Q&A: Prism Bitch

By August Edwards

For almost ten years, Prism Bitch have been shredding stages across the nation. With their whimsical costumes, unforgettable riffs, and delicious harmonies, they’ve carved out their own space in the world and in our hearts. I know I’m not the only one who’s told a bunch of friends you just gotta see them.

In anticipation of their first tour of 2025, ABQGR had a chance to catch up with PB. I hope you’ll enjoy our interview as much as I did; we covered everything from their tour preparations to their connection with fans and what it means to have Albuquerque as their home base. Whether you’re a longtime listener or just now diving into their work, Prism Bitch is always stuns.

Check out dates for this tour and future tours here and listen to them wherever you listen to music.

Photo by @poundingthenail on Instagram

ABQGR: I'm sure the answer to this would vary depending on the season, but what’s band life looking like these days for you? I know it can seem like an endless cycle of writing, recording, touring, so what’s the pace looking like these days?

Chris: Well, we haven’t seen each other in maybe a few months, so we are kind of gearing up for this next tour. We booked some of the dates, Lauren worked with a booker, getting merch ready—stuff like that.

Lauren: We’ll go on tour, right? And we have a rhythm, so when we get off of a tour we’ll decompress and maybe not see each other or talk to each other for like a month. So now we’ve been having like weekly zoom meetings and starting to get together as we plan the tour. Now we’re just excited.

[Lauren’s audio and video get wacky, lagging and freezing, so she drops out for a minute.]

Teresa: August, we forgot to let you know that Lauren’s a cyborg now, ‘cause we lost the original Lauren on tour so we made a robot.

Lilah: Much like Avril Lavigne.

Teresa: So, we have been meeting remotely, I think is what she was saying. It’s actually been a nice beginning of the year for us, I think because of a doomy news cycle, we all—I just wanted to do band stuff. I just wanted to not read anything on the internet anymore. We have this tour planned around Treefort, that festival. We just confirmed a festival at the end of June so we’re planning a Westcoast swing for that. It’s been a lot of, like, let’s start casting the tour-plan net over a couple of different things. We’re looking into doing artist residencies, we might do Summerfest in Albuquerque later in the summer, in August. Just a couple of different things that I feel excited about, personally.

ABQGR: What’s something that a fan might not know about the work that goes into planning a tour?

Lilah: There’s a lot of data entry involved. Like, a shit ton.

Teresa: And then you have to differentiate between two shows, two days apart that have the word “dive” in the club name. Swan Dive or High Dive? High Dive or Swan Dive?

Lauren: Yeah, “dive” is like a surprisingly popular name used in venues.

Teresa: We really get excited about talking about our costumes for the tour cycle. There’s important things, like, Hey, T, did you file taxes for the LLC? But then it’s like, Oh! Let’s talk about costumes! We put a lot of fun love into that. It’s like Project Runway.

Lilah: Maybe not all bands do it this way, but we kind of create theater pieces when we go on the road. We’ll bring an identity with us while we go. We are ourselves as well, always, and Prism Bitch as an entity always, but each cycle of touring has a different thing going on at the time, too. We’ll make sure what we’re doing fits into that, a little bit. We wanna be a safe, cool, inclusive, friendly place for everybody, but we also have opinions that a lot of things that are going on are wrong. So, it’s kind of fun to mesh the two worlds—art and theater, as well as friendship and solidarity.

Lauren: Yeah, the temperature check has a lot to do with what we’re wearing.

Teresa: And where we go.

Lauren: Everywhere you go—living in NM, for example, a state where the legislation isn’t really coming for our trans friends, or our LGBTQ friends as much as another place is—yeah, we’ve been on tour with one of our trans friends, and thinking Tennessee is really coming for us, and we go to Tennessee and it’s like, there’s trans people in Tennessee! That’s what sucks, too. Every state that has got these more dangerous political—like we’re going to Idaho, we go to Idaho a lot, and they’re coming for our friends in Idaho, politically. It's scary that there are a lot of people an Idaho [who] want our music, too, and they wanna be safe, too. We wanna go to these places—everybody deserves music, and medicine, and healthcare. I don’t think we’ve actively routed out of spaces, but we’ve had our buttholes tightened as we approach spaces.

