Bully have a profile on the 280-character website; the photo-sharing one; the data-collecting one. Often, it's bandleader Alicia Bognanno, herself, that's piloting them. But, the 28-year-old who leads the Nashville-based band, wielding super fuzzed riffs and passionate, hollered vocals kinda wishes she didn't have to.
"Having to keep up with any sort of social media is my least favourite aspect of being in a band," Bognanno admits. "If it were up to me I'd just write songs, make records, put them out. I understand why it's there and how it can be beneficial, [but] I hate having to be involved in social media. It bums me out knowing how much it really does help with records and ticket sales. I don't like being involved in it. It feels like a place where a lot of companies are profiting off your attention span and time, creating this desire to make you feel constantly validated. It doesn't make me feel good. I never go on Instagram or Twitter and come off of it feeling like a better person, or feeling better about myself. If anything, it's usually the opposite. I think, if I didn't play in a band for my job, I'd like to be way more off the grid."
Bognanno can handle the rest of the grind: she loves touring, playing guitar and, most of all, being in the studio - where she records and engineers all of Bully's songs, usually on analogue tape. She cut her teeth as an engineer: studying audio engineering, interning at Chicago's legendary Electrical Audio studio (where Bully would subsequently record their two LPs), and doing live and studio sound in her adopted hometown of Nashville. She's taken this interview in a tour van "somewhere in Virginia", she thinks, though she's not quite sure which state she's in.
The band are in the middle of another long bout of touring; a run of shows that will, eventually, bring Bully back to these shores ("Australia was definitely the best place that we've ever played," Bognanno enthuses). They're touring in the wake of their second LP, 2017's Losing, the follow-up to their 2015 debut, Feels Like.
Don't miss a beat with our FREE daily newsletter
In making the second Bully record, Bognanno wanted to "be a bit more patient" with the process of writing; challenging herself to write harder guitar parts, better lyrics. "I wanted to be happy with all the lyrics I wrote, instead of just settling for whatever came to mind the first time around," she says. "I needed to make sure that none of them were making me cringe and I was ok to sing them every night."
Bognanno is reluctant to talk about her songs at length - "I don't think that everybody needs to know every detail about every musician and have a breakdown of every song" - but given she tends to wear her emotions on her sleeve, people think they can tell what a song's about. Bognanno is fine for some "confusion" to exist between her reality and listeners' interpretations, but when she uncovers them in print, it can prove deleterious.
"I don't really read any reviews or a lot of press stuff, because I can be really critical [of myself]," Bognanno says. "I don't really want to have a stranger's point-of-view in the back of my mind when I'm trying to write a song in the future. I know how I respond to that, which is not very well... I'll read one thing that I maybe think was misinterpreted, or that other people wouldn't even think of as a negative thing, and it'll really just shut me down. It's really stressful."
Chief among her hated narratives: the recurring belief that Bully - with their fuzzy riffs, Electrical Audio recordings and love of The Breeders - are grunge revivalists. "The one thing that has come up, non-stop, with the past two records, is the whole ''90s grunge' thing," she sighs. "That's a little bit eye-roll-y to me. I was born in 1990. It was never the goal to replicate the era in which I was born. Sure, there's a bunch of great bands from that era that I like, that've surely crept in there as influences, but there's nothing about Bully which is trying to revive the past."
