I originally thought this story was going to be about how to start a band. Then I went on tour with one.
Misandrist began at my karaoke-themed birthday party on a Los Angeles rooftop, where my best friend Erp asked our friend Jason if he wanted to start a shoegaze band.
“No,” he replied. “You’re too emo.”
The sun was setting as we sang Cocteau Twins’ “Cherry-Coloured Funk.” That’s the moment, Jason told me over a year later from the passenger seat of a tour van somewhere between California cities, that he changed his mind.
At some point that night, Erp wrote “Misandrist” across Jason’s arm in Sharpie. The next morning, he woke up hungover staring at the smudged word from the toilet.
“I was like, what the fuck is this?”
A year later, Misandrist is packing San Francisco venues shoulder-to-shoulder with crowds that feel less like fans and more like friends. Their members assembled through sidewalks, Reddit posts, Hinge matches, and mutual friends. It’s like a party that accidentally kept growing.
In a city whose culture has been flattened by tech money, pandemic isolation, and years of creative exodus, that kind of momentum feels pretty radical.
The band came together the way most things in Misandrist seem to: accidentally.
“We’ve gone through 30 guitarists,” Erp told me.
We went back and counted. It was actually 8.
“We ate them,” added bassist Lailee, who joined the band before knowing how to play bass.
When Erp first asked if she played bass, Lailee told her no.
“Perfect,” Erp responded. “Don’t tell Jason.”
A month later, Lailee bought a bass off Facebook Marketplace. By May, she was in the band.
Their guitarist Willis entered through Reddit. At the time, he was debating whether to move back to Madrid or stay in San Francisco.
“I knew wherever I ended up, I was gonna throw myself into music,” he said. “So I googled ‘how to get into the SF music scene reddit.’”
Eventually, he found a post from Erp: “looking for a guitarist for a female-fronted shoegaze band.”
“Erp showed us his Instagram and was like, ‘This dude looks AI-generated,’” Jason said. “Turns out he was actually perfect.”
Misandrist’s first show happened because the band needed a deadline.
“We needed to have something to work towards,” Erp said.
She texted their friend Cami—vocalist of Townbully—asking if she’d be willing to host a house show.
“She was like, ‘Uh… sure? Can my band play too?’” Erp recalled. “And I was like, fuck yeah.”
The house was tiny. The crowd wasn’t.
“Everyone we knew came,” Lailee said. “Which was really sweet. But then it was like, wait: I’m performing in front of everyone who knows me.”
Before the show, Erp spiraled into a week-long panic attack bad enough to send her to the hospital.
“But once it happened,” she said, “it was lit.”
For guitarist Willis, it was his first time ever playing in front of people.
“It was just getting over the nerves of putting my stupid fucking guitar on and getting in front of people,” he said. “All of our closest friends were in the front row.”
From there, the shows kept getting bigger. Or maybe just fuller. The band unanimously points to their show at Kilowatt as the moment Misandrist stopped feeling hypothetical.
“That was the best night of my life,” Lailee said.
“It was all our community,” Willis added. “People said they were gonna come, but people say shit, right? We fucking packed Kilowatt. I’ve never seen it that full.”
“It was body to body out the door.”
The show also marked the arrival of guitarist Izzie Clark (of chokecherry), who flew up from Los Angeles to play with the band for the first time.
“Izzie provided the spark that we all needed to take everything seriously,” Jason said. “You hear this touring guitarist is gonna come play with you and suddenly you have to be on your A-game.”
For Izzie, joining Misandrist coincided with something else: returning to a San Francisco music scene she felt had fundamentally changed.
“I could see it coming back to where it was pre-pandemic,” she said. “Which was the best shit ever.”
She described the city’s earlier DIY scene as fragmented and territorial—bands sticking within their own circles, reluctant to intermingle. Now, she said, something softer had emerged in its place.
“Everyone’s sick and super supportive now,” she said. “It used to be super cliquey in SF. People would cool-guy each other all the time. Now it’s fucking sick.”
For Jason, the shift felt especially noticeable returning to San Francisco after college.
“I feel like I have a pretty good understanding of the ebbs and flows of SF youth culture,” he said. “Because when I was growing up, I saw it all just fucking die.”
He remembered the city changing in real time.
