If love exists, it’s between the four members of Pom Pom Squad. There is a casual and comfortable intimacy among them. The four musicians seemed to be both emotionally and physically in sync throughout their shoot, leaning effortlessly into one another and laughing through any awkwardness, as they smoothed over each other’s baby hairs, or wiped away stray mascara. Pom Pom Squad softens the edges of their four-piece alternative-rock band with pure platonic love, making it impossible not to gravitate towards them.
Mia Berrin, a senior at the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music, is the glue that binds the group together. Her emotional honesty and magnetic personality stem from a lifetime of performance, having come to NYU to be an actor. The concept behind Pom Pom Squad began in Berrin’s sophomore year of high school, but didn’t really come into fruition until her second year at NYU. Her first project, Hate It Here, is the brainchild of her and some of her peers at Clive, who left the group to pursue their own projects.
The current iteration of Pom Pom Squad is Maria Alé Figeman, Shelby Keller, Alex Mercuri, and Mia herself. Maria is the “caretaker” of the bass for Pom Pom Squad (doubling as their resident witch). Shelby carries the band’s percussion, her rhythmic prowess hailing all the way from New Jersey. Alex, the self-identified “token male,” is an NYU CAS alum and the lead guitarist for the band. Mia, the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist, is also the group’s head cheerleader. These four musicians all came to know each other through New York City’s music circuit.
“[Alex] missed my set and went to the bathroom so he had an excuse to talk to me,” Mia laughed. “I met Shelby and Maria in May.” After realizing that Alex had also been at Shelby and Maria’s show with Menjuje, Mia added: “We were all in the room together before we officially started playing together, on that fateful night.”
Although this band was formed from luck, Pom Pom Squad blossomed under Mia, Maria, Shelby, and Alex’s care. They actively open themselves up to possibility and vulnerability in their music. Mia recognizes that Pom Pom Squad confronts feelings that may sit “between straight up aggression and the subtler, more intricate details of things like feeling depressed.” For the band, healing in music can come from “realizing that you have complicated feelings and can deal with them accordingly. It doesn’t have to be black and white, it doesn’t have to be angry or sad or sweet. It can be all of those things.”
Pom Pom Squad is a chance for each of these four musicians to heal together, guiding and supporting each other along the way. For instance, Berrin will bring parts of songs — a chord progression, a melody, or a lyric, into the rehearsal space. Together, the band grows these seedlings into full-blown works of art, working to create music that will silence the “White guitar-store guy” in their heads.
This femme-led quartet battles a male-dominated industry daily, pushing back against the pressure placed on womxn in music to be “perfect on the first try.” Maria described how challenging it can be to stay motivated to work on music, when everyone in the industry feels like competition. Rather, she found that it helps to “open up” in order to enjoy music again, and “realize you don’t have to be perfect.”
“I remember when I started trying to make music in 2012,” Maria said. “That’s when I stopped tracking live releases. I would just get so stressed being like — ‘Everybody here is competition. I don’t even want to listen to it.’ Because one, its going to be something that I feel I can do better than and bore me to tears. Or two, it’ll be something that’s more than I can handle and I’m going to feel awful about it.”
Ultimately, Pom Pom Squad can help you find yourself and lose yourself at the same time. On stage and in her music, Mia assumes a persona that many young womxn can identify with. “The character that I’m always drawing from, is the difference between the quiet girl in the back of the class who is always more interesting, and then the girl atop the cake — the cheerleader and pageant queen.”
The band aims to support listeners on their path to self-discovery or self-love, as well as those that feel immobilized by their mental health circumstances. “The energy of this band is definitely here to help pick you up when you’re down,” Maria said. “But it can also help you go down safely.” Despite jokes about being a “depression band” throughout the interview, Pom Pom Squad is able to confront the complexities of mental health in a meaningful way. They approach the intersections of anxiety, depression, and self-perception, and how they can manifest in us. On “Hate it Here,” Mia painfully begs the question:
Am I ever gonna be okay?
Am I allowed to like myself one day?
Will I keep building prisons
Making cages to keep myself in?
“Hate it Here” embodies an emotional journey to the center of the self. Pom Pom Squad creates a sonic struggle to mimic an internal one, between the lyrics and the dynamic fluctuations in the music. The chorus is saturated with heavy rhythm guitar and distorted bass, with Mia wailing artfully over top. This contrasts the verses, softly sung with an emphasis on light percussion and sustained guitar chords. At the climax of the song, Mia’s two voices are layered over each other, perched atop of a wall of sound — in a moment of raw emotion.
Hate It Here’s emotional honesty sticks with Pom Pom Squad outside of music as well. Between the tangential conversation we had about star signs and capitalism, to listening to them share one thing they love about each other, these musicians proudly wear their hearts on their sleeves. Listening to Pom Pom Squad has a similar effect to being in a room with them; it leaves you feeling hopeful and lighthearted.
Pom Pom Squad has perfected the art of dancing between hurt and love, and learning to manage difficult moments through leaning on one other. There is a truthfulness in the way the band communicates with one another, that translates seamlessly to their music. Pom Pom Squad patiently tends to every aspect of the music, regardless of how seemingly small, building a world of sound that is moving, empowering — and in Alex’s own words, “really fucking rad.”
Come see Pom Pom Squad and three other incredibly talented musicians perform at Local Sounds. Hang out with us at Trans-Pecos on Nov. 29. Tickets are $7 in advance, and $10 at the door.
