Taking Deep Breaths

“For me, lyrics are really important on this record, whereas in the past they'd be straight-up reactionary – like someone would do something shitty to me that day... and then I'd write a song about it and that would be it.” This is Mish Way, frontwoman for Canadian punk band White Lung, talking about their third album, Deep Fantasy, an album that tackles deeper lyrical themes than 2010's It's The Evil and 2012's Sorry. “The goal is to write more intelligent songs, y'know; I'm not a punk, I'm a fucking musician and I always want to improve my craft… For me I was trying to make an album that had something intelligent to say about the current female condition.

“On this record I'm looking at everything from love and what it means to care about someone again, to the fact that we live in a white culture, to idiotic things like body dysmorphia, the way that women pick and toil and play with and manipulate our bodies, for the sake of what? All things that I struggle with on a daily basis… The record is me trying to figure out what's going on and how I feel right now about the state of myself as a woman and about all women and men too, y'know. That's something I think about all the time: gender and sex.”

It's her interest in gender issues that has proved Way an almost outspoken figure in the punk world; she's a vocal feminist, whose writing has been published in Tavi Gevinson's teen mag Rookie and in VICE. But she admits that punk “gave us a space where we could talk about whatever the fuck we wanted to… You can be whoever the hell you want”.

To her, feminism is simple, and it becoming a part of her music definitely wasn't a choice. “That's just a huge part of who I am, so really for me it's personal – performance is very personal; the political is personal to me, especially with my rights to what I can do with my goddamn uterus being talked about, how can I not take that personally?

“All it really means to me is that I don't totally hate myself for being a woman, that I believe in equal rights and I believe that women are powerful creatures, we're amazing, and men are fucking powerful creatures too, but I just think that the archaic constructions of what masculinity and femininity mean are the things that are really messed up.”

As well as writing for younger female audiences, she's taught at Girls Rock Camp, and knows a thing or two about “sound guys who are going to treat you like you're ridiculous or stupid when you get up on stage just because you're wearing a fucking nice dress”.

“I wouldn't trade my position for anything. I love being a woman. I don't want to be another dude noodling and masturbating to his guitar. Forget that… You just have to make your content worthwhile. People can't say shit if the music is good. I mean, they can, but they don't have a leg to stand on.”