For Drea Doll the pandemic was stifling. The Venomous Pinks singer couldn’t use her guitar and microphone to demand social justice, so she began to write.
“Writing this album through a pandemic where people lost family members or friends, it was just a crazy, stressful and heartbreaking year — not just for us — for a lot of people,” Doll says. “We couldn’t play shows, so we had time to think about what was happening in the world and around us. This forced me personally to dig deeper.”
The ink on her pages eventually spilled over into her guitar riffs and onto her bandmates, bassist Gaby Kaos and drummer Cassie Jalilie.
The trio had enough for its first full-length album. They reached out to Grammy Award-winning producer Cameron Webb (Mӧtorhead, Social Distortion, NOFX).
Although Doll and Kaos admit they were shocked by Webb’s agreement to produce the record in October 2021, the trio did not know they would be pushed out of their comfort zone.
“Cameron pushed us in everything — how we write, how we perform, how we record and even how we talk to each other,” says Kaos, a Scottsdale Community College alum.
However, Doll was pushed the hardest. She likens working with Webb to “punk rock boot camp.”
“When we got into the studio with Cameron Webb, one of the things he really pushed for was better lyrics,” Doll says.
Although the band captured its buoyant personality on tracks like “Pizza Slice,” Webb pushed them to write more sophisticated lyrics.
While laughing, Kaos describes the band’s previous works as being pepperoni pizza and the work with Webb as being supreme pizza.
The band recruited the likes of Efrem Martinez Shulz (Death by Stereo, Voodoo Glow Skulls), Brenna Red (The Last Gang), Dan Palmer (Zebrahead) and Linh Le (Bad Cop/ Bad Cop) to contribute to tracks on the album.
“It was super humbling to know that these people we look up to and love their bands were willing to help out a small punk band from Mesa,” Doll says. “They’re all musicians that we each look up to and seeing them work in the studio was amazing to watch.”
“They all bring something unique and different to each song that they’re on,” Kaos adds.
Half of the album shows Doll’s dark lyrics, while the flipside covers loss, sexism and social change.
“With this new record it’s 50/50 with being dark but still having fun,” says Doll, an alum of Mesa Community College.
“There are a couple of songs on the record where there is some realism in the spoken word format that’s a little dark but the album still has the true Pinks sound.”
Doll hopes the contrasting songs will attract a variety of listeners.
“The album is very eclectic in that each song is different from the next,” she says. “My hope is that whoever listens to it can find something that they really like about it.”
The variety of songs made it difficult to choose a single, but one stood out.
“With ‘No Rules,’ there was an agreement between the band, the label and even Cameron that there was something special about the song and how it’s a little catchy but sounds like a grown-up version of us,” Doll says.
When “No Rules” was released on March 24, The Venomous Pinks unveiled the album’s name: “Vita Mors.”
“Vita Mors roughly translates in Latin to life and death, which is exactly the theme of this album,” Doll says. “We’re born then we die but what we choose to do in between with our life is what’s explored on the album.”
Kaos adds, “It also makes people google it to find the meaning.”
The band also unveiled the single “Apothecary Ailment” on April 13, and “Broken Hearts Club” will go out before the album’s June 3 release.
The Venomous Pinks will offer the album on vinyl with multiple solid-colored variants and will schedule a show once vinyl is available.
In the meantime, The Venomous Pinks will head out on the road with T.S.O.L. and the Voodoo Glow Skulls. Coupled with those are European and Canadian festivals. Hopefully, Kaos says, fans will enjoy the music and the live shows.
“We’ve never done anything like this, and it blows my mind with what we created. Hopefully, people’s minds are blown too,” Kaos says.
The Venomous Pinks
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