EDM

Sorry (not sorry) in advance, this post is super long & highly opinionated✌