Overview
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.”
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