GOLD WINNER
Steel Cut Oatswebsite
SILVER WINNER
Pillow Fitewebsite
BRONZE WINNER
John Snowwebsite
It all started as a bit of an in-joke, Sarah Roberts recalls. She and two fellow music-obsessed pals (Sophie Janke and Emma Laffoley) were on a camping trip fuelled by endless bowls of porridge when “we were just canoeing down a lake being like ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we started a band?’ We went back the next week and went ‘Okay, I guess we’re going to make music now.’” Never mind none of them had ever played in a band before: Soon, the trio rounded out their pack—and their Alvvays-meets-Diet Cig sound—with Jo Koechling and Ted Morris.
They started hitting stages around town in packed-house shows, with fans comparing them to The Cranberries. “We make shows an experience. It's not just music: You go there to have a full experience front-to-back of being excited, angry, creeped out, happy. Like, you go there to have a full field of emotions paired with the outfits that we're wearing, the vibes we’re creating, the sound of course, but there's so much more to our performance,” Roberts adds.
When asked why the band has resonated so quickly with fans, she credits the skills and energy of all her bandmates and “the fact that three of our musicians are kind of newbies in the musician world, but have gotten up there and put ourselves out there as women to sing these songs that have this feminist narrative. I think that resonates with a lot of people because it is pretty brave.”
Steel Cut Oats will be dropping its first album in December 2022.
