WAR BUNNIES were formed in 2021 by music journalist and lead singer/bassist (and ANTIGRAVITY contributor) Sabrina Stone and guitarist Aaron Younce (Them Ol’ Ghosts) as a counter to the uncertainty and silence of the early COVID years. Marrying punk, metal, and theatre dramatics, WAR BUNNIES—whose current line-up consists of Stone, Younce, and drummer Lex Condes (leafdrinker, Rare Seed)—is primarily concerned with creating music that is as introspective and cathartic as it is exhilarating. Their music is meant to be listened to at high volumes and, even more importantly, in a large room full of other people moshing, dancing, and being in community together. Over the past five years, they’ve released one EP and are in the process of recording and releasing singles from what will be their next release.
On a gentle May evening, I met with Stone, Younce, and Condes—and their mascot, Bleu the dog—at their practice space in Bayou St. John. Over the course of two hours, we had a sprawling conversation that explored everything from the band’s influences and origins, covering Chris Cornell (not for the weak!), expanding on their sound, and how live music can provide the sense of community that people are craving.
So, to get started: What exactly is a war bunny?
Sabrina Stone: A war bunny is two things. One, it is a small, quiet, nice person who’s underestimated, but is actually really fierce and powerful. And two, it’s kind of just quietly an armadillo.
What are the origins of WAR BUNNIES the band?
SS: I had actually gone into Aaron’s shop because he runs Strange Guitarworks and I had gone to get a guitar fixed up. When I met him, I was in his shop with a broken leg, posters for a show, CDs, and a guitar I needed fixed up. And we met a few times after that. Finally, I was like, do you want to be in a band with me? And he was like, absolutely not. And then he actually listened to the music I was doing and was like, oh, wait, no, I would be down for this. It was a COVID-era thing [in 2021]. We had a lot of time and space and everyone was so quiet during COVID that being really loud was something I feel like we were all craving having the ability to do.
What musical backgrounds do you all come from?
Aaron Younce: I come from more of a rock and punk and metal background. My first concert was Metallica—actually, my parents took me to a Beach Boys concert when I was a child.
You can definitely hear those influences in your music, especially in the first EP. In particular, there is a Soundgarden influence that is really very apparent throughout that EP.
AY: Yeah, I had Superunknown when I was like 12 years old. I also grew up listening to Nirvana and Alice in Chains and all that stuff, too.
Lex Condes: I guess I listened to classic rock growing up on the radio, and then got into Ty Segall and Brian Jonestown Massacre and Pixies and Deerhunter in high school when I started playing in bands. My brother also got me into Northeastern hip-hop like The Roots and A Tribe Called Quest, and I also got into bands like Baroness and Melvins around that time. Other than that, I was in a few bands in college—Heavy Friends, leafdrinker—and then Rare Seed and WAR BUNNIES now.
SS: My first real concert was Garbage, No Doubt, and The Distillers, which was perfect because they and Hole, they’re examples of what a kind of female-fronted version of [rock] can be. And they just dominated the stage. I literally remember Gwen Stefani doing one-handed push-ups on stage while singing into a microphone. And I was like, that’s cool! That’s rock’n’roll. But yeah, I also grew up doing classical and a lot of the standard music student stuff.
Your theatrical background also comes across in your performances.
SS: [Laughs] I’m so sorry.
If you look at rock and metal performances, though, there’s a lot of theatrics in that!
SS: That’s true.
We were talking earlier about when WAR BUNNIES formed, that it was during COVID in 2021 and things were more quiet and you all wanted to create music that was louder. Do you want to speak more about that?
AY: We got together and just kind of [started] throwing spaghetti at the wall. We weren’t really sure what we wanted to sound like, we didn’t really have a direction. Our first song we actually wrote was a song I wrote on a Wurlitzer [piano], [a] soul ballad thing. And then after that, we’re like, OK, well, why don’t we try to do some rock stuff with loud, distorted guitar and fuzzed-out bass? We didn’t have a drummer, so we did everything to a beat machine, an Akai XR20 drum machine.
SS: We did one performance [with the drum machine]. It was with Guts Club on the second story of Blue Cypress Books. Lindsey [Baker, guitarist and vocalist for Guts Club] had made [posters] that said “Earth’s loudest book signing,” because it was also the release of the first edition of the New Orleans Arts Rag [Stone is the founder and editor]. We were so loud, we were afraid that we were going to break the glass because it’s an all glass room! And that was even before we had a drummer.
