On ‘Tarot Interlude’, the penultimate track on Pom Pom Squad‘s sophomore album, Mia Berrin’s best friend spells out the definition of the Tower Card: “It’s unsettling because it shows that no matter our plans for ourselves, a divine act can completely uproot everything.” Berrin has only pulled the card once, and it did, in fact, turn out to be a sign of significant upheaval, which the musician then stares right into on Mirror Starts Moving Without Me‘s momentous closer. But the journey of tearing through the looking glass, cathartic as it may be, is disheveled and disorienting. Following the acclaim of 2021’s Death of a Cheerleader, Berrin found pieces of herself fragmented and refracted as if through a hall of mirrors, though not beyond repair. Working with co-producer Cody Fitzgerald, she sought to shake off the expectations set around the Brooklyn band’s debut by leaning into her love of pop and singer-songwriter music as much as she tumbles through a dark, grungy chaos. “You must abandon what you’ve known before,” the tarot reading instructs, but in a way, Berrin responds by going further back to a knowledge of self that is formative, pure, and essential: Alice in Wonderland, horror movies, songs that shape you in ways new ones can’t. It’s as much a process of rediscovery as it is recovery: turning hell into an endless void, then through your honest reflection, back into wonderland.

We caught up with Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin to talk about how Alice in Wonderland, disco, Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, Prince, and more inspired Mirror Starts Moving Without Me.

A Spotify playlist

I was in a bit of a writer’s block going into the album. And then also on the very tail end of the album, I had to write two more songs and was really having trouble accessing the part of myself that could come up with two new songs. [laughs] I don’t know what exactly spurred the idea, but I was like, I’m going to make a playlist of every song I can remember from childhood to adulthood that really informed the way I hear and write music. Not just like, “Oh, I really loved this song,” or “I had a big phase with this song,” but songs that really changed something for me. I made this playlist and just listened to it over and over, and it was the thing that helped me finish the album and allowed us to finally go into the studio. As we were going into the studio, I told everyone how inspired I was and how excited I was about this idea, and I basically assigned everyone to make their playlist. We all had to listen to each other’s playlists and pick songs from each other’s playlists that we’d never heard before and be like, “What did you learn about the person from listening to their playlist?” or, “What’s a song that you’ve never heard before?” I got really extra with it.

I was so excited about the findings of all our shared playlists that I ended up making a Venn diagram of everyone’s songs in common, because we had a lot. And it was surprising – I’ve been in a band with Shelby [Keller] and Alex [Mercuri] for six years, Lauren [Marquez] has been in the band for I think two years now, and Cody [Fitzgerald] and I had been working together for a year before we went into the studio. Lauren and Cody had never met before the sessions – they had the most songs in common! Cody, Lauren, and I had a ton in common; all of us had at least two or three artists or songs in common, and that’s pretty incredible. Or we were going through each other’s playlists and going, like, “I should have put that one, I totally forgot about that song!” But it really showed me that I have a really good group of collaborators in that we value a lot of the same things about music. And then, as we were in the studio, we were pulling references from our playlists as opposed to being like, “Well, what are our contemporaries doing?” I still reference that playlist a lot when I’m going back to write.

Why was it important to you to choose formative rather than contemporary influences?

That’s a good question. I think being an independent musician now is very mentally challenging. This is going to sound so boring, but if you’re someone with any aspiration for commercial success, it’s so easy to have your creativity completely zapped from you. And that’s kind of what I was feeling. I think there’s a lot of pressure as an artist to be the artist, the advertiser, the marketer, and to be thinking about TikTok trends. To me, it’s all detrimental to the music and to any kind of true creative expression, because I found myself thinking, “What does my label want? What do fans want? What does press want? What will I get criticized for the least? How do I just avoid any negative feeling? How do I maximize my commercial potential?” That’s not the type of artist that I am, and it’s not the type of artist I want to be. There’s nothing wrong with being that type of artist, but for me, it completely eats away at the creative side.

For a second, I was having a lot of trouble writing because I was lost in thinking about everything except my creative instincts. I think that’s part of the pressure of a second album. If people like your first album, you’re like, “Well, I want them to keep liking me.” And the fact is that nobody wants to listen to something that feels rote or mechanical. I feel like people can tell when you’re doing something that’s not true to you. Early in the writing stages of this album, I found myself pushing back my creative instincts because I was thinking about what other people would want. That’s not fair to me, and that’s also not fair to the people who actually like my music and this project. I was also at a spot in my life where I felt like I needed to start peeling back the layers and getting back in touch with who I am. That really became the impetus for the album – trying to carve away anything that is not authentic to me or pure creative impulse.

