Pom Pom Squad Eliminate the Noise

“The tower card depicts a spire that is set ablaze by a bolt of lightning. It’s unsettling, because it shows that no matter our plans for ourselves, a divine act can completely uproot everything.” These are words whispered by Mia Berrin on her new record, Mirror Starts Moving Without Me. It’s a precursor for a shadowy tale of ambiguous identity entangled in an inner-soundtrack of relentless desire and inescapable criticisms. The Pom Pom Squad bandleader calls me on Zoom from Hoboken, New Jersey, comfortably seated in her friend’s living room, taking a breather from city life. She’s coming off a grueling recording process, a period filled with emotional dives into the past, self-destructive ambition and many tears. Though it took some time to get here, she is comfortably settled into her new moody, morose era filled with Alice in Wonderland imagery and videogame references.

Berrin, now 27, started Pom Pom Squad at the age of 18 after moving to New York City from her parent’s home in Orlando, Florida, to attend New York University. Her first EP, Hate It Here, was more of a solo project with a backing band than the collaborative, full-band project it grew to be on 2019’s Ow EP. After coming out her junior year of college and transferring to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Berrin came into her own as an artist, leaning into a production background that helped her craft a more decadent, dynamic sound for Pom Pom Squad. Two years later, she co-produced the band’s debut album, Death of a Cheerleader, and fully embodied the queer youth she missed out on, creating a world that was hers to play around in.

Now, Pom Pom Squad is kicking things up a notch on Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, a dynamic, genre-bending exploration through Berrin’s psyche during a search for her genuine self—an image that has been marred and distorted by public attention and industry woes. The band’s sophomore album is a polished version of their fuzz rock past but packed with richer production and a range of styles weaving in and out of lullabies and electro-pop while still nurturing their classic grunge sound. “It was uncomfortable at first, because I was nervous that people wouldn’t like it,” Berrin says of releasing lead single “Downhill.” “I think it’s not necessarily what my fans, my label or what I expected, but I knew that was the path I had to follow. It’s not a fulfilling way to make art thinking about other people’s opinions of it. I had to get that language out of my head to make something I was proud of.”

Death of a Cheerleader was Berrin’s ode to fuzzy ‘90s alt-rock and ‘60s girl group sweetness. Using the hyper-femme imagery of a head cheerleader allowed for a queer reclamation and, while Mirror Starts Moving Without Me still has the same girlish, queer charms of its predecessor.

However, in the wake of critical acclaim and a surge in popularity, Berrin saw her work measure up with a piece of art like Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan—a transformation she references in “Messages,” when she sings about “growing feathers from her back.” It was a vicious split between the version of Berrin that she feels to be true and the persona supporting the image other people were crafting around her; she was chasing after a fantasy just out of her grasp even though it wasn’t faithful to her. “Running from myself, all my life / Running from myself, I’m terrified / Don’t know how to cope / Hoping that I won’t catch up this time,” she confesses in a similar sentiment on the heartbreakingly honest “Running From Myself.”

To make up for the time when Berrin felt like she was spinning out of control, she took a bigger role in the studio this time around. “I’ve focused on learning how to produce because I hadn’t realized it until the last few years, but being a producer affords you a lot of power,” she says. “It’s not that hard to do, but it is very inaccessible. You could technically Google everything I learned in college, but I wouldn’t have known what to ask. I think that’s true, particularly for a lot of women, queer people and, well, non-men. You don’t want to look incompetent and be judged, so you are scared to ask the ‘stupid’ question, even though it’s not stupid—it’s just not intuitive, and no one has taught you. I feel fortunate that I had the experience to learn hands-on from really amazing mentors. I hope that’s a skill I can pass on to others someday because it has empowered me as an artist. I think it’s a gift creating things—seeing your art come to life right in front of you.”

That control allowed Berrin to compose Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, a record that bites with sharper teeth and serenades with a haunting realism—evidence of Berrin’s transformation over the last three years. She details her inner turmoil in the album’s second single, “Spinning,” when she sings, “Crying for the girl I could have been / She haunts me like a melody.” It’s a bleak sentiment of the paths that Berrin did not take. However, it’s a reminder that all the strife and turmoil she endured has led her to this exact point in time, creating a work that is precisely who she exists as in this stage of her life.