AY: During that very nascent period of our songwriting, we were writing everything to this beat machine. And so it definitely had this kind of almost like Nine Inch Nails quality to it, or like a Radiohead kind of quality. But we knew that we wanted a drummer. We just hadn’t found one. Luckily, we ended up finding a drummer [original WAR BUNNIES drummer, Ana De Ferreira]. You can’t really be a rock band without a drummer. Even Nine Inch Nails has a drummer.
SS: I actually got to go [see Nine Inch Nails at the Smoothie King Center in February] because we had just played at Okay Bar and we’d done a Nine Inch Nails cover for the first time ever. We did “Head Like A Hole.” One of the people who was at the show called me 10 minutes before the [Nine Inch Nails show] and was like, oh wait, aren’t you a Nine Inch Nails fan? Do you want to come to the show? So from now on, we just have to cover whoever we want to go see.
That’s a good segue because y’all have covered Soundgarden’s “The Day I Tried to Live” in your live shows. Why that song in particular?
AY: At the shop that I have, Strange Guitarworks, we have a huge playlist that just plays anything from Bach to Meshuggah to Frank Sinatra and everything in between. And so one day, “The Day I Tried to Live” came on and I was just listening to it and I hadn’t heard it in a long time. And I was like, man, this song rocks and I really like that it’s halfway in seven. It bounces back and forth between odd time signatures like a lot of their songs do. And it just seemed like a really interesting challenge to play something that vacillates between odd times, and it also seemed like something we could probably pull off with our very minimalist kind of instrumentation that we run. So we decided to give it a try and it worked. And also Sabrina can sing like Chris Cornell. I’ve never been in a band before with somebody who can actually hit those notes.
Many people will try to cover Chris Cornell, but most people should not.
AY: Correct. We tried it and we’re like, hey, this actually works pretty well. It worked so well, in fact, that when we were in the studio working on our second EP we decided to record a version of it.
SS: Yeah, and we’ll probably release [the cover] in conjunction with the article because we also did a live video recording of it at The Rabbit Hole.
I wanted to comment too that the lyrics in that song, which are both dark and hopeful, also tie in with the lyrics in your first EP, What You Wanted. That EP is interesting because it’s not your typical rock album with love ballads or even really any breakup ballads. Can you speak more about the lyrics and the songs in that first EP?
SS: We started it with a single called “What You Wanted,” which is also the name of the EP and the first music video we did and everything. And the full line is, “I hope you want what you wanted when you wished for it, cause you’ve got me now.” So many of our songs are about being exhausted and fed up and going through it, but realizing that everybody else is, too. And I think it has drawn really specific fans to us because we’re all overworked all the time.
AY: That’s what she’s described as aggressive self-help.
SS: Yeah. [laughs] Aggressive self-care. Lex, when you joined the band, did the lyrics speak to you, too?
LC: Of course.
SS: The first song that we released for this kind of new era was “Didn’t Do It To You.” And that starts with, “I’m circumnavigating all of your trauma / You think you’re mad at me but you’re mad at your mama / I didn’t do it to you.” And so now all the new songs we’re writing, there’s a lot of self-evaluation… We’re not being preachy about it, but we’re trying to talk about real things that are personal, but also universal.
WAR BUNNIES perform at a house show on May 16 in Bayou St. John.
So would you say that you view music, your music, not only as art but as also a message?
SS: Yeah, I write most of the lyrics, but we all discuss them and make sure that they’re things that we all care about and relate to. We’re not exactly political. It’s more personal politics—
AY: Or interpersonal kind of dynamics.
SS: Yeah. And there’s almost no breakup or love songs. There’s enough of that out there.
AY: We’re also not trying to write stuff to be universally appealing in the way that pop songwriting’s done. We’re not trying to write these songs so they’re pop hits, we’re just writing songs that feel cathartic for us to write.
How has your sound changed since Lex joined the band? Because I know that every time you add a new member, they’re going to bring their own flavor to things.
LC: You guys have already made me better conditioned.
AY: I would say that we’re pushing more boundaries now than we used to. We’re trying to take it into a more challenging direction. And he’s an amazing drummer, so we’re able to execute that stuff with him.
SS: Everything also feels a little bit heavier in a good way. It’s like there’s even more strength there, and [Lex’s drumming] is definitely influencing the way we’re writing. We’ve been writing a lot, and we’re going into the studio as soon as I’m back from the summer, because we have four new songs that are getting really, really close.
