Q&A: Shower Curtain Return From Hiatus With Heavy Shoegaze Hitter “Edgar”
VICTORIA WINTER FIRST STARTED — Shower Curtain with her acoustic guitar in her bedroom, as many did in 2018. The term “bedroom pop” was being tossed around in media like an expletive when a kid learns it for the first time; artists like Clairo and Cuco were still freshman among the indie-rock scenes. But Winter claims that the story of Shower Curtain begins when she moved to New York two years ago.
From her hometown of Curitiba, Brazil to Los Angeles and eventually New York, Shower Curtain released three EPs, the latest, Something Instead, released in 2021. Since then, Winter has solidified Shower Curtain into its current formation, composed of Jill Oleson, Ethan Williams, and Sean Terrrel. Inspired by the current waves of heavy shoegaze, Shower Curtain returns with their first song in two years, “Edgar.”
“Edgar” is a study in grief’s circular motion in a linear life. Doctors diagnosed Winter’s cat of the same name not once but twice with viruses and cancer that they said would lead to his death within weeks. Once was last year, when Winter began writing the track. After Edgar survived the news, doctors returned with bad news over a year later.
“I feel like people don’t see that grief as serious human grief,” Winter shares. “I feel like if you go through that grief, then you know that it is. It is way more intense than people think it’s going to be. Humans, they can tell you what they want. With pets, you carry a lot of the responsibility and guilt because they don’t know how to tell you what they need.”
Before there is grief with loss, there is grief with knowing that you’ll lose something or someone, eventually. Despite the deep matter of “Edgar,” it never pulls away from the beautiful evolution of the new Shower Curtain era. The band also shares the single’s music video directed by Nikos Campbell, showing Edgar getting lost in New York as the viewer watches from his eyes.
Continue reading below for Luna’s conversation with Victoria Winter about “Edgar,” its music video, and the bands that influenced Shower Curtain’s upcoming record.
LUNA: How did you get started with Shower Curtain?
WINTER: I started in 2018. It was just a project I would release random music under. I didn’t take it too seriously at the time. I was going to move to LA — I was mostly a drummer in other people’s bands. I just needed a name to put something out.
I’m originally from Brazil, so I moved back to Brazil during the pandemic. There, I still treated it as a pretty loose solo project. In 2021, I moved to New York. For the first time, I got a consistent band together. We’ve been playing in New York for the past two years now. That’s when it really started being a band, having people collaborate with me and writing the music a lot more than ever before. All the stuff I put out… I mean my last EP I had a couple more people dabble in the recordings, but my first two EPs I did everything by myself, pretty much. For the past few years, it’s really been like a band band. We’ve been recording a bunch of songs that hopefully are going to be in the first full-length record.
LUNA: How would you describe the music scene in Brazil compared to LA and New York? Is there a good music community from your city?
WINTER: Not so much for indie music, I guess. I’d say it’s not super prevalent. There’s not as [many] resources going around — not as many venues, not as many people [who] have the money to buy a bunch of pedals, for example. It’s not as easy to be playing gigs all the time and making your band work where I’m from, but there definitely are a couple bands here and there. There’s a lot of really cool Brazilian rap or Brazilian bossa nova. I’d say more in the indie-rock sphere, it’s a little more limited.
I think New York has a lot more since it’s huge, but [it’s] in LA is where I really started understanding how often people can do music. How big it can be a part of someone’s life, you know? I’ve never really seen that before.
I definitely feel like New York is a scene with a lot more diversity. Obviously more people with different walks of life, but also just in sounds and genres than LA. Both of them were really eye-opening for me to be a part of.
LUNA: How did you end up meeting your bandmates? Did you meet them in New York?
WINTER: Yes. I met two of them at the New Colossus Festival, which is put on by Lio and Steven. Steven runs Dedstrange, and Lio Kanine Records. I met Jill and Ethan there — we played a show together at the time. My band was these two girls that I knew from the scene in LA. My drummer, Sean… I just ended up playing a show with his other band, Fasting.
LUNA: Did you know that you wanted to add people to Shower Curtain?
WINTER: At first, no, because I was really shy to be a front person. I didn’t really want to. I wanted to just play other people’s music because I love playing shows. I was just like, you know, I can be other people’s band. Then once I played one show as a full band, I was like, “Oh shit, this is actually really cool.” I enjoy being the front person. This inspires me a lot, to see other people play with me and what they can do to something I bring in. I think at first it was never really my plan, but after I started doing it I enjoyed it a lot.
LUNA: Do you remember that first gig that you did?
WINTER: It was back in 2019 — it was super random. My friends had this booking collective called Higher Vibration, I think? They did one show and they were like, “Do you wanna do a Shower Curtain set?” I was like “Yeah, sure.” My sister, who’s Winter, and my good friend who I was playing bass with at the time… I was like, “Do you guys wanna learn some songs just for this?” It was at The Smell. That was the first time we played a real show. I was so nervous. My sister was like, “You need to give us direction. If we’re playing too strong, you need to say something.” I was like, “I don’t know! Anything is good!” That was 2019.