In a full-circle moment, Berrin, along with bandmates drummer Shelby Keller, bassist Lauren Marquez, guitarist Alex Mercuri and co-producer and co-writer Cody Fitzgerald, holed up in Electric Lady Studios—the same studio Berrin would walk past frequently during her college days—to record a gloomy fairytale. “I heard there are ghosts,” Berrin grins, talking about the historic studio. “It was amazing recording there—it’s obviously a storied studio, and you can feel that when you’re there. It was very creatively fulfilling. When I was at Electric Lady, I was more in producer mode, and it felt really good to create this space within our little group. It felt very private and special.”

In an effort to tap into a more authentic version of herself, Berrin tasked her bandmates—and herself—with creating a playlist of their favorite songs from as early as they can remember to kick off the album’s recording session. “I wanted everyone to try to weed out songs that you went through a phase with or liked because your friends liked. I wanted to know the songs that really affected the way that you see and relate to, either as a musician or as a person,” she explains. Her own playlist consisted of tracks like “Lolita” by Prince, “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles and “You Don’t Know Me” by Ben Folds and Regina Spektor. “It spanned a huge range of genres, which was an interesting discovery. I grew up listening to hip-hop and R&B, and my mom’s favorite artist is the Smiths, so that was a big phase in my life. Then, in high school, I found riot grrrl, grunge and indie rock.”

Berrin and I commiserate over being tricked by the same headline—the promise unseen Prince footage in a new documentary that the public will never see. “There’s a battle with Prince’s estate over releasing it, and I’m so bummed,” she laments. “I read a book about Prince recently; when I was taking the train to the studio for this album, I was reading my little Prince book.” Berrin comes by her pop culture obsession honestly, growing up with a family who adored staying in the know and immersed themselves in the media’s ever-growing constant. “My siblings and I were very good at pop culture trivia early on,” she laughs. “It was just the language of my household. We watched a lot of films and listened to a lot of music.” Her cinephile status is evident in her recreation of Sophia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides in her music video for “Lux” from Death of a Cheerleader, as well as her consistent references to filmmakers like John Waters.

Berrin’s love for those titles and her comfort in her sexuality comes from her mother and their shared love of media. “My mom is very analytical about art in a way that has benefited me as an artist,” Berrin says. “I have found myself applying so much of her advice as an artist. I’ve always known that I was queer, but I didn’t start living as an ‘out’ person until my junior year of college. Weirdly, one of my mom’s favorite movies is Paris is Burning, and around the time that I was going through my queer awakening, she showed me that movie. It was a huge introduction to queer media and queer aesthetics, especially what it means to be queer and a person of color. Because I don’t feel that those spaces are explored as often in media.” Later, Berrin found RuPaul’s Drag Race during the pandemic and it was a “game changer” for her. “I felt like Drag Race was my crash course in fashion and queer media. It really awakened something in me.”

As someone whose college years were mostly soundtracked by Death of a Cheerleader in all its campy, queer, grunge glory, it felt kismet that Berrin and I have so much in common. The similarities we discovered throughout our conversation were uncanny, from our moms’ love of pop culture, to realizing our sexualities during college, to falling into a Drag Race obsession during COVID-19, and even our mutual feelings of angst surrounding change—a feeling she explored in the album’s closer “The Tower,” a reference to the tarot card and its dual meaning of destruction and liberation.

“I do [tarot] readings on myself, and sometimes for friends, but I only do them in moments where I feel like I’m at a turning point or something really pivotal is happening,” Berrin says. “I did a reading right after Death of a Cheerleader where I pulled the tower, and I was kind of like, ‘Oh no, I don’t know what this means, but I got the card.’ I didn’t know what to expect, but I felt its effects. I went through a period of a lot of change at once, feeling lost within myself. I had some of the lyrics for ‘Tower’ sitting in my notes for a long time, and that song unlocked the album for me. I remember coming up with the melody for it one day. I had just gone through this big move. I was alone in this empty apartment and started humming that melody. Then I immediately started sobbing, and I was like, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”

Though so much of Mirror Starts Moving Without Me feels like Berrin moving on from Pom Pom Squad’s past, tracks like “Street Fighter,” cheekily call back to her former persona with the line “You couldn’t hear me? What if I cheerlead? / M-E-S-S-Y / You’re messy.” Within the desire to grow away from a former self, there is an apprehension for the future. On the piano ballad “Everybody’s Moving On,” Berrin details the uncomfortable growing pains of watching your friends start new chapters in their lives while you are stuck in place. Her growth is apparent, though, in tracks like “Doll Song” and “Villain,” which each play around with the idea that she is a puppet for others to control through their critiques and praise. “Villain” opens with a hushed cadence in the vein of early Billie Eilish before bursting open with a lick ripped straight from Death of a Cheerleader and a magical lilt of teardrop synth as she sings, “You be just like me, I’ll be like you / You can play your games, but I can too.” Then, on the dreamy acoustic “Doll Song,” Berrin cements her individuality and her power while crooning, “I’m not gonna be your doll anymore / I did it before, and it wasn’t for me.”