ABQGR: Lilah, you said something like, you’re always Prism Bitch even if you go through these “costume changes.” Are those different eras and costume changes sort of like mirrors the different eras of Prism Bitch? Would you say that maybe you do change, and you go through sort of this growth journey throughout your tenure together?

Lilah: Yeah, we can all definitely answer this in our own ways. I feel like we’ve changed a lot, but I also feel like we’ve stayed pretty much the same, which is really strange. I don’t know if you guys can relate to that feeling. Just this bond and connection that keeps us tethered with our music, keeps us writing things that we’re really happy about and proud about and excited to play live. I think that’s been there since day one. Lauren will reference our first gig to us sometimes, at Winning [the now-defunct coffee shop on Harvard, across from the University of New Mexico], and how afterwards we were just in the alley just so soaking it up, every moment—it was our first show, but it wasn’t a show, even. It was a punk rock open mic. What we felt that night, I still feel that exact feeling to this day. But a lot has happened in ten years.

Lauren: When something’s new, you don’t know what you don’t know. For me, this is the first band I’ve ever been in. I would say learning curve takes over more—it’s cool to see how much we’ve grown. When you asked that question, August, what’s changed, it made me happy because I feel like in every band member, I see that same soul that we all fell in love with. There’s a lot of kid in all of us, and I think that’s what we have in common, is this little, nerdy, sweet child. I think that’s in everybody, every human being, and I think that gets dulled and protected and hidden. But yeah, I think the learning curve has made us savvy in ways we didn’t anticipate. For me, there was just shit I didn’t know until I learned how to do it.

Teresa: We formed during the first Trump administration, and then we went through covid together, and now we’re going through the dismantling of the constitutional processes together. And in between, there have been a couple of school shootings. You really have to gut-check that soul person. Cause there’s been a lot of scary stuff. Especially thinking of that first tour after things started to reopen. We have a dynamic of being each other’s best friend, slash sibling, slash parent.

Lauren: We all shift without even talking about it. Okay, I get to be Baby, now I’m Mommy, now I’m Auntie.

Teresa: When you’ve been a band for eight, nine years, you can’t help but go through your own personal changes. And then watching out for each other, watching each other grow, watching each other break down and then build up again. It’s like a family dynamic without, hopefully, any passive aggressiveness.

Lauren: Being in a band is like having three life partners. It’s almost helpful to read books on polyamory to balance personalities and time. I would suggest that, maybe. If you’re starting a band. If it’s a band where everybody just wants to fuck off and blow off steam after work, that’s fine. But when you wanna work towards something together—changing your schedule, changing your hopes and dreams, moving to different cities—then we’re all in a relationship together. So, I would say get a little book on polyamory so you can balance the schedules and the life of all your partners. Cause your bandmates are almost as important as your significant others.

Photo by @poundingthenail on Instagram.

ABQGR: Shifting gears just a little bit, you’re kicking off this tour on March 22nd with a matinee show, all ages at the Launchpad in Albuquerque. Some might consider this a delightful yet unusual decision. What was the thought process behind this show?

Teresa: Last year we did a tour and we played the Ivory Room in Berkeley. This is my memory of it: they wanted us, but they had something already booked for the evening, so they were like, Hey, wanna do a matinee show?

Lauren: We also didn’t realize it was Easter Sunday. So that was a funny extra layer to the day.

Teresa: And seeing the other group that showed up, the audience that was there—how awesome it was to be done at 5!

Lauren: Yeah! And everybody was excited to go see rock and roll at 3:00. They were cool with it.

Teresa: ‘Cause when we think “All Ages,” we think a lot of younger folks. We have really been trying to figure out how to get to the under 18, under 21 crowd for a while.

