Pride Month Barbie
ABOUT
You can’t spell Pride Month Barbie (PMB) without "Demon." As Libras, sluts, drama queens, and judgmental bitches, Pride Month Barbie brings a sound and performance that will leave you feeling insecure, horny, and annoyed. Inspired by early 2000’s celebutante culture, the films of Gregg Araki, and acts like Handsome Furs, Yaz, Light Asylum, and New Order, PMB brings a dark sense of humor to a candied electronic gloss. Drawing from the indie pop culture of the ’80s, ’90s, and early aughts, PMB harkens the bittersweet, nostalgic purity of early synth titans, parodies the current zeitgeist, and imagines a glittering future encompassing the dystopic and utopic simultaneously.
Shetty and Holmes met at San Francisco’s El Rio while sharing a bill as their solo acts in 2016. They remained adjacent figureheads in the DIY experimental pop underground of Oakland and Berkeley in the 2010s and shared many bills, collaborators, friends, and mutual experiences amidst an underground network of eclectic baddies from San Fransico to LA. They both have a prolific catalog of solo music and have performed and toured in art and music spaces across the US and Europe.
In 2022, Shetty offered engineering services while Holmes was working on an upcoming solo album at a residency in rural Northern California. Upon wrapping, Holmes shared some of the electronic pop work they had made as a reprieve from their sad experimental music. Shetty was immediately eager to sing over the tracks and expeditiously demolished the demo with beautiful harmonies and hooks. PMB’s debut single was created almost on the spot. Shetty asked, "did we just start a band?"
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