Supercute!

Supercute! were an American indie pop band from New York City composed of teenage-girl members Rachel Trachtenburg, Julia Cumming, LuLu Laurette Prat and Ruby Tanja. The band has acquired notable press attention, toured several times in the U.S. and Europe with English singer-songwriter Kate Nash.

Trachtenburg has described the band's sound as "psychedelic-indie-bubblegum"; Cumming told Nylon Magazine Supercute's songs are "ukelele rock operas", while Nash was quoted as saying "it's smartest pop you’ve heard in years. It’s candy-colored, girly and fierce, political and intelligent, innocent yet wise. And they have indie-credible style."

Trachtenburg and Cumming, the core members of the band, also co-host an Internet radio show named Pure Imagination on the Progressive Radio Network about politics, art and music that’s aimed primarily at fellow teens. The two are in a Glam rock cover band, Terry Tinsel, and both have done some fashion modeling - Trachtenburg is currently signed with Elite Model Management. Rachel has also been an outspoken political activist, remarkably addressing the New York City Council at age 14 in 2008 to protest against Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s rewriting of the city’s mayoral term-limits law, and both she and Julia have been actively involved with protests on behalf of Slutwalk NYC, in favor of vegetarianism, and against the mistreatment of Central Park's carriage horses. "We want to change the world," Trachtenburg told a national magazine in 2011.

Rachel Sage Piña-Trachtenburg (born December 10, 1993), the daughter of Jason and Tina Piña Trachtenburg, first started playing the drums for her family band (The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players) at the age of 6. Growing up initially in Seattle and then in the East Village, Manhattan, Rachel first met Julia Rachel Cumming (born January 16, 1996) in 2003. Julia is the daughter of Alec Cumming, a longtime friend of and occasional bassist for the Trachtenburgs, and Cynthia Harden, a noted epileptologist; Alec and Cynthia's band Bite The Wax Godhead was active in the New York music scene of the early-to-mid 1990's. Trachtenburg and Cumming became close friends and fellow entrepreneurs, often selling lemonade, hot chocolate, popcorn and chai together in front of Rachel’s apartment building. (Trachtenburg and her parents currently live in Bushwick, Brooklyn, due to the increasingly unaffordable rents of Manhattan.)

Rachel long had dreams of creating her own girl group when she got older, a project that family friend Kate Nash (a popular UK-based singer/songwriter who had first toured with the Trachtenburg Family in 2008) particularly encouraged. In the summer of 2009, Trachtenburg enlisted Cumming and June Lei, who had been best friends since the second grade at Manhattan’s PS 40, to form a group. They debuted as The OMG Girls, but the name was changed to Supercute! once it became apparent there was already a teen-girl group with the name of The OMG Girlz. Supercute! gained positive reviews for their appearance at the 2009 CMJ Music Marathon and began to play all-ages performances with friends and fellow teen performers Care Bears on Fire, Jack Skuller and Ethan Levenson at Cake Shop NYC and other local venues. The New York Times praised the band for its “tidy, clever bubblegum pop” with “pop instincts as finely honed as Mr. Jonas’s”.

The early Supercute! era featured a more acoustic, quirky, "anti-folk" sound, with Trachtenburg on ukulele, Cumming on ukulele and acoustic guitar and Lei on keyboards. The three were especially noted for their homemade space-age outfits, on-stage hula-hooping, and witty cover choices (Led Zeppelin’s “Misty Mountain Hop” and Pink Floyd’s “Pigs (Three Different Ones)”, amongst others). They frequently appeared at comedy/performance art shows as well as rock venues, performing alongside Paul Rudd, Jeff Garlin, Janeane Garofalo and Ira Glass. The band released a music video titled "Not To Write About Boys" in mid-2010 (featuring guest star Jack Skuller), toured later that year with Kate Nash in both the U.S. and Europe, and created a stir busking on Ludlow Street in New York's Lower East Side during the 2010 CMJ Conference. "I think Supercute! is about being yourself, and breaking rules, and art and music," Trachtenburg told the Village Voice at the time. "You have to stick to what you are, and be true to that. And I think Supercute! is also about being goofy and just having fun with fashion."

By the end of 2010, Lei left the band to concentrate on her high school studies, and Supercute! has primarily been a duo project of Trachtenburg and Cumming’s ever since. (Julia attends New York's prestigious Professional Performing Arts School, which allows its students a fair amount of latitude towards taking leaves of absences for out-of-town projects and tours.) Olivia Ferrer, daughter of Guns N' Roses drummer Frank Ferrer, performed extensively with the band throughout 2011 and into 2012 on keyboards and bass, making her live debut as the girls busked the 2011 SXSW festival Olivia appeared with Rachel and Julia on videos for “Paint It Black” and “Dumb Dumbs”, the latter featuring cameos of Kate Nash, Reverend Jen, and Andrew W.K. Delilah Brierley, then a resident of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, also began to make appearances as an alternate Supercute! member at the time. But Ferrer (who was 12 when she joined the band) and her family found the demands of frequent commutes into New York City from suburban New Jersey increasingly difficult to manage, so she no longer regularly performs with the band; Brierley, meanwhile, returned to her native England in 2012.

Supercute! recorded a song, "Superrookie!", for the September 2011 debut of Tavi Gevinson's Rookie (magazine), which was later released as a flexi disc accompanying the 2012 Drawn and Quarterly book release of Rookie Yearbook One. Gevinson's attitude towards encouraging independent thinking, style and creativity within adolescent girls fits in well with the Supercute! worldview, and the band and magazine maintain a fruitful alliance. Also in 2012, Trachtenburg and Cumming shot a reality-show pilot for Den Of Thieves (a video production company that has worked extensively with MTV and Bravo), and expanded the Supercute! sound by playing with new musicians Heather Boo (bass) and Jacqueline Russo (drums). Julia and Rachel also collaborated with R. Stevie Moore on a cover of Paul McCartney's "Coming Up", and recorded background vocals for several songs on the upcoming Dot Wiggin solo album. (The reclusive Wiggin, guitarist and songwriter for the groundbreaking music group The Shaggs, is releasing her first new music in over thirty years in 2013 with the help of bassist/producer Jesse Krakow.)

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Trachtenburg and Cumming recruited bassist LuLu Laurette Prat (formerly of Care Bears On Fire) and drummer Ruby Tanja to join them for their 10-city March 2013 Northeast U.S. tour opening for Kate Nash, helping bring the live Supercute! sound closer to the more complex and mature tone of the album. The band already has an impressive live resume, playing alongside artists such aaa as Adam Green, The John Spencer Blues Explosion, Gary Lucas and Jeffrey Lewis. They have performed at the 92nd Street Y, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York’s Bowery Ballroom, Minneapolis’s First Avenue and the Los Angeles’s El Rey Theater, and have played gigs in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Italy and France. In addition to upcoming Supercute! shows this year, there is also talk of a collaboration on a single with The Raveonettes as well as a possible full-length album project with R. Stevie Moore.] “Look, Supercute! may be exactly that: super cute,” Nash told Nylon Magazine. “But they’re also smart women—and you don’t f*ck with smart women."