LUNA: When your bandmates joined Shower Curtain, what was that like for the evolution of what you wanted to make?
WINTER: I feel like I was progressively wanting to make a little more heavier music. Not making stuff that was so soft, bedroom pop-y which I feel like was that era of the time. You know, 2017 to 2018. Progressively I was getting better at playing guitar, getting more heavier sounds from my guitar. For a while I was already writing music that was a little different than what I had put out.
My drummer… he’s into more jazzy experimental things. I see his influence in it a lot. My guitarist, who is also my partner, he’s the one producing the music. We’ve now almost for the past two years have developed a relationship where I can bring him an idea and I feel like he really helps structures a song and totally puts his flavor on it, even more than he gives himself credit. There’s a lot of things that they do that I would do differently if it was just me.
I was trying to go into the shoegaze/slowcore kind of sounds for a while now, and just having a little more confidence in myself. I am… you know, approaching my mid-20s and it’s very different now than when I was a 17-year old writing music for the first time. I progressively was more confident in singing a little more aggressively… I want to show the sides of myself that are more just how I am as a person.
LUNA: Do you think those sides of yourself existed back in early 2018? Or do you think that has also shifted with time?
WINTER: I think it’s shifted with time. I was very comfortable in the cute, soft aesthetic, even though I don’t feel like fully that was represented. I do think just maturing and going from being a teenager, especially a teenage girl to like, okay, I’m an adult woman, is a big shift that I feel like a lot of people go through in coming into your own skin.
LUNA: What kind of shoegaze and slowcore are you listening to now that you’re inspired by or that you just like?
WINTER: I’ve been listening a lot to the new Slow Pulp album. I also like Double Virgo and bar italia. I’ve been listening to that a lot. I really like them, I love their songwriting. The older Wednesday stuff… I really liked the new album too, but [I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone] was life changing honestly. There’s the classics like Horse Jumper of Love and a lot of Swirlies. Unwound as well. Those are a couple of things I feel like I’ve been listening to lately.
LUNA: Could you tell me a little bit about the new single, “Edgar”?
WINTER: “Edgar” is about my cat, whose name’s Edgar [laughs]. In March 2022, he had an episode where he got really sick and I found out he has feline leukemia virus. They told me he had a couple weeks to live, a couple of months. The song’s really about that moment. I had gone to Brazil for five weeks on vacation. I came back, he was really sick, I thought he was gonna die. It’s about the agony of when someone’s sick and there’s nothing you can really do about it. You can only see them get worse… I didn’t even leave my house because I was afraid he was gonna die. I’m already a really anxious person. I was afraid he was gonna die at any moment… He’s still alive somehow. They told me he had a couple weeks to live and he’s lived for almost a year and a half now after that.
That song is really special to me. Not only is it one of the songs I feel like is heavier… but it’s still a song that’s super significant to me. Now he has cancer on top of his virus, so I’ve been told for the second time that he’s gonna die in a couple weeks and he’s still persisting. It’s a song that still touches me because I’m still kind of going through it.
LUNA: When you were making the music video, could you tell me about the process of making that?
WINTER: I am usually very involved with the concepts of my music videos. I knew I wanted it to be a night chase and I wanted to have flashlights and stuff. I got together with Nikos and I told him that, basically. I told him what the song’s about… I wanted it to be like, not taking myself too seriously, but also not funny– an in-between of those. That’s all I had given him. After we shot it, we both sat down and edited it together… I feel like he did a really good job and he shot that whole thing by himself. It was really crazy how good he was at that.
LUNA: My favorite part of the song is the end when you sing “stay” and there’s that drum solo. Could you talk about your band’s contribution to the song?
WINTER: I actually wrote this song when the band had a different formation. I pretty much had zero involvement in telling what that should look like. It was fully my drummer Sean. Every single time we played that song it sounded different, so we had to organize it and be like, okay, what’s the actual recording going to be like? I honestly let people do their own thing 90 percent of the time. It was really their own experimentation. Live, I enjoy experimenting with vocal pedals and making my vocals sound crazy. I try to sing it differently every time. Sometimes I’m yelling, sometimes I’m being more soft and clean-speaking. It really just depends on what we feel. It’s purely a visceral moment in the song. I’m glad it came through in the recording.
LUNA: You have a couple shows lined up– the next one is in Brooklyn and then you’re going back to Brazil for a festival?
WINTER: Yeah, we’re playing Balaclava Fest. It’s my first time playing in Brazil as Shower Curtain in two years. I’m super excited. We’re sharing that with this Brazilian band called terraplana. We’re doing like a supergroup set where we play both Shower Curtain songs and their songs. It’s going to be very different. We’re going to do a Shower Curtain back in my hometown of Curitiba. It’s really exciting, I have not been there for two years… we’re gonna mostly play songs I’ve never played there before.
