Surrey-based all-female punk band releases their 1st album

Dusty Pines, a Surrey-based, all-female punk-rock band, is set to debut their first album, On The Yawning Maw of the Apocalypse. 

To mark the debut, the band will perform tracks from the album at a release party at The Cobalt Cabaret in Vancouver on April 19 from 7:00 to 10:00 pm. Dusty Pines will be joined by punk-rock group Pilsgnar and Slowicide, a femme-filled punk band. 

Dusty Chipura, the lead singer of Dusty Pines, says the album has songs with themes of “love, heart break, relationships, feminism, [and] late-stage capitalism, in that order.”

Before Dusty Pines, Chipura says she avoided themes of love and relationships when writing songs. 

“I didn’t want to write the same kind of songs as everyone else .… I thought it was beneath me, and so all my songs had to [be about] these lofty things.”

Chipura took a five-year break from music after separating from her ex-husband, whom she was in a band with, believing she would never play music again.

She says she then started writing songs again and found that it helped her process the feelings she had surrounding men, relationships, and breakups, which helped heal her connection with music. 

“I didn’t start off with a grand theme in mind,” Chipura says. “There was a lot of anger that I had to process about relationships. I wanted to situate those feelings and those experiences in something bigger and more important. For me, [these feelings have] to do with feminism and the global hellscape we live in.”

By starting Dusty Pines, Chipura says she approached her relationship with music in a different way. 

“Music was the tool by which we gained power or self-respect for ourselves. The music was just the side product.” 

When she formed the band, Chipura says she didn’t want to play music to get famous but to go back to the beginning, learn to enjoy and get better at music, and have good experiences playing with other musicians. 

“I think the relationships between us and our emotions and our emotional experiences [are] all that we have,” she says, adding that everything else is fleeting.

With three out of four Dusty Pines members being mothers, Chipura says it’s important to have that representation in music.

“I know hundreds of musicians, and the vast majority of them are male and a good number of them are dads,” she adds. “It’s sort of a given that they’ll have the leeway to pursue their dreams or their passions. But when you’re a mom, it’s a totally different context.”

As women in music who have small children, the Dusty Pines band members have struggled with feeling selfish and being a “bad parent” for making their music a priority, Chipura says.  

“[Being in a band is] not something that a lot of women do when they have small children. I feel like we’re trailblazing something here, where we’re figuring out what it looks like to balance motherhood and parenting and adult responsibilities with being able to participate in this counter-culture.”

As for the album release, Chipura hopes attendees “get sweaty.”

“Punk-rock shows are places where you don’t just hear music, you learn things,” she says. “You learn political philosophies, you make connections, you come to participate in a part of a worldview that is more important now more than ever.”

For tickets to the album release party, visit www.bit.ly/dustypinesalbum.