All-girl punk band Skunk Motel is riding high after releasing their debut EP on June 20.
Having performed at several Music Nova Scotia showcases and being crowned The Coast’s gold winner for Best Punk Band in 2024, the four members of Skunk Motel have continued to up the ante with their five-track debut, wearing all of their influences on their sleeve as they push the limits of their sound.
The band consists of guitar player Kate Bo, bassist Sara Eve, vocalist Sarah Ellen Morrison and drummer Maya Taraschi. All four of them have been involved in the Halifax music scene for years, making Skunk Motel a scene-supergroup. Since their inception, they’ve managed to sell out some of the city’s most notable venues, including Seahorse Tavern and Gus’ Pub.
As drummer and lyricist Tarashi explains, one of the band’s major goals is to create a safe space for women to be loud.
“It’s crazy, we kind of took off way faster than we thought we would originally,” says Taraschi in an interview with The Coast. “At first it was just us wanting to jam with other women and try to create a space for safeness and having fun with other women.”
She says that people who attended their shows resonated with their intention, leading to the success they’ve had so far.
“It’s cool to see that not only that there’s a want for spaces where they can get loud and be themselves, but also there’s so much support, just people show up in those spaces.”
Welcome to the Motel
Skunk Motel’s debut EP has been in the works for some time. It started as they were doing gigs with another Halifax-based punk band, Like A Motorcycle, who have since disbanded as of October 2024. They toured together across Atlantic Canada in the summer of 2023.
“They were helping us get started a bit, just kind of helping us shape what it was that we wanted to do, and that grew into them helping us with our record,” says Taraschi.
Guitarists for Like A Motorcycle KT Lamond and Dave Casey respectively produced and recorded Skunk Motel’s EP with Toronto’s Lawrence Currie mixing and Noah Mintz mastering. The result is an album that is unapologetically punk.
The band rolled out two singles prior to the release, including “Pretty Good 4 A Girl”, a classic punk rock track, fighting against patriarchal structures with fuzzy power chords and melodic chants.
“SLUDGE” is particularly interesting as it may come as unexpected to those looking for a traditional punk record: the opening is reminiscent of Hendrix with that bluesy guitar wail before following into a loud rager, going back and forth between heavy blues rock to headbanging punk. It’s a show of versatility for the band, and an indication of their influences.
“It’s very ZZ Top, blues inspired,” says Taraschi. That was one of the ones that was heavily inspired by and driven by Kate [Bo], who again loves like the bluesy rock type stuff.”
Enjoy your stay
It’s also indicative of Skunk Motel’s creative process. While Taraschi pens many of the lyrics, the process of putting songs together is collaborative. With everyone coming from different musical backgrounds and projects, composition usually requires a jam session to get their songs to where they want to be.
In the case of “SLUDGE”, that process is undeniably working. The track has been in CIOE 97.5 FM’s East Coast Top 30 for nine weeks as of writing, currently sitting at its highest peak of eighth place. Now with the full EP out, they’re having an even better time performing for their fans.
“It’s really cool,” says Taraschi. “Now that the songs are out, at shows, people are actually singing our lyrics back at us. So that’s really crazy.”
Furthermore, Skunk Motel isn’t just content on being a punk band. As Taraschi says, they don’t want to corner themselves.
“If something’s going a certain direction… we don’t try to stop it. We’re like, OK, let’s see where this goes and see if we like it, and we’re not going to try to corner ourselves just because we call ourselves a certain genre.”
What’s more punk than that?
Skunk Motel is currently preparing for an EP release show which has yet to be announced. They’ll post about it on their social media once the details are finalized. They’ll also be playing at Nova Scotia Music Week in October, which takes place in Yarmouth this year.
This article appears in Jul 1-31, 2025.