You mentioned asking everyone what they learned about each other through their picks. What’s something you learned about yourself?

In terms of what I learned about my taste, I think there was a lot of pressure at the beginning of this album to stay in a more rock-focused zone. And I just found that rock music and indie rock are part of my larger sonic palette, but they’re not the things I value most in a song. I think part of the reason I was having so much trouble writing was that I was really trying to pressure myself to stay in this one particular box. When I first started playing music, it was a big part of my induction into music, like riot grrrl and the DIY punk scene and grunge music. It’s always going to be a part of the tapestry of what I do. But I found that a lot of the things on my playlist were very songwriting-focused, lyrics-focused. For me, I can’t get into a song if I can’t get into the lyrics. I found myself really wanting to explore my voice more – literally as a vocalist, as a lyricist – and lean more into myself as a producer this time around. The playlist kind of helped me reverse-engineer the type of songs I want to write and what makes the most sense for these lyrics.

Alice in Wonderland

What brought you back to that book as a reference point?

When I’m conceptualizing stuff, Death of a Cheerleader really started with color and texture – that kind of cherry red, red latex texture, which is a weird starting place. This one really started with mood, feeling, and color. The formative place that ‘Downhill’ came out of, and that served as a reference point for the album generally – this is so abstract, but I wanted it to sound like you’re at the bottom of a well. I wanted it to be a deep, dark place that blooms out into something. But I kept going back to this well feeling, and I think the sense of loss, confusion, fear, and disorientation brought me back to Alice in Wonderland.

Alice in Wonderland is one of my favorite stories ever. I love the 1951 Disney film, and there have been a lot of great adaptations that are really sick as well. But I always come back to that character. I was very stuck on the concept of trying to figure out what I like without any pretense, detached from any sense of cool, just gut reactions to things that I loved. And one of those things was Alice in Wonderland. I even had an Alice in Wonderland-themed Bar Mitzvah, it was really fucking funny. It just feels like it came back to me at the perfect time when I was exploring this story about a kind of loss of my sense of self. It felt like a very apt character to play with and explore for this album cycle, and also to get back in touch with my childhood self.

There’s that famous quote from the book: “Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.” That question obviously marks a lot of coming-of-age stories, and Death of a Cheerleader fit into that category. But I feel like Mirror Starts Moving Without Me tackles this loss of self from a different perspective, one that’s tied to the disorientation following the success of your debut album. Did you feel like your sense of identity was upended, or that it became a different sort of puzzle, in a way?

Yeah, definitely. I do feel like my sense of self was really upended in the aftermath of Death of a Cheerleader. They say you have your whole life to write your first album, and then you have a year to write your second, and it’s kind of true. The oldest songs on Death of a Cheerleader I wrote when I was 16 or 17. For this album, there’s only one song that’s “old”; everything else was written after Death of a Cheerleader. It was a really confusing time. Obviously, I’m not a big artist, but any kind of analysis you see other people make about you or your art – online, in person, or at a merch table – is slightly disorienting. You write this thing that’s so personal to you, and then it becomes everyone else’s. And everyone else’ take on it is fair – positive, negative, that’s fair. There’s no objective truth about music. But it’s also very disorienting to then analyze yourself as an outside party, looking at this thing you made – that you’ve loved to do since you were a kid – and be like, “Now I have to reverse-engineer what people like about it if I want to succeed a second time.” I felt lost in the sauce in that way.

Were you inspired by the sequel, Through the Looking Glass, as well, given the mirror symbolism?

Yeah, absolutely. I knew that the album was going to be called Mirror Starts Moving Without Me for a while. That mirror idea was something that just kept coming back to me. I think it all became this big blanket of the mirror concept informing me coming back to a lot these references. Obviously, the cover art is very much inspired by Through the Looking Glass. That whole imagery definitely comes from that story.

Prince

I read that your mother introduced you to his music.

Yeah, technically both my parents, but a lot of my music taste is from my mom. My first memory of music is Prince. When I was like really little, my family was on a road trip, and I remember that when my parents thought that me and my siblings were asleep, that’s when they would listen to, you know, the good music, the adult music. [laughs] So I would pretend to be asleep and listen to whatever they were listening to. They started listening to Prince, and it was a really formative moment in my life. It was just so electric and incredible. He’s just an amazing, genre-defying artist, and I take a lot of inspiration from him and his creative practice.

