Winona Fighter

Sometimes, album titles just make sense. They capture the spirit of the band who made it, as well as the songs that make up the record. Brutal & Extremely Underrated is one of those titles. It’s taken from a line in “Self Affirmations”, the sixth song on Winona Fighter’s second full-length, in which frontwoman Chloe ‘Coco’ Kinnon—who also plays drums on all its songs—wrestles with both the way she perceives herself and the way the she feels others may perceive her. But it doubles up as a description of where she feels the Nashville trio—completed by lead guitarist Dan Fuson and bassist/producer Austin Luther—have landed in the wake of their 2025 debut album, My Apologies To The Chef. That album was released to great fanfare, and established Winona Fighter as a true force to be reckoned with in the alternative/punk world. Its songs transformed Kinnon’s anxiety about both the world and her own life into a very powerful anger, the kind that inspires as much as it rages. That rage has been amped up even more on this record—which, like its predecessor, was self-produced by Luther and recorded at his home studio—but there’s a significant shift in focus. Whereas before it generally looked inwards, this time the viewpoint is more outwards, reacting to, and directly addressing, the unignorable state of the world. “A lot of these songs are inside thoughts,” explains Kinnon, “where if I said them in a public setting they would ring true, but people would also be like, ‘You’re not allowed to like say that!’ But we have more songs about conflict around the world and in our country, songs that look out into the world and our perception of it and its politics. Whereas the first record was totally things, up until that point, that had just happened to me personally.” That shift in focus comes partially from a sense of self-assurance that all three band members were feeling when they were writing these songs and making this record. Which also very much ties in with the album’s title. “We went into this record with a little bit more knowledge and confidence,” continues Kinnon. “There’s more swagger, and we had bigger goals for ourselves.” That attitude is worked into the fabric of these songs from beginning to end. Though that debut was a tough act to follow, these songs have even more bark, more bite, more visceral intensity and raw feeling than that one did. To some extent, that was reaction to the challenge of making the record after the success of the first, of not succumbing to the cliché sophomore slump. “We definitely felt that second record cloud hanging over everything,” admits Luther, “but we also felt we were making something that was really great. It’s not a sharp pivot, but it is an evolution. We didn’t want to make the second record a copy of ourselves. We wanted to grow and evolve, so that was very nerve-wracking. Like, are we changing the right amount or too much? Are people going to get it or is it going to turn people away? I think, for all of us, it was a bit of a mind game, but we just went with our gut overall because we wanted to make a kick-ass record.” “I still feel—in a good way—that we have a lot to prove and a lot to give,” adds Fuson. “We do have still a lot of confidence, and we’re trying to just continually do better. And I think these songs reflect that like forward momentum in both our songwriting and our playing.” They absolutely do. From the moment it kicks off with “TV On The Radio”, Brutal & Extremely Underrated is full of a tangible, charged energy. At times desperate, at others vulnerable, that first song is a rush of melody and aggression, sweet yet surly, that sets the tone for what follows. Because the balance between those two things is in constant flux on these twelve tracks, shifting depending on the song and subject matter. Second track “Bombs Away”, for example, is probably the most overtly political song here—a cathartic and vicious hardcore punk explosion centered around the immigration raids that have been ramping up all across the USA over the past year or so. “That song references ICE, as well as my distrust in the government as a whole,” explains Kinnon. “That’s what came out when we were writing it because it’s hard to keep it contained. The second you keep it contained and stop talking about it is when you become complacent in a world that you should not have complacency in. You can still have happiness and joy, but there are also conversations to be had. And we have a platform, so we should use it.” The album was recorded over the course of two sessions, the first of which coincided with an ice storm that rendered most of Nashville without power, and the garage in which they were recording without heat. Understandably, that prompted the band to finish it as quickly as they could. “There was definitely an urgency about it,” remembers Luther. “We were like ‘We’ve got to just nail this, otherwise we could lose power and it might not save.’ We had to make sure it all happened quickly.” In order to bottle the raucous energy of their live shows, as well as that created by the ice storm, this time around, the band outsourced mixing to Grammy Award-winning engineer Greg Collins (System Of A Down, U2, Eels, No Doubt). He did a great job. It’s in the almost grungy self-awareness of “Leech”, written after Kinnon ill-advisedly read some online comments about the first record, it’s in the tense vulnerability of “Lily Cut Her Hair”, a song Kinnon wrote with PUP’s Stefan Babcock about one of her closest friends, and it’s in the raucous insecurity of “Out! There!”. It’s also a huge part of the spiky, angular “Title Redacted”—yes, that is a (partial) reference to the Epstein Files, but it started life as a song about AI—which closes this album with a heartfelt surge of snarling, melodic punk rock. “That song has a lot to do with common sense and critical thinking going absolutely out of the fucking window and into the shitter,” Kinnon says bluntly. It all combines to create a record that fizzes with a vitality comprised of both anger and hope. More than anything, it’s an album that is 100 per cent real. That was paramount for the band to capture, especially in a day and age (and music industry) where AI is infiltrating everything. Winona Fighter, though, wanted people to unequivocally know that this was made by human beings who gave this album absolutely everything they could. “That song is such a perfect way to end the record,” says Kinnon, “because it is—and we are—real. We speak on real things, we’re real people, everything on the record is real. Every instrument, every vocal take. There’s this one line on that song where it sounds like I’m almost out breath, but I didn’t want to edit that out. We wanted to keep the rawness and the realness in it, and I hope people can feel that.” They extended that to the artwork, too. The band worked with director/photographer Hannah Hall to create three videos for the record as well as photos for it, while the cover art is a sculpture by one of Kinnon’s favorite artists, Glen Martin Taylor, specifically made for this album after she cold-emailed him and asked if he’d be interested in doing so. “He did such a phenomenal job,” says Kinnon, “and it felt like we were kindred spirits when we were talking. It's really cool to have a record that's so real and then to have real art be the cover art, and I hope it shows people that there are still real bands out there who want to spread love and create community and make fucking rock music.”