Lauren: Especially in a place where we mostly have bars to play at.

Teresa: But then the “all ages” aspect is also the other group, sometimes where I land. I gotta wake up at 7 in the morning, and I wish this is a little earlier. I think it’s just a different offering. I think originally we were looking at a weekday late at night, and we said, Hey, is there a venue that’s open to us playing a little earlier?

Lauren: Yeah, ‘cause the Launchpad has a great local show booked the same night after we’re done. The first matinee show I noticed in our local scene was Ty Segall and he sold out Sister, so they added a matinee show, and the turnout was awesome. After I went to that, I was like, Man, that’s great. Why don’t we do more of this? I feel like there’s an opening for shows there that was kind of slept on.

Teresa: High and Dry Brewery, I saw that they had an afternoon show with Sweet Nothin recently. It’s just an opportunity for more people to see music.

Lauren: Then you can do more than one show in a night if you’re really jonesin’.

Teresa: I think there’s a lot of rules—the culture of music, we’ve accepted it’s a nightlife activity, and it doesn’t necessarily have to be. So we were like, let’s try it. So far it seems like it’s been a positive response.

ABQGR: You brought up that you’re maybe trying to broaden your audience—when you think of your audience, do you have a specific kind of person in mind?

Lilah: A few, yeah. Lots of different kinds, all over the world, all different people, but people who are just accepting of human beings for who they are. Honestly, those are the types of people I see at our shows—really accepting and sweet, kind humans.

Lauren: I just realized—I work at a bar, and T, when she works a hospital, she works in the morning. The Venn diagram of those folks—and our friends, our family—it’s like, yeah, there’s so many people that, if we only play local shows that we’re headlining and we go on at 11 at night, there’s a huge part of the population that it’s just untenable for them to make that. A daytime thing is just opening another opportunity for people to see music.

When I think about who’s our audience, I’m surprised all the time at the diversity. It’s really interesting to me, and really cool who we see at our shows, and who’s really connecting with the music and with each other. I love being surprised. Like, wow, this 12-year-old boy is really into Prism Bitch. And wow, this 68-year-old man is really into Prism Bitch. Like folks that might not have a lot of markers on a survey together, they like the music, and they like the show, so that’s cool.

Chris: Yeah, I think it’s a pretty eclectic group, and I’m always surprised at who comes up to us after a show. It can just have a huge range of people—from age, to interests, to just who they are. Which is kind of reflective of who we are. I think we’re all kind of a little different. We all have stuff that we share in common, but everyone brings a little something different to the band as well.

ABQGR: I’m wondering, how would you describe your relationship to your audience and your fans?

Lauren: Grateful! I guess it depends—there’s some folks that find our stuff streaming and we’ve never met them face-to-face, so I don’t know what that relationship is. But I hope they’re having a good time, ‘cause they’re listening to us. And then we see folks that are at multiple live shows over multiple years, and you end up really getting to know them.

Lilah: We’ve had a lot of different interactions being on tour at different times in people’s lives, you know. I think we’re kind of a safe space for people—myself included. We’re a very safe space to just kind of relax and be. I think about some emails we received that really touched my heart and made me cry. From people who lost their mom, or somebody in their life, and that one of our songs helped them get through it, like they listened to it religiously to help them through it. When I hear that kind of thing, and I’ve heard it a few times—like right now, I get a little emotional thinking about it because it takes so much out of us to play it, and write it—it really fulfills our hearts and our bodies and our lives when we write something that affects people.

Teresa: Or it wrecks us, it wrecks our bodies.

Lilah: And physically wrecks us!