Was he one of those artists you went back to around the recording?

Yeah, absolutely. I was reading a book about Prince while we were in the studio. And ‘Lolita’ is the first song on my playlist of songs that I can remember from my childhood. Something that I love about Prince is how much vision he had for his project. Kind of similarly, he produced, he conceptualized the visuals, he was an instrumentalist; he just was a workhorse, and that’s just the kind of artist I am. I also love how identity-defying he was. I think about him a lot when I work, and I was listening to a lot of Prince while I was working on the production of the album.

Disco

We mentioned ‘Downhill’, and you can really hear the disco influence on that song. What took you in that direction?

From the Death of a Cheerleader headline tour onward, I had a little mental disco revival. I really started falling in love with pop music around that time. This is not disco, but I’m going to mention it anyway – I was listening to CAPRISONGS by FKA twigs, which is one of my favorite albums of the last few years, if not my favorite. I think I listened to it literally every single day for the whole entire tour. I would just sit in the back of the van and listen to it, and I just loved it so much. I love twigs as an artist, so hearing her do something a little bit different and have fun with her project was kind of the first inclination for me.

I was talking to my mom about this new discovery of loving pop, and she sent me a long playlist of things that she thought I would like, and there was a lot of Donna Summer on it. So I started listening to a lot of Donna Summer, and then Beyoncé’s Renaissance came out, and I was listening to it a lot. Seeing Beyoncé and twigs, these two artists that are clearly perfectionists about their craft, just have a lot of fun with it was really transformative for me, because I tend to be a little bit more nose-to-the grindstone, serious, and perfectionistic about my project.

I’m a little bit of a music history nerd, and the rock versus disco dichotomy really was fascinating to me as someone who people associate with the rock world more. The whole “disco sucks” movement – rock was very white, male-dominated; it was not started by white males, but it became very white, male-dominated. When white men took over rock and roll, all of the people of color and the queers went to disco. Rock became this place for men to express sexual frustration, aggression, desire, or whatever, and disco became this place where the queers and the people of color could escape from a world that was otherwise didn’t care or wasn’t accepting of them. I think that we still kind of see the rock versus pop face-off in the modern era more than even we would like to believe. I think there are more people who listen to both than ever, but being an artist who’s more associated with the rock side, but also being queer and being a person of color, I still think the rock world is severely missing some fun and queer POC energy.

Disco just became this escape for me, too. I think ‘Downhill’ came out of that place – it literally starts as a rock song and becomes a dance song, so it felt like this very literal exploration of, how do I marry these two sides of myself? How do I take this darker, moodier part of my persona and still try to have a lot of fun with it?

Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue

How did the film or the main character’s journey resonate with you around the making of the album?

I love that movie. I have trouble recommending it because obviously it is so disturbing, but it’s just such a special film. For me, watching it helped me start to hone in on the language I wanted to use to talk about the subject matter of this album. Sometimes you get faced with a piece of art that helps you put a feeling into words, or something that you felt but never knew was, like, real. That’s what that movie was for me. I was already kind of playing with the concept of dissociation. Obviously, the title, Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, is very much inspired by the horror movie trope, where your main character is looking in a mirror, and the mirror does something that the main character doesn’t do and it reveals some kind of hidden desire or ulterior ambition. That image felt like something extremely relevant to my life.

The nature of being a performer and wanting to be a public person – there’s a version of you that you can’t entirely control that exists for other people. And it’s disconcerting, especially as someone whose sense of identity can already be a bit tenuous, to feel like there’s another version of you out there that is up for interpretation or up for grabs, so to speak, that other people can latch on to and make into whatever they want. It’s like your avatar in a way. Seeing that journey externalized through film was really important for me because it was a feeling I didn’t understand. It came to me at a time in my life where I really needed to see it, and it definitely helped inform the subject matter and the imagery of the album.

How do you work towards drawing a line, mentally, between your personal life and your persona as Pom Pom Squad? Is that a question you find yourself wrestling with?

Yeah, a bit. I mean, I love doing this, and I want to do this for a long time. I think that it is a good question to start asking myself now: how do I make it sustainable for myself? Because it is getting very mentally taxing, trying to think in character all the time. And it’s very easy for me to slip into an identity or a character and not think about my own instincts or wants and needs. I’ve had to really find ways to separate, just on a personal level. I think it’s always gonna be ongoing, but I think when I was writing Mirror, it was finally starting to get to a place where I was like, “I need to create some kind of separation for myself.” It’s weird, because it’s not something that’s easy to explain, and it’s not something that’s necessarily intuitive to make someone else understand. I think that’s also kind of why art exists, though. Art exists for the feelings that are hard to explain and are hard to make someone understand.