AY: When we found out that Lex was interested in joining the band, I was really excited because I used to go see one of his bands—
SS: leafdrinker!
AY: They’re almost doom metal. And so I was really excited when I heard that he was interested in joining the band because I was like, I want to tap into some of that. And so that’s what we’re doing a little more. We’re just trying to make it a little heavier, a little bigger, and a little more expansive.
Are there any themes that y’all are exploring that differ from the first EP?
SS: “Ready for a Fight” [from the first EP] came out in one strong practice. And we’ve been working on some songs that have taken us months. And it’s exciting to be in a position where we can take our time and grow things and change them and change the key if we want or change the tempo. They’re all slightly different genres. We’re actually releasing singles because they’re so different that we don’t know what order they’d be in yet. And so we released “Didn’t Do It To You” first, and then next we’ll release “The Day I Tried to Live.” And then we’ll do “Smirnoff Ice,” which is like a very fun ‘90s [song], which we’ve had to rename to “Make it Double.” We actually were on stage and we’re like, can we crowdsource a name, please, so we don’t get sued by Smirnoff Ice? “Didn’t Do It To You” is kind of psychologically complex. It’s the one that I quoted earlier, it’s about people’s trauma informing how they interact and how it’s not someone else’s job to fix that for them.
AY: I think that one of our defining attributes is the fact that we are so minimalist. With some of the heavier rocking stuff it’s more advantageous for us to have her just running around on stage like a crazy person and then sing her ass off, and the two of us will kind of hold it down musically.
SS: We did an Okay Bar show, and all of a sudden we just got a mosh pit. I don’t know where they came from. They weren’t there for the rest of the set—they showed up, they moshed like crazy, and then they disappeared. I hope that if anybody gets anything from this article, it’s please come to our shows and start a mosh pit.
It’s a really exciting time in the New Orleans music scene for a lot of reasons, one of which is that there are a lot of female and femme-fronted projects. Can you speak more about this shift in the scene?
SS: People are kind of sexist sometimes and will just put together lineups because they’re female-fronted, regardless of genre. But that doesn’t actually bother me so much, because any female-fronted band that is singing about shared experiences, I feel like that is a genre unto itself. If things at all go together lyrically, I don’t feel like they have to go together musically as well. I also just kind of love when a band randomly has a female bass player or something. I think having one girl in a band is usually a very good thing.
Sabrina, you’ve been based in both New York and New Orleans for the past couple years, and you’re going to be a more permanent fixture in New Orleans soon. How do you foresee that changing the music and the trajectory of the band?
SS: I’m an only child and my parents have needed me. And it’s been about two years now where they just have not been able to take care of themselves. And that has required me flying back and forth to New York pretty much every two months, and it’s paused our trajectory… I feel like we’ve been in a chrysalis state of creating music, of brainstorming and writing things. But the minute I’m back from this summer trip, I really want to hit the ground running with anything that anyone wants to do. I’m finally getting to the point where I want to be part of other things. Invite us to do your fundraisers! Some of the coolest bands coming out are like one-year-out-of-Loyola kids, and we’re totally down to play [with them] in a skate park or under a bridge or in your grandma’s backyard. I would love to play in an LASPCA or Take Paws [Rescue] fundraiser. We do really care about animals and they just make everything better.
AY: I think, honestly, playing live is a huge reason why we like doing this stuff and being in a band is because shows are fun to play. Recording and all that is also really fun to do, but there’s something special about the feedback loop of playing and also people getting excited about the music and you getting to feed off of that.
LC: And it’s the immediacy.
Well, it’s that community aspect too, right, that people are really craving right now.
AY: Yeah, I just feel like people are ready to be social again. Humans are social creatures. I think that people need that kind of community thing, that social outlet.
SS: I don’t know if this adds to the lore of it, but every serious relationship I’ve ever gotten into, I’ve met them at a concert.
AY: My message to the people is to support local venues, go to local shows, support independent music, and yeah, go to these small shows, go to these bar shows because that’s where you’re gonna discover cool, undiscovered local talent.
LC: And a bunch of weirdos.
AY: And a bunch of weirdos. And you might even meet a guy that has a band shirt from a band you like, and you might make a friend.
For more info on WAR BUNNIES, check out warbunniesband.com.
Top photo, left to right: Aaron Younce, Lex Condes, Sabrina Stone.
All photos by Stephanie Tarrant except bottom photo by Temple Blacksnake