Lauren: Definitely—I think it’s not crazy to say we get a battery going at the live show, you know, with the energy between us and the crowd. We’ll start at whatever energy level—tired, sleepy, happy, sad, hydrated, hungover, whatever. And then you get the show going, and the energy from the crowd will usually, we get a feedback loop going. And they get us more stoked. It’s so funny how this energy can’t be created or destroyed, and you just see this conveyor belt going. Where the audience is happy and they’re dancing, and so that makes us go harder, and by the end of the show we don’t plan to ramp our energy up, it just ends up happening, because it’s the cool feedback loop when the audience starts letting go and having a good time and not worrying about how cool they look, and so we stop worrying about how cool we look. Then everybody’s having a good time at the best of times. It doesn’t always work that way, but we’ve been very fortunate that that’s become a pretty cool standard.

Teresa: I love watching sports, you know, and sometimes I feel like [the audience is] going to stick with us even if we don’t make the playoffs.

Lauren: Yeah! Like, Oh no, we struck out! But they’re like, It’s cool!

Teresa: Like Pittsburgh Steelers fans, they’re like We just love our team! And our managers aren’t trading any of us to different teams.

Lauren: Like Lilah was saying about folks—like you were asking, what’s your relationship to your fans—you know, we don’t know unless someone takes the time to tell us personally how much they like us or a song. I remember people would open up at our merch booth about really vulnerable shit. And it’s cool and it’s really humbling, but it also makes us feel like, okay, cool, we should keep going, ‘cause this is good.

Lilah: I almost feel this parental thing with our audience, too. Like, Did you see that, mommy? Look, mommy! They’re like, Good job, baby! I honestly do feel this family feeling sometimes with our audience in that way.

Photo by @poundingthenail on Instagram.

So, movin on just a little bit—when we think of Nirvana we think of Washington, when we think of Bruce Springsteen we think of New Jersey—Prince, Minnesota. Artists we love end up sort of inextricable from their hometown or base. What is the significance of that relationship from your side of things, from the point of view of a band?

Chris: Being from Albuquerque, it’s not known as a music town. No one’s like, The Albuquerque sound! Or anything like that. But I feel like it’s a pretty working-class, blue-collar place, where you have to work hard. It’s not an easy place to make music, there’s not a lot of money or support. But if you can do it in Albuquerque, I really feel like you can do it anywhere. I think that’s helped us out a lot, it’s been a good training ground to then go out into the world. Plus, most places seem very tame compared to Albuquerque.

Lauren: I remember in Boise, when Lilah went into the gas station to grab something, and me and Chris were in the car, and we saw this guy roll up on his bike, and just lean his bike against the newspaper stand and not lock it. And he walked inside, and we were like, what the fuck, dude!

And I remember the first tour we ever did was ABQ, Flagstaff, LA, Phoenix, and El Paso. It was such a good test run experience. There was a bunch of music professionals from LA on that tour with is. And you think, like, LA! That’s where you make it! Or whatever. And I remember Sophie and The Bom Boms were like, No, the LA musicians I talked to are dominated by trends, or what your publicist says you should be doing.

And I remember Monica Demarco—this was like 15 years ago, she got paid to go on tour with the Red Elvises to play on keyboard for a month. And when she came back, I was like, Oh, for sure she’s gonna wanna move away to a big city and be a professional musician. And the Demarco sisters, they’re awesome weirdos—very cool exemplifying the weirdos of Albuquerque. But Monica was like, No, no, no, it made me more thankful for the Albuquerque music scene. Because all the big cities she went to felt [restricting]. And this may not be true, things change. But she said, in Albuquerque, we don’t have the opportunity to make money at our music, but there’s also no scene dominating what you feel like doing and nobody gets pigeonholed, and everybody can just do whatever the fuck they want, and nobody’s telling anybody what to do.

Chris: Yeah. There’s a freedom here. No industry insider’s watching you. And there’s a real—if you’re not authentic, people can smell that on you real quick in Albuquerque and call you on it. I feel that much more so here than in bigger towns that may have more music.

Teresa: I think there’s always the joke of people getting trapped here. Or certain things happening in your life, like you had one plan and something else happened, and I fall into that. But I don’t think this band could have formed in any other city. There’s four distinctive, different personalities. We came from different backgrounds. And there’s no other scene where we would all meet up. It reminds me of that scene in Toy Story where all the scary toys, you think they’re evil but then they’re all actually helping each other out. They have big hearts. There’s this certain degree of, the sheen doesn’t rule here. So you can be a little broken and vulnerable about it.

