“We’re a very political band,” says Breagha Cuinn, one half of punk rock band Bratakus. “It’s so easy to get burned out with political stuff and feeling you’re fighting a losing battle, so it’s important to share the messages in our songs so people don’t feel alone.”
Cuinn, along with her bandmate/sister Onnagh, are set to release their second album Hagridden on February 13, a relentless, widescreen Stoogian politico-punk manifesto. The songs are like ten electric shocks railing against late-stage capitalism and white patriarchy, moored by Breagha’s pencil-sharpenings’ voice, which punches its messages with the phlegmy tone of Linda Blair in The Exorcist. “Almost every time I come off stage, a guy will come up to me and say:’ I didn’t expect such a big, powerful voice to come out of such a tiny wee girl,” Breaghan says, sitting next to her sister over Zoom. “It correlates to what things are seen as ‘feminine’ and less powerful.” The album includes the explosive ‘Turnstile’ which features the giant-footstep drums from The Hives Chris Dangerous; Behave which is about being groped at a gig (“It’s really disheartening the amount of reckless macho aggression is prominent at a lot of shows”); and the propulsive ‘Final Girls’, which takes the horror movie trope – that the chaste, ‘good girl’ survives the killer – and applies it to the modern world. “The onus shouldn’t be on women to behave in a certain way in order to be safe or respected,” explains Breagha.
Since they began a decade ago, do they think sexism has decreased in the alternative scene? “That’s a kind of hard question to answer,” says Onnagh. “I wouldn’t say I’ve noticed a huge improvement since we began.” Breaghan says that what she has seen an increase in is ‘fake inclusivity’. “At festivals you will get these performative gestures like ‘Ladies Night’ which are attempts to combat critiques that there aren’t any women on the line up. But they will happen on the Thursday, before anyone has actually got to the festival,” she says. “Why not just have a more diverse line up?”
The duo grew up in Tomintoul, the highest village in the Cairngorms. It was isolated from urban subcultures, but their parents were veterans of the Scottish DIY punk scene of the 90s and 2000s (her dad was in punk band Sedition). “Some of our earliest memories are of being in our house, which is in the middle of nowhere, and our dad’s friends rehearsing in our living room,” remembers Oonagh. “Politics was always openly discussed. Our mum is a very outspoken women who is unafraid to speak up about the things she believes in.”
Getting a mix CD which contained Bikini Kill’s ‘Tony Randall’ for Breagha’s sixth birthday was a key moment for the development of the band. “I started to read about the Riot Grrrl scene, where they combined feminism and punk,” she says.” Girls who were angry and wanted to make music and maybe they didn’t even know how to play instruments, but they just figured it out. That was really inspiring to me.”
Seeing the video for The Distillers’ ‘Drain the Blood’ on Kerrang! TV was an epiphany for 8-year-old Breagha. “I was at my gran’s house, and hearing the gravel and grit that she had in her voice blew me mind,” she remembers. “It just shows you how much representation matters,” says Oonagh.
Hagridden is the follow-up to 2017’s Target Grrrl and its birth has been a difficult one. Despite one of the tracks – Real Men Eat Meat – appearing in early form on their Bandcamp page as early as 2021, it’s taken the band years to finally release the full album. Breagha wrote their follow-up album and then ditched it. “I was not inspired by what I had written and it was too similar to the first album,” she says. She lifted the songwriting restrictions she’d put on herself and wrote a new batch of songs. “I spent a year writing solo songs in loads of different genres and subject matters.” After that songwriting cycle cleared out her system, she was ready to write for Bratakus again. A new album was completed but then the tech failed. “We recorded the entire album in our home studio but our laptop got destroyed and we lost it,” she explains. “Then different hold ups like the pandemic and health issues meant we weren’t able to release it,” she says. It’s been worth the wait. Still, the band are taking no chances with the next one. “‘Hagridden’ means ‘plagued by nightmares’. It became a self-fulfilling prophecy,” jokes Brenagha. “We’re going to call the next one ‘Smooth Sailing.'”
