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The girls of Nasty Cherry have had quite the trajectory over the last two years and are showing no signs of slowing down any time soon. From being hand-picked by V-alum and pop pioneer Charli XCX, to the Netflix series that documented it all—one thing for certain is these girls have the makings of a supergroup. With the help of their two-time Grammy-nominated Mentor, the band developed a one-of-a-kind sound that knows no bounds or genre. Now with the training wheels off for their third EP, the band’s genre-bending antics are set to reach new heights as they take control of their sound.

Fresh off the release of their latest EP The Movie, Nasty Cherry Front-woman and vocalist Gabbriette details the making of the EP, how they found their voice with this project, and the early influences they are tapping into for inspiration nowadays.

Read the exclusive interview below

V MAGAZINE: Hey, Gabbriette, how’s it going?

GABRIETTE: Good! Sorry about the hair.

V: Are you in hair and makeup? 

G: Yeah I am! 

V: Love it. You look great already! Can’t wait to see the finished look! What else are you up to?

G: Thank you so much! I’m just taking it day by day, you know? How are you?

V: Good, can’t complain. I’m super happy to be talking to you.

G: Thank you, me too! 

V: All right, first I want to start off by congratulating you on the latest single, “her body”!

G: Thank you.

V: Yeah, the video was quite cinematic, who directed it?

G: My great friend, Dana! She rocks. She put it together in under a week. I came to her with the idea and a timeline and she made it work. It’s funny because my label was freaking out about budget and getting it out in time with the song. I’ve been wanting to work with her for a while. So she turned it out, we got a lot of favors to make it happen, and we’re just really excited that it came out the way it did.

V: No, it came together so beautifully.

G: Thank you.

V: All right. So just to backtrack and give some context into this amazing mega-star that you are, I just want to dive into your backstory and like your earlier years. Would you say you’ve always been musically inclined? Just curious to know how your music abilities and creativity manifested.

G: I think I would have liked to say that I was very musically inclined, but I didn’t know shit about playing an instrument or actually being a part of a group. I had to put in all the work and you know. But I did theater when I was in middle school and I always liked to sing. I went to karaoke every Saturday in high school. But it wasn’t a real thing, not until I met Charli XCX who started the band I’m in now. She came to me with this idea that she had already been planning for three years and I think they had gone through maybe three or four other girls to be the singer in the band. I was really excited about just being a part of a band and I wanted to step out and do something new because at that point I had been strictly modeling. Like I was never really home for a period if like three years. So I was really excited about the band and I always loved Charli. I don’t think that I necessarily knew how crazy it was all going to get and how intense the process was going to be with filming the Netflix show for five months.

V: Did Charli offer you any advice? How did you strike up this relationship with Charli and also your bandmates? 

G: With Charli, she was like “You don’t need to take voice lessons, but learn an instrument if you want.” So she wasn’t like you have to be like this or that to be a musician. I think the most important thing for me was just having the other girls in the band with me to collaborate with and be on the same path together. It was just a really intense first year for us. And not all of us knew how to be in a band or play an instrument or do anything like that. So yeah, it was just cool to have other people to share that experience with, and now we’re here.

V: Yeah it’s been a beautiful trajectory for the group as a whole. In terms of your roots,  you’re from California, right? 

G: Yeah, Orange County. 

V: Okay. How has that influenced your sound? Yes, you’re in a band but you do have this very distinctive sound, as an individual as well. 

G: I think, Gwen Steffani, I always bring her up in every interview because she’s from Orange County and I listened to her religiously growing up. And when I started doing music, I was like, fuck, she’s like the O.G. bad-ass Orange County girl. I think a lot of our influences as a group are those Los Angeles synthy and dreamy sound. We had that in our minds at the beginning. We always referenced The Runaways because they are such a powerful girl group and another influence is obviously Courtney Love. So I guess all those artists have a Californian sound. All of us came into this with completely different tastes in music. When the band came together I was listening to a lot of sixties rock and like coming out of my Zeplin phase, whereas some of the other girls may have been into pop. It’s a mix of all of us and I think it reflects in our music and we’ve definitely developed our own sound. With this EP that we’re coming out with in April, you can tell that we’ve honed in on what you want to sound like. So it’s cool to see how we improved and developed.

