8 Things You Should Know About SNUB

If your copy of Nevermind has never gathered any dust, and you have a Hole in your heart that can only be filled by Courtney Love, SNUB is about to become one of your new favorite bands.

The Melbourne-based grunge rock foursome just released their full-length debut album, All Day Glow, and it’s filled with heavy riffs, and vocals that hit harder than a heavyweight fighter.

Consisting of (above photo: L to R) Amanda Gregory (bass), Chris Howe (guitar / vocals), Lisa Bell (vocals / guitar), and Jemima Pitcher (drums), SNUB sounds like they’re pretty much always ready to kick some ass, and the 30 minutes of All Day Glow will leave a listener ready to rumble alongside them.

With All Day Glow starting to make some noise, and the band tearing up recent performances, here are eight things you should know about SNUB.

They’ve been playing together in some way, shape, or form for nearly a decade 

The story of SNUB begins with the story of another band named Slugbucket.

Slugbucket included all three women from SNUB, but a different guitar player, and launched around eight years ago.

Right before the pandemic, a switch was made at guitar, and with the addition of Chris – who’d previously been in other bands with Lisa – SNUB was born.

Jemima says that despite both bands falling under the heading of grunge, the addition of Chris made a huge musical impact. “Just changing one guitarist did change our sound quite a bit.”

In addition to the change in sound, with Chris in the fold songwriting duties went from being something Lisa did the bulk of, to being a collaborative effort.

After the pandemic – Chris notes that with SNUB being a new band during the days of lockdowns, “It was hard to get anything off the ground” – they began recording songs in 2021, and hit the stage for the first time in 2022.

Lisa’s vocals were a surprise to everyone 

Before Lisa joined Slugbucket nobody knew she could sing.

Having been a drummer for many years, she’d always been part of a rhythm section.

“I hadn’t sung before,” she explains, “and I just really wanted to be in their band because they had some really cool influences they posted, and I was like oh yeah, I reckon I do this. I’ll give it a crack,” adding, “I just thought, I don’t know these people, so if it’s terrible, oh well.”

Amanda describes the scene that day, saying, “She came in to audition for Slugbucket with me, and Jemima, and she’s come in UGG boots, tracksuit pants, with this notepad, and just takin’ off like – yep, I’m going to do this.”

To say things went well would be an understatement.

Jemima remembers, “(She) walked in, and smashed it.”

Amanda adds, “We were like, ‘What the???’ … This is awesome! I think our jaws were dropped, like yes, you, this is great.”

Chris notes he didn’t discover his then former, and future bandmate’s vocals until the first time he saw her hit the stage with Slugbucket. “I’d never heard her sing, so coming to see their band for the first time was pretty mind-blowing.”

They bring a wide range of musical influences to the table 

While SNUB perform a heavy style of grunge, their individual influences are wide-ranging.

Chris, who has a punk background, notes, “We all listen to quite a lot of different stuff, but then we all kind of meet in the middle on a lot of the main big grunge bands, and stuff that we all appreciate.”

He says the qualities the bands they mutually love have in common are, “fuzzy, heavy riffs, but still catchy songs.”

Jemima points to Hole as a huge influence on SNUB, adding L7, Garbage, Blondie, and the Divinyls count as influences, as well.

Lisa adds that she and Amanda have bands like Alice in Chains, and Soundgarden as two of their mutual influences.

Their recently released debut album, All Day Glow, was years in the making 

SNUB shows some hostility on All Day Glow, and much of that stems from when Lisa was writing the initial songs that ended up on the album, which was four years ago.

“I wrote some of them during the pandemic,” she says, “so some of them are just my sheer frustration of the time where, you know, especially in Melbourne, we were really locked down for long periods of time.”

Those earlier songs, which almost didn’t make the album, ended up being tweaked along the way, as Chris explains, “We kept working on them, and perfecting them. ‘Blowflies’ is an example. That was actually the first song that we wrote as a band. At the time, we decided to record a few other ones, and then we came back to that one for the album, and we’re glad that we let it marinate, and get much better.”

Chris created the artwork for the album 

All Day Glow is actually named after the album cover artwork, and that artwork was created by the band’s own Chris Howe.

“We didn’t have a name for the album,” Chris says, “so we were like – let’s create some art, and see what we can work around that.”

The band started brainstorming.

“We wanted to do something a bit weird, and surreal that kind of felt like some of the ‘90s artwork,” he remembers.

The vibrant, almost Kafka-meets-modern times cover art was what the band came up with, and Chris created it himself.

With the cover having drawn comparisons to albums by The Offspring, and Melvins, Chris says that while he was coming up with the image, “I’m sure that was all just subliminally in there.”

They teamed up with a local skate shop to release All Day Glow on vinyl 

In Melbourne there’s skate shop named Desert Highways that doubles as a record store, and an indie record label. The owner, Anthony Moore, was originally a fan of Slugbucket, and his fandom has continued with SNUB. This led to a collaboration when it came to All Day Glow.

Chris says, “(He’s) really supported us from day one, and we got together, and he said, ‘Let’s do something together. I don’t really care what. I just think that your stuff is cool, and we should work together.’ So we decided to pair up, and release the vinyl through his label.”

SNUB also performed at the store last month as part of Desert Highways’ Record Store Day festivities.

They’re creating their own scene in Australia 

While Australia has a tremendous lineage in rock music that includes everyone from AC/DC, Midnight Oil, and Men at Work, to Tonight Alive, and Skegss, Chris notes, “There’s not a lot of bands doing (music) similar to what we’re doing.”

Based on the bills they’ve been on, Jemima says, “We’re either too heavy, or too light. We get put in with like punk bands, and metal bands, but there’s not a lot of other grunge bands. It feels like we’re either not heavy enough to fit with the metal bands, or we’re too heavy for some of the other stuff.”

Seeing this, SNUB has taken to connecting with the bands that, as Chris puts it, “are within the same realm,” and continuing to play shows with them.

Oh, and about those lives shows … 

Whether they’re randomly in the middle of a bill of grindcore bands, or performing at a Record Store Day event, Lisa says a SNUB show will always be three things – “Loud, high energy, honest.”

She adds that even with the aggressiveness of the music, “We always have the nicest people come to the shows. A lot of positive vibes. There’s no fights. There’s no dickheads.”

Grunge, and good times – what more could you ask for?

For more SNUB, check out linktr.ee/snubmelbourne.