“Singing is my true instrument,” says Bria Salmena, the L.A.-based singer-songwriter who might be most famous for playing guitar in Orville Peck’s touring band. “That’s really my preferred form of expression. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to put myself deeper into my songs, how to make my songs more like emotional journeys.” Combining shoegazey synths with grungey guitars, her debut full-length, Big Dog, is full of pained anthems of disconnection, alienation, and regret — all sung in a voice that sounds engaged and enraged, wounded and at times even feral.
It’s also her first release to bear her full name, after making a handful of records with the Toronto postpunk band Frigs and a pair of wry country-covers EPs credited simply to Bria. Remarkably, every release sounds like its own world with its own musical palettes and its own vocal demands. Looking over her small but diverse catalog, she’s not always happy with what she hears. “I listen to some of those older performances and it’s like, shit, I sound like I’m phoning it in.”
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To avoid her future self dismissing Big Dog, Salmena recruited Meg Remy of the Toronto experimental band U.S. Girls to serve as a coach and vocal producer. “Meg told me something that really stuck with me: A record is a permanent thing, so it’s always going to sound like this. That was pretty sobering, but I felt even more committed to getting everything just right. I knew I couldn’t let myself fuck this up.”
It wasn’t always easy, as Bria devised dramatic arrangements that both heightened the intensity of the songs and posed some significant challenges. One song in particular, “Stretch the Struggle,” took several throat-shredding takes: “It was a lot of held notes that go into these big, belty screams. We were trying to get full performances rather than spliced-together comps of performances.” Once she finally nailed it, the song became the strident heartbeat of Big Dog.
Now the challenge is how to re-create those harrowing performances onstage. “It’s becoming muscle memory at this point. The more I do it, hopefully the better I’ll get at it. I just have to not smoke as many cigs.”
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