“It was like it got bombed. Suddenly I didn’t see the people I used to see walking around every day anymore. It was all these techies. It was the backpacks and the computers and everything.”
When he came back four years later, something felt different again.
“I remember telling my mom, ‘It’s coming back,’” he said. “I could feel my friends wanting to make San Francisco cool again. People were actually putting in the effort.”
That effort was far from glamorous. The band describes house shows, flyers, sidewalk gigs, borrowed gear, or entire friend groups squeezing into tiny venues on weeknights.
“There are lots of waves,” Jason said. “But we were a wave.”
He started listing them off: himself returning to the city, Erp moving from Nashville, Lailee moving from Los Angeles, Willis almost abandoning San Francisco entirely before stumbling into the band through Reddit.
“Everybody sort of had this silent intention to—”
“To get lit,” Erp interrupted.
“To have a community,” Jason corrected.
“This is the place we wanna do it,” he continued. “Because it’s so beautiful and it deserves to have people love it.”
That sense of openness came up constantly in conversations about the current San Francisco scene. Nearly every band member described a culture that felt noticeably less competitive than the one they were in before.
“In Nashville, people would only fuck with you if you had something to offer,” Erp said.
“That’s kinda how LA is too,” Izzie added.
But in San Francisco, things felt different.
“Maybe we just got super fucking lucky,” Erp said, “but I really haven’t felt that here. Everyone’s super stoked on each other and actually shows up to each other’s shows.”
“We all go to everyone’s shows all the time,” Lailee added.
When I asked the band about the scene, they struggled to even define what scene they belonged to.
“I don’t know if it feels like a scene,” Lailee said. “It’s just our friends.”
“We just do cool stuff with our friends and that’s kind of it,” she continued. “We’re just having so much fun.”
Eventually, Erp settled on the simplest explanation.
“We’re just throwing parties with all our friends,” she said.
The scrappiest thing Misandrist has done so far was also one of the most ambitious: a sidewalk show outside Muddy Waters Coffeehouse in the Mission.
The idea came while walking through the park.
“We were talking and Lailee looked gorgeous obviously,” Willis said. “And I was like, what if we played a show in front of your house where the band is on the sidewalk and Erp sings from the window?”
“At first I was like, no, that’s not gonna happen,” he continued.
“But then Lailee was like, ‘no, we’re doing this and we’re doing it next week.’”
The day of the show, it started raining. People came anyway.
The owner of Muddy Waters rolled out an awning to cover Jason’s drum set while friends carried gear across the sidewalk. Erp sang above the crowd while the band played below her.
“The guy who owns the coffee shop was the most excited out of all of us,” Lailee said.
Despite the rain, the entire thing somehow worked.
That seems to be the pattern with Misandrist: Ideas sound ridiculous until suddenly they aren’t.
More than once while talking to the band, I found myself waiting for someone to describe their goals in the language musicians are expected to use: networking, branding, exposure, momentum. Instead, the conversations kept circling back to the same thing: friends, parties, community, showing up for each other.
Earlier in the tour, Izzie described the city she returned to after the pandemic as “warm” again.
“The energy in SF even three years ago just felt sterile and cold,” she told me. “Now I feel like there’s such a beautiful warmth here. It’s actually magical.”
Sitting in the crowded tour van near the end of the trip, I kept coming back to that warmth. Maybe that’s why the band feels inseparable from the version of San Francisco they describe. Not a city “coming back” through tech investment or cultural prestige, but through people choosing to gather again.
Jason described receiving the voice memos Erp records from inside her closet: “It’s always a surprise getting the voice memo back. You throw it into the project and suddenly it’s huge.”
He paused.
“You never hear somebody speak so quietly, yet be so loud.”
For years, people talked about San Francisco like it had lost something permanent. But sitting in that van, listening to the band talk over each other somewhere along the California coast, it felt obvious that the city was getting loud again.
Just quietly.
In collaboration with Soundwall Music Fest and Bandcamp, White Crate is presenting Starbelliedbug, Misandrist, and Big Dog Mastiff at Kilowatt on Saturday, May 30th.
All proceeds will go towards Soundwall Music Fest—featuring Ringo Deathstarr, Suzy Clue, Her New Knife, Blossom, Starling, and Misandrist—happening Saturday, July 25th at Great American Music Hall.
