Gun-Shy Butterfly meld sugary harmonies and urgent hooks with fuzzed-out guitars for a tough and tuneful sensibility evoking the 1990s alt-rock, grunge, and Riot Grrrl scenes, especially bands like Veruca Salt, L7, The Breeders, and Bleach-era Nirvana. Exter and White pen lyrics that are intelligent and incendiary, smoldering with social commentary and justified anger. Both musicians are multi-instrumentalists with well-developed songwriting sensibilities. Their Philadelphia-based two-piece band steps forward with its debut EP Uncomplicated, featuring the lead-off single Dark Side.
“Dark Side” features thick walls of feedback-dripping power chords, barbed alt-rock riffs, strangled guitar leads, and pounding Dave Grohl-style drums. It’s about a former relationship of White’s that ended in her losing her social circle while he got off consequence-free.
The band’s evocative name embodies an abstraction of raw female energy. “I wanted a name that represented transformation. That showed getting through the hardest shit and turning into a beautiful thing, like a butterfly,” White says. Rhyming and riffing, she added the “gun-shy” as a reflection on how it feels to face the same challenges over and over again, pressing on even when you don’t trust the outcome.
Outside of creative pursuits, White and Exter are both mothers in their 40s who are flipping the script on expectations about what women their age “should” be doing.