“Our biggest influences are a mix of Prince, Operating Theatre, Little Dragon, BDSM as well as the storytelling of drag, burlesque and DIY theatre,” says Slade Warnken of Drugstore Lipstick. “We’ve always wanted to create a universe and multimedia experience with the music we create. This album specifically is accompanied by both a live burlesque and drag play as well as a comic created by Leo Rauf, heavily inspired by the cartoons we grew up on and the melodrama of queer romance.”
And create a universe, they did.
Earlier this year, OffBeat covered the sold-out spectacular performance of BIO GIRL at the Allways Lounge, where the band’s core members, Slade Warnken (vocals, synthesizers and guitar), Tyler “Jangles Mackenzie” Bellingar (guitar and synthesizer), Joshua Dellabella (synthesizer/atmosphere) and features Ylva Mara Radziszewski (narration), performed their aching hearts out. Now, with a troop of local artists, producers, collaborators and more, Drugstore Lipstick is dropping eight tracks on Friday, June 13 in the form of an album.
BIO GIRL is more akin to Pink Floyd’s The Wall or The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club. There is the live musical component, the album theatrical aspect and accompanying comic book. Warnken says it took the band four years to produce.
Unlike many traditional concept albums, the story of BIO GIRL didn’t come first — the songs did. “When it comes to creating a concept album, our approach was a little backwards,” says Warnken. “Most times you don’t know the story you’re telling until you’ve reached the ending, and that was certainly the case for this project.”
The initial thread of narrative emerged only after mixing their first single, “Meet Me in the Dark,” a lush, moody track that feels like When in Rome meets Radiohead. (Warnken has one of the most distinct voices in all of New Orleans.)
“That’s when the image of a hollow robot landing on Earth in search of a human heart first came to mind,” says Warnken. From there, the band developed the storyline piece by piece, working with Rauf to create a visual arc that mirrored the emotional one. “We slowly wrote the story as we created the comic for each song,” says Warnken.
BIO GIRL will be available on all streaming services.