Tarot Readings

This ties into the final two tracks, the interlude and the closer. Tell me about the symbolism of the Tower and how it figured into the resolution of the album.

I started messing around with tarot cards in high school. My best friend is amazing at reading tarot and reading people’s charts. It’s her voice in the interlude, it’s her reading the definition. It’s something she and I bond over and talk about a lot, and if I’m really going through it, I’ll call her, and I’ll ask her to pull a card for me. I’m not a religious person necessarily; I am a spiritual person, and I think that going through life unmoored to any kind of system of belief is treacherous. I think people who are confused by religion as a concept – I don’t think it’s all that difficult to understand, in that everyone just wants to feel like what we’re doing has purpose and reason. I was walking through life for a while really in the day-to-day, and with no real thought towards greater purpose or ambition. I just felt completely unmoored and horrid.

Getting back in touch with a more spiritual side of myself started with reading tarot again and pulling my cards. If there’s a big crossroads in my life, I’ll always pull cards. I’ve only ever pulled the Tower card once, and it predicted this huge upheaval in my life that I never saw coming. I think that the past few years of my life, after Death of a Cheerleader, have been defined by that upheaval and personal chaos. That is the big piece that I’m attacking in the album generally, but also specifically with the song ‘Tower’. It feels like the natural end of a moment. The other thing about being an artist and releasing albums is it’s very ceremonious, in the way that people who don’t have music careers or whatever have birthday parties or weddings or anniversaries. An album is a personal anniversary in a weird way, for me at least. It marks a phase of my life, and it essentially commemorates that moment. This time period of my life, the Mirror time period, was marked by a lot of disorientation and confusion and chaos and upheaval, and that all felt very encompassed in pulling this card.

I had the lyrics for ‘Tower’ sitting around for a long time. When I started writing that song, I sang a little bit of it, I just started crying, and then I didn’t touch the song for like a year. It just felt like I came upon something that was a little bit too hot to touch then. But in coming back to it, it felt like the close of this moment. For me, Tarot marks just putting belief in something in that there’s a purpose beyond what I can see. It helped me find my way back to some kind of groundedness and sense of self. And it’s also something that helps me connect with my best friend.

Did it help you see a sense of purpose beyond or within the upheaval?

People always tell me, “Well, maybe you haven’t resolved it because you haven’t learned a lesson from it.” And I really resented that. I still resent it in a way, like, “Well, you don’t feel better because you haven’t learned from it”. I think there’s truth to that; there were definitely some really hard lessons that I had to learn over the last few years. I’m grateful that I did, because I feel like I’ve come out on the other side more emotionally capable than I was a few years ago. The interesting thing about Mirror is that it’s a part of my life that really needs to end and needed to end. It almost feels like this long-delayed gratification because the songs were so difficult to write, and it was such a difficult time that now what I’m left with is just the fun part, which is performing these fun songs. It does feel like a reward at the end of a very, very long few years, in a weird way. It’s going to be interesting recontextualizing them in a live space, and I think that’s the positive spin of “The songs aren’t yours anymore.” I get to stop singing about what they meant to me and start singing to what they mean to someone else.

EMDR therapy

I only did it a little bit, but it’s this type of therapy where you hold these two little things in your hands, and they’re lights, and the lights flip back and forth. You’re supposed to keep moving your eyes from light to light, and they ask you a bunch of questions. For whatever reason, I was having the most vivid, visual memories or images that I’ve ever had while I was doing this EMDR therapy, and that’s where a lot of the imagery came from. There’s a visual for ‘Doll Song’ that, when I was doing EMDR therapy, I had this vision of myself as a doll, and I just kept shrinking, and I was falling through this completely dark, void space. The therapist asks you questions like, “You come upon a picture frame in a long hall, what’s in the frame?” It’s very fucking weird. But it was, without me realizing, the impetus for the visuals of this era, of being this figure alone in this completely dark void. And that imagery feels very representative of starting over. Death of a Cheerleader being so colorful and so bright and Mirror being nearly devoid of color – it literally feels like wiping the slate clean. That was scary to start, but I’m proud of it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Pom Pom Squad’s Mirror Starts Moving Without Me is out now via City Slang Records.