It’s Thursday night in Sydney’s inner west and I’m following a red neon flame to a live music venue, my stomach already lined with tacos and cider. My friend, the one with Sailor Moon eyes and ice blond hair, strides ahead while I trip along in bat-winged boots. We’re going to a gig and I’m fizzing from head to toes. It feels like approximately a million years since I went to anything with plugged-in amps. After hundreds of Jane Austen evenings: dinner conversations, drawing board, peppermint tea, books — I am hungry for this.
We’re here for Potion, a playing their first gig in more than a year. On Instagram they promised to tear the roof off.
17-year-old me would've be thrilled. The same me who spent all her pocket money on 20-hole Doc Martens, who brought Mum’s guitar to school to insist a friend teach me three chords, who swapped mixed albums with besties – a dozen tracks burnt to disc, with handwritten titles, everything heavy with purple ink and meaning.
Between sets, I see one of the band members, , at the merch stand. AKA the bassist of my dreams. Off stage, she’s petite. On stage, she seems seven feet tall, with waist-grazing hair, tattoos, elegant fingers working frets and strings, red light on that calm face - calm in the manner of women in Renaissance paintings. Like Caravaggio’s Judith sawing the head off Holofernes.
Leung told All Grrrl Assault zine that what matters to her is “people who are like me, regardless of race or gender, can look at my art and feel like they can do anything they want”.
How many women are in metal? How many Asian-Australian women? An artist and illustrator of eerie, elegant girls by trade, Hong Kong-born Leung didn’t play an instrument until she was in her early 20s. But fame was never the point. Leung told All Grrrl Assault zine that what matters to her is “people who are like me, regardless of race or gender, can look at my art and feel like they can do anything they want”.
One time, at a question and answer session on Instagram, Leung urged me to find the “wildness within” and release it. No one has ever asked me to locate that part of myself, let alone coax it out. In everyday life, it was okay to be gentle, polite, quiet. Steely-eyed and strong, too. But wild? Not so much. It’s a word rarely associated with the kinds of women that our society rewards.
But wildness is a feeling that doom metal brings out. Standing near the stage, the sound feels good because it feels big. Deep vibrations shake each of us down to our marrow, the ground trembles under our oversized boots. The growls and screams of the vocalists seem to match my own unvoiced growls and screams that I know I have within me. The ones my award-winning politeness helped me suppress for years.
But wildness is a feeling that doom metal brings out. Standing near the stage, the sound feels good because it feels big.
Back at the gig, some of us are thrashing about, windmilling long dark hair around the room. My hair is among the longest and the darkest. I feel like I’m in one of Leung’s gothic illustrations or part of an Emily the Strange comic, like the copy I carry around with me ever since I found it for $2 at a used bookshop. It stars a misanthropic girl in a black dress – wry, spiky, happiest in the company of animals – playing a monstrous 13-necked guitar.
One of the best things about this music is you don’t have to dance, you just have to listen and feel it. Sometimes I think we all have a need for big sounds, the biggest sounds we can experience as a collective. Roaring football crowds, locked-down Melburnians screaming in unison, Italians singing together from their balconies would probably agree.
On the drive home, I return to the city’s familiar sounds. But I feel as though a pressure valve has been released. Later that night, when I climb under a big plush doona to sleep, it won’t come easily. My body, like a struck bell, is still ringing.