Funny enough to discover what felt like her true self, Berrin looked to her old self for inspiration—to a version not yet colored by public opinion. “At the time I was writing Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, I felt the need to strip back emotionally and artistically,” she says. “You just get a lot of different voices in your head. I was thinking too much about other people’s opinions of me and the music, so I took a lot of time trying to remove any pretenses from what I did. Music has a strong attachment to status. Whether a certain type of music is cool, a certain band is cool, a certain type of writing is acceptable, or a certain type of writing is cringe.” Berrin wanted to go back in time and figure out what she loved when she was “pure of heart” and “detached” from critiques and phases. Her visuals conjure childhood curiosity, ideas pulled from videogames, anime and Westernized animation, particularly Alice in Wonderland. “I loved the idea of creating this void space to operate within,” she continues. “The album cover was inspired by Alice in Wonderland—walking through this mirror into this black void. It’s a literal interpretation of that need to strip everything back and eliminate all the noise. But I think it also represents this slightly darker album thematically. It just warranted darker spaces.”

Those darker spaces also stem from Berrin’s passion for horror. Her catalog has slowly been built out of Black Swan and Blue Velvet references, but few pieces of media were as crucial to the foundation of Pom Pom Squad as Jennifer’s Body—Berrin’s introduction to the genre. “It’s an obvious one for a girl such as myself, but it has it all,” she gushes. “It’s got practical effects, lesbian cheerleaders and indie rock boys being bad. But I also love psychological horror.” Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue was a galvanizing force of intrigue and imagery for Berrin on Mirror Starts Moving Without Me, a disintegration of reality mimicking her own blurring the lines between every part of her, both past and present.

As she grows older and more confident, Berrin is finding more authority over her image and art, yet there are still times where she feels like the tiny ballet dancer trapped in a music box—forced to perform on a whim for others. “It’s always slightly complicated to talk about because I’m not a big artist, but I’m very sensitive to the attention,” she confesses. “The love, vitriol, or criticism is all a bit overwhelming for me. I clearly let other people’s feelings affect me, and it’s sometimes difficult not to start to see yourself the way that other people describe you. That’s the strange thing about having your art analyzed for better or for worse. As an artist, you feel this kind of pressure that if someone likes something about you, you’re like, ‘Well, I have to keep doing that.’ Even if it doesn’t feel totally close to who you are at that time in your life. I get that on a business level, but on an artistic level, my job is to grow and make things that feel true to me.”

“It was helpful to push through that noise and follow my internal voice,” she continues. “My ambition is the best of me, but it’s also the worst depending on the day. However, I think the better part of my ambition took over for this project. I needed to aspire to make the kind of art that would satisfy me, whether that satisfied anyone else or not. I just had to realize that when making things public, my reward can’t be accolades or positive reviews; it has to be making art. And anything good that comes out of that is a blessing.”

Mirror Starts Moving Without Me is a culmination of Mia Berrin’s journey with doubt and discovery documented through raw sincerity and oneness. “I cried my way through the recording process,” she admits. “I’m really grateful for my co-producer, Cody Fitzgerald. I also felt so supported by my bandmates. They really allowed me to be the worst version of myself in those sessions. I could just cry and be self-deprecating; they were there for me and gave me pep talks when needed. I feel really lucky that I’ve found my Squad. I’m proud of myself for getting through, particularly the vocals on this one, because it was hard for me to find my voice. It taught me a lot about myself as a singer and also as a person.”

Mirror Starts Moving Without Me is out October 25th via City Slang.

Olivia Abercrombie is Brooklyn-based music and culture writer. When she is not reviewing albums or interviewing artists you can find her ranting on Twitter (@o_abercrombie) about Survivor or making terrible jokes on Letterboxd.