V: Yeah, no, it’s definitely something that comes through when you listen to some of the new tracks. Before we jump into the EP, I do want to talk about “Her Body”. Obviously, it explores just owning your body and empowerment in that. I’m curious what was the process like to make it? What was the process like working with Charli on this single in particular? How did it come about, what was the songwriting and recording process like?

G: So Charli popped in for a few days and she writes really fast. It’s so crazy but she does really well with just hearing a beat or a melody that she likes and going off of that. Yves our producer had a beat in mind so it just went from there. Most of the songs we’ve written up to that point were a little slower, more synthier or like what we’d usually done. And Yves was like, ‘We’re going to do something a little harder. Like, let’s just try it out.  And then when Charli heard it, she was like, okay, well with this beat, with that storyline, it totally goes the opposite way of sinking into like the sad bits of being cheated on. Then maybe it’s from a perspective on the other end when you come out of it and you realize like, ‘Oh no, they aren’t my worth. I am my worth. And I am me and I don’t need to try and get them back. Like I’ve done so many times before, like, fuck them for doing this to me. How could they have done this to me?’ And like a very like fuck you song, which I think is a really cool and totally rock and roll way to do this because I listened to so many songs about being cheated on. And then I ended up crying for like four hours. So I don’t know. I think it’s just like a cool perspective to have a song about this and this kind of tone. And the video really sits alongside that. Just like a fuck you dance, I think. And like really feeling sexy and strong and powerful and not being like, even though yeah, I’m dancing and underwear, I’m not being overly sexual. It’s just like me being me and being strong. So… yeah.

V: And segueing off of that, single to the EP that you’re about to release, when you released the single Her Body, I think there was also an announcement for the EP “The Movie”

G: Yeah that was the final single, so we want

V: What was the process like for you guys bringing this EP to life? Like you said earlier, you guys are kind of honing your craft and there’s a sense of confidence and like self-assurance this time around, that definitely comes through, with the music. So I’m just curious to know how that all came about? Like what was the process of reaching that level of confidence to say, this is what we’re making…take it or leave it.

G: We were on a UK and US tour and as soon as we got back to the States, after doing the shows in the UK, COVID happened. So we had to stop pretty abruptly and say goodbye to each other and stop seeing each other for a couple of months and figure out what to do next? We can’t play shows. We haven’t written anything new to release during this time. It was all really scary and up in the air. Especially coming off that tour with us being together for a long period of time, and we also never played that many shows back to back. Touring was basically like when we filmed the Netflix show a few years back. In terms of curating sound and EP it started with just knowing what we like. We brought our drummer in from the UK. I think this the turning point, was when we just decided on using Yves, our producer, solely just him for this  EP, because in the past we had written with many different producers and you could hear that in the EP. It’s like us figuring out our sound with different people and it seems jumbled. It sounded like we were figuring it out. So just with Yves, he knew our sound. We’d worked with him before and he had so many ideas and we went in with the concept of the EP being about friendship and like how we’d miss each other so much. And we were so excited Debbie our drummer was going to be there. We had one month with Debbie to record the EP and also have Charli involved. So I think that it was just like this overwhelming feeling of gratitude for the time that we got to be with each other. It was a lot of – getting to the studio at 10 in the morning and staying until 10 at night. It was a lot of not getting much sleep because we’re writing in our heads at night and sending each other voice memos of lyrics. 

V: Woah so intense.

G: Yeah. It was exhausting, but exhilarating and also very scary because we had no clue when we were going to see each other again after we completed this project. So I just think like, it all happened perfectly-getting Yves and being together at that time and getting everything we felt out in the music because we knew we were going to release this and then it was a feeling of what next? 

V: And can you speak to the nature of the songs?

G: All the songs on the EP are experiences of ours that we’ve had, we just took it all and combined it. Like we called it the movie cause we had this insane plan at the beginning to make a film with the music. We wanted to use all of the songs to tell a story and do some kind of rogue lo-fi films, saving the day and like being the best band in the world. So in our minds, it was a million-dollar budget movie that was just never going to happen. I think if you’ve listened to them in the order we put them out you can just imagine the different scenes in your head.