be an album that makes people feel empowered in some way to be themselves, or to reclaim themselves or whatever, but have so much fun while listening to it along the way.”

Hannah’s two older sisters were only a year apart and the pair could often be found watching shows like The Hills, Laguna Beach and One Tree Hill. On the surface of it, you might think that the golden age of 2000s reality TV and teen drama is from another planet to the alternative scene, but back then, they were much closer connected. “If you go back and listen to the soundtracks of those shows, it’s All-American Rejects and stuff like that,” says Hannah. “It’s all intertwined, like with The Simple Life – Nicole Richie ends up marrying one of the members of Good Charlotte. I got introduced to that world through the lens of alternative music, in a way.”

Hannah was also heavily encouraged to get into music by her grandfather: an Italian immigrant who was “always singing and dancing” and getting his granddaughter to do the same. On drives to school, he’d play Frank Sinatra and persuade her to sing along. Belting out ol’ blue eyes in the comfort of her grandad’s car, Hannah began to realise she had a talent and something to latch onto, leading her to join choirs and take vocal lessons.

“It was a really conservative town with not much to do, so driving around with my grandpa and singing Frank Sinatra felt like the most exciting thing I could have done with my life,” she says. “I think that ingrained a sense that if there was nothing else to do, there’s always music.”

As she grew up, Hannah would drive many hours to Cleveland every weekend to go to gigs, usually on her own. At those shows, she wasn’t just having the time of her life – she was looking at what she wanted her future to be. If she wasn’t going to be onstage, she’d be backstage, working behind the scenes. She went on to study music business at college in LA but hated it and dropped out halfway through, switching her focus to songwriting, but the call of the stage still proved impossible to resist. “I realised I wanted to stop waiting for other people to make me successful,” she says of posting her early music on TikTok, which almost instantly went viral. “It’s just been a massive climb since then and it freaks me out every day.”

It was the experience of escaping to the big city for shows that inspired Hannah to reach out to her own fans find themselves in the same position, attending gigs alone because there’s nobody else in their hometown who knows about the alternative world they’re so immersed in. She even created her own sorority, Bimbo Beta Pi, and inducts a number of people at each show on the condition they pledge to be a friend to anyone in the crowd who needs some company.

“I was like, ‘As an adult, if I’m going to start this fanbase, the most important thing is going to be the sense of community within it,’” Hannah reasons. “I never want people to deal with the same thing I dealt with, which is feeling like you didn’t fit in anywhere. Now, I’m very thankful that I play shows, people come by themselves, and then the next time I come through town, they’ll be in a group of seven friends that they made at that show. Small towns exist everywhere – going to shows in the city is an escape for so many people. Even if it’s three hours out of their whole week, I just want to make sure that it’s a time they feel completely involved and included in something.”

Earlier this year, Hannah took a stand against sexual misconduct within the alt. scene in a louder way than anyone had done before with the incendiary track 18+, combining her characteristic sense of cheek and fury to both mock and rage against perpetrators. There’s even the rather dark cheerleader-esque chant, ‘18 plus, 18 plus, get those children off your bus.’ For better or worse, this infectious takedown of predators was many people’s introduction to Scene Queen’s neon pink world, and the resulting discourse was deafening.

18+ isn’t Scene Queen’s most popular song on Spotify (that honour goes to the mischievous, violent duet with Set It Off’s Cody Carson, Barbie And Ken) but Hannah notes that at shows, it’s the song people yell along to the loudest. She’s afforded them an outlet for their anger, expressing what thousands have been thinking and feeling, but have perhaps been too afraid to say out loud.

“I definitely wrote it to be controversial. I intentionally made it vague so you would have to speculate over who it was about because the big issue is it’s not just one band. It’s like, ‘Okay, how did we get to this point as a scene?’ and that involves discussion more than pointing fingers at a band. What can we as a community change so this doesn’t keep happening?”

Hannah was expecting backlash and she got it. What she didn’t expect, however, was the number of her peers who reached out to her afterwards and thanked her for releasing it. It even birthed a new working relationship after Hot Mulligan guitarist Chris Freeman approached her and ended up co-writing a couple of songs on Hot Singles In Your Area.

“I got a DM from him being like, ‘You’re so cool, thank you for doing this. We could make a song about this, being a pop-punk band, but it wouldn’t mean nearly as much as if a woman did it,’” Hannah recalls. “So many bands reached out, and I also realised there were a lot of people that were afraid to say things, because they were worried it would affect their career, and it made them less afraid to be vocal about stuff. I was living proof that it benefitted my career to be so bold.”

Walk into a Scene Queen show and you’ll find one of the kindest, friendliest fan groups around. Somewhere in that crowd, you will meet other people who look and identify like you, even if you don’t expect it. There’s more men than you might expect, too.

“There’s a lot of supportive guys in the crowd,” Hannah says. “Many of them are dads of queer kids who don’t know exactly what to do to try and understand them, but they’re making the effort to put them in spaces where everyone does understand them.”

Ultimately, with the Bimbo Beta Pi initiative and female and non-binary-only mosh-pits to name a few of examples, Hannah’s taking the biggest strides forwards in making gigs the safe spaces they ought to be.

“Scene Queen helps me personally because it helps me come out of my shell in my day-to-day life,” Hannah concludes. “But with 18+, I’m now able to see what people want out of Scene Queen… I’m able to look at issues they have within the world or within their specific communities and write about those. Because of [that song], Scene Queen’s become more of a community project.”

And in that welcoming, empowered community, there’s a place for you.

Hot Singles In Your Area is released spring 2024 via Hopeless.

Read this next:

• Scene Queen: “If there’s not a door that’s open for me, I have the full ability to kick it open”
• From Paris Hilton to Pierce The Veil: The icons who inspired Scene Queen
  
• “The more out of the box I get, the more room there is for people to hop in”: Inside the hyper-femininity of Scene Queen