Meet Me @ The Altar to bring early 2000s sound to Lollapalooza
CHICAGO (CBS) -- Edith Victoria, Téa Campbell, and Ada Juarez make up Meet Me @ The Altar, a pop-punk band leaning on roots of early 2000s rock.
They're scheduled to play three shows in Chicago this week, all around their performance at Lollapalooza this weekend. CBS News Chicago's Jamaica Ponder sat down with the group to discuss their upcoming album, playing at Lollapalooza, and what it means to be a woman of color in punk-rock music.
"Me and Juarez have been playing together as the altar since summer of 2015, but this lineup has been going strong since late 2017," said Campbell, the group's guitarist.
"And we all grew up with a love for pop-punk and like the world tour scene. And I feel like as a fan of like the Warped Tour scene at that specific time, if you're musically inclined at least a little bit or even wanted to be, the bands you saw playing in pop-punk, and kind of heart in music were really influential," said Victoria, the band's lead singer.
"We're definitely a group of people that's influenced by loads of genres, not just pop-punk or rock. So you can kind of hear a little bit of all of our influences coming into our music. But like you said, at the core, it's still, you know, pop-punk, and rock," said Campbell.
"All three of us share a love of the early 2000s, kind of late nineties to early 2000s, I would say, because everything I don't know, music was so honest and musical and like we grew up on it. And so obviously a lot of people have a soft spot for the music they grew up on and we really, really do," said Victoria.
"So we're like, we love this feeling…of nostalgia and the feeling of musical music, so we wanted to make an album that was like that," said Victoria.
The band recorded their latest, unreleased album with veteran producer John Fields, most famously known for his work with Demi Lovato and the Jonas Brothers.
While they rely on nostalgia and how music used to make them feel, Meet Me @ The Altar also hopes to change a few things about the music scene, namely, how white it is.
"There wasn't really anyone that we had to look up to that looked like us, that played the type of music that we liked. So, we kind of always knew from the start that if [we] were to make it, we would be that for not only ourselves but for other people who also didn't have that representation growing up. And it's something that we definitely don't we don't carry lightly," said Campbell.
"I've been going to shows for so long, but it was always the same people there and never people that looked like us. No, like and I always took that into account," said Juarez, the band's drummer.
"And it's so interesting to subconsciously become aware of that when you're young because it's not like anyone is exclusively telling you, like, this isn't your space, you know, like, I'm just here. But you look around you and it's like, Well, where are the other people that look like me? We were very aware of that from such a young age that I was always kind of at the forefront of our mind," said Victoria.
"Because I always kind of put my focus on to the artists, our playing the show, and then I would be like, What? Okay, first of all, there's barely any woman, maybe 108 shows on women. And then like no black people, no black woman, no woman of color at all were ever on the stage. And that really stood out to me," said Victoria.
"And I was like, this is so crazy because it was like, why not? I think about how [I'm] probably 99% sure there was someone— some band before us, that was very similar to us, but they were not given the platform. But at the same time, it's like, I wonder how many more were not given the chance we were given, given the social climate at the time.
Things change all the time with that," said Victoria.