White Lung's Mish Barber-Way on 'Paradise,' Punk Fans & Preconceived Notions: Q&A
Mish Barber-Way of White Lung was this close to ripping the industrial entrails of the building straight out of the casings that adhered them to the ceiling.
It was a muggy night in New York, the kind that curls your hair and dampens every surface, and Barber-Way was in the process of running headlong into the songs of Paradise, White Lung’s brand new album and the most deliberate, ambitious effort to date. The venue—the basement of a posh gallery/media space in the Meatpacking District that could only be entered through a door in the garage of the space—was packed to the brim with thrashing, beer-spilling, fist-raising fans. (Jaden Smith was rumored to be in attendance, but it was hard to spot him given the sardine can-like closeness of the crowd.)
As Barber-Way wailed through Paradise, throwing the verses of these new songs into the dank air, her own hands joined her words as she wrapped them around the pipes that hung low over the stage. For a second there, it seemed like Barber-Way was going to not-so-metaphorically swing from the rafters... even if the rafters were just the shallow nooks in between the wires and tubes that were growing increasingly more dewy thanks to the sweat of her ecstatic and boisterous crowd.
The setting is familiar for the Vancouver-bred outfit—hot, loud, packed-to-the-gills scenes aren’t uncommon at their shows—but the context has changed: Paradise, their fourth studio album, represents a newfound determination to push the limits of how Barber-Way, guitarist Kenneth William and drummer Anne-Marie Vassiliou write, perform and define punk. White Lung will spend the rest of the summer touring in support of Paradise—after a run in Europe, they’ll commence a lengthy string of dates Stateside starting in Los Angeles on July 8—but before then, we caught up with Barber-Way about the album, how it posed new challenges and what it’s taught her, so far, about what she wants for herself and her band as they continue to fall for these songs.
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