Deap Heat

"From the start, we knew we wanted to be heavy,” says Julie Edwards, the drummer/vocalist of Los Angeleno duo Deap Vally. “We knew we wanted to be unapologetic and bold and assertive. We always knew that we were going to be confrontational. We were never going to be an indie-rock band.”

Edwards describes Deap Vally's sound as mixing the “ballsiness” of Tina Turner with the “jamming” of Led Zeppelin, talks up the band's forthcoming, almost-finished debut LP as “really, really heavy,” and dubs the duo a feminist concern. “We both felt frustrated with the roles we saw women playing in music: like, a woman playing keyboards in an otherwise male band, or a guy teaching his girlfriend to play bass so she can be in his band, or a girl singing over music that men wrote,” she says. “A woman will never know how empowering it is to make music with another woman until they do it. When you make music with men, there's a lot of expectations, a lot of fear, a lot of posturing. I know my boyfriend in high school told me that I'd never be a good guitarist. There's just always shit like that going on, and who needs that, y'know?”

By high school, Edwards had long been exposed to music-making by her elder brother, Greg Edwards from Autolux. “I grew up listening to him play slap bass through the airconditioning vents, he was hugely influential on my life,” she recalls. Still, his influence didn't keep her from going astray. “Embarrassingly enough, I got really into musical theatre,” recalls Edwards. “When I was 15, I was Audrey in Little Shop Of Horrors, I thought it was so awesome. Then, eventually, I got over it, and never wanted to hear another musical again in my life.”

Long after high school, she'd form her first band with old school pal – “the guy who played opposite me in Little Shop Of Horrors!” Edwards laughs – Marc Smollin. “We were really nerdy friends, we decided to start a band together one day,” she recalls. “We rented a practice space that had a backline, we paid hourly, and we got in there, and I just ran behind the drumkit before he did. And that, randomly, determined the fact that I became a drummer.”

The duo were The Pity Party, a cult LA act who released a run of EPs and one album, 2008's Orgy Porgy, built around their maniacal energy. In 2011, when The Pity Party were “in deep freeze”, Edwards formed Deap Vally with guitarist/vocalist Lindsey Troy. “I've only ever been in two-piece bands,” Edwards says, “I'm a monogamist.”

At Deap Vally's second show, a friend took an iPhone video of the band playing their “capitalist empowerment anthem” Gonna Make My Own Money, and it became their “calling card”, sweeping through blogs – and across the desk of major labels – long before they'd recorded anything. With the Deap Vally LP set for release on Island, and plentiful UK press hype having been steadily building, the duo are due for bona fide buzz-band status. It's a swift rise from their first tour, 18 months back.

“Our first-ever tour, we booked it ourselves,” Edwards recounts. “We played in the oldest bar in San Francisco, called the Saloon. And it literally had the oldest woman in San Francisco in it: this tiny old lady with no teeth and this pruney, shrivelled face, and clearly deaf because she sat right next to the speaker and watched us play. We also ended up playing this drag bar in San Francisco, with these really old drag queens in it. There was this one old queen who started calling me Reba McEntire. Like: 'Reba! Reba! Don't wait too long to play the next song, Reba!' And he was calling Lindsey Goldie Hawn: 'Goldie! Goldie! You're so beautiful, play the next song for me!' It was really weird, and really hard, trying to be Reba McEntire and Goldie Hawn whilst still Deap Vally.”

Deap Vally will be playing the following dates: