“I was nervous, we’ve kinda been through it all today. But I’m feeling okay right now.”
At the moment, Baylor Luckey, vocalist and guitar player for Reno, Nevada’s Worm Shot is sitting with the band backstage. In a few minutes, the band will step onto the largest stage they’ve ever performed on, opening for Coheed And Cambria in one of Reno’s more sizable concert halls. There’s a palpable sense of excitement as each of the four members alternate between making adjustments to their makeup in the mirror and bouncing off of the chairs in the dressing room. But throughout it all the group laughs with each other.
While tonight marks the group’s first foray onto the larger theater stages, it’s taken years of work and playing frequently in backyards and across smaller venues and events to get here. The group’s first EP, Skin, Bones, Virtue displayed the group’s tendency for lyrical complexity over 90’s grunge rock leaning songs.
“There’s this thing that’s stuck with me since middle school that says ‘poets, we get it, things are like other things,’” Luckey says about summing up her lyrics. “I feel like that’s always stuck with me. I’ll never say it for what it is.”
Though while Luckey takes on most of the band’s lead vocals, those lyrics, along with the songwriting is all a collaborative effort. The group usually writes songs with everyone present, each having a hand at input in the music and lyrics.
“The basis of our songs comes from things that we share,” says Cierra Randall, the group’s bass player. “The song ‘Cut My Tail’ is about losing female friendships and the pain of losing a close female friend. That’s one we wrote really collaboratively because that hits close to home for all of us. ‘Arden’s Garden’ is about hating the internet and the internet woman. Not hating women,” she emphasizes, “just hating what the internet wants women to be.”
It’s notably obvious that Worm Shot is made up of four females. This fact is often the first thing mentioned about them by others despite being old news to the band themselves.
“I think there’s a big, unconscious bias people have against women being able to do things on their own,” says Gina Hoang, the group’s drummer. “Being fed a lot of media about ‘none of these women artists wrote their own songs’, or ‘they can’t be pretty and talented at the same time… and also smart!'”
But Hoang explains the extent that the dynamic affects the band when they’re playing.
“I feel like I’ve only become conscious of it because of what I’ve heard to make me conscious about it. When I’m recording or we’re onstage, I’m just thinking that I’m with my best friends and we’re expressing something that we all made together!”
In fact the group explains the band through the lens of their friendship. Each grew up in the Reno area and knew of each other through attending shows, particularly at The Holland Project, where participation and positivity tend to flavor the all ages arts and community space.
“I think there’s a kind of specific musical taste that’s prevalent with kids who grew up going to The Holland Project,” Randall says of what initially led to the members forming Worm Shot. “I think we were all inspired by a bunch of musicians and bands that are a little bit obscure but were really inspiring to us because they played there when we were 17 year olds.”
Liv Rogers, the group’s lead guitar player talks about how the band took inspiration from that scene, but set out to improve upon it. “I think a lot of things that we do, we do them because we’ve never seen someone do them before. In Reno we hadn’t really seen a girl band, at least when we started. I think it’s fun for us to do something different.”
It’s getting closer to showtime. A murmur from the audience can be heard from the other side of the stage curtain. Though at this point if the group is nervous, it hardly shows. The band exudes a warmth, talking about their time writing and playing together in a way that constantly compliments one another’s contributions or outside projects. When it comes down to it, each will say that they’re friends first who are putting out music and playing shows together.
“We play a lot of shows but that’s something that I never take for granted,” Luckey says about the road to this point paved with small clubs, dimly lit rooms, auditoriums and backyards. “Because I’m always thinking, I don’t know if this will last forever. Each one is very special to me, even if it’s at the same places… I never take it for granted.”
Worm Shot perform on Thursday, October 3rd at The Holland Project in Reno with Bushfire and Next Question. Tickets and information here.
Worm Shot’s music is available for streaming on Spotify and Apple Music.
Follow the band’s Instagram for updates.