There’s a lot of bands I’ve seen here—going back to the Demarco sisters, like Chicharra was not a band that could form anywhere else other than in Albuquerque. With big, huge, dark sounds, but emerging into this beautiful chorus. I hope that we ride a little bit of that wave—we all have our dark corners, but we come together and bring out something beautiful. A hopeful feeling within ourselves. And hopefully that is reflective in our music.

ABQGR: Yeah—I’m thinking to myself, we all have to start somewhere in our lives, in our artistic journeys. Like, Lauren, you were saying this was your first band and everything. And I’m just thinking to myself, you’ve accomplished so much—you do amazing work, and I hope that you feel like you’ve got some validation for that. I guess my question is—was there a moment through the course of this band where you felt super connected to what might be the music scene nationally? Through your touring process, through your growing process, was there a moment where you felt like, oh, I know what I’m doing?

Lauren: For me, meeting other bands that we play with at different venues or festivals, and thinking, oh my god, they’re fucking good, and then realizing they treat you like a peer. That feels like a level-up. Meeting other bands that you admire that treat you like a peer has been a cool thing. And then you realize—some of our best friends we’ve made are this band, Itchy Kitty, from Spokane, Washington, and I’m like, oh, Spokane is just like the Albuquerque of the Pacific Northwest. Or we’ll make friends with people in Miami, or LA, or Boise. There’s so many cool musicians, working hard and it’s been really validating to meet other people and become a fan of them, and realize they’re treating you like a peer. So it gives you this confidence.

Teresa: My drum teacher is based out of New York, and he came to see a Built to Spill / Prism Bitch show in Brooklyn. The next day he texted me a picture of him wearing a Prism Bitch shirt. And that felt really validating, ‘cause he’s toured all over the world. He’s my teacher, so as an instrumentalist I have a lot of admiration for him. He had texted something like, That was something really special, what you guys have. And I was like, okay, cool, I think we’re on the right track.

Chris: You always question what you’re doing. Like, are we going in the right direction? Is this the right thing? But actually, the more we’ve done it, the more it resonates today—the stuff we recorded nine years ago, I still like playing it, I still like listening to it, and I think people still like listening to it. I think we were very lucky that we picked the road that we went down.

Teresa: Or it picked us.

Chris: Or it picked us—whatever happened, we were lucky that it happened. I’ve felt that from the very beginning. We were writing songs very quickly from the very start—there was a chemistry there that you just can’t make happen unless the right people are there. So from the beginning it felt very special.

Lauren: Yeah, I felt really lucky. I’ve seen a lot of friends, especially when they move to another city—singer, guitarist, multi-instrumentalist—they’re like, I just wanna get a band together. Just getting people that you’re gonna get along with, or meeting a great musician but not gelling in the studio for some reason—I didn’t realize how lucky I as to be with this group of people that I get along with so well until it’s been this long.

Lilah: Same, all of that. There’s definitely some bigger parts of our story that I remember, and smaller parts that are equal to it. It’s hard to pick just one or two, or even a time period. Form the beginning it’s felt very special. I think recently we did the Bands of Enchantment on PBS—they feature bands, and we did the red caret that season. Those moments felt like, wow. Watching on a big screen our own episode, together, with our moms and partners. That moment for me was exciting. Like, I wonder what’s coming next, this is just right now. It felt like, we’re going places, we’re doing things.

Lauren: Or if, like, nothing big changes, I’m so happy with everywhere we’ve gone. Man, had some really silly nights in hotels and alleys and cars and gas stations.

ABQGR: Anything that I missed that you wanna talk about?

Teresa: Thursday afternoon [3/20/25] we’ll be on KUNM Afternoon Freeform, 3 o’clock or thereabout with Brandon Kennedy. It’s our Albuquerque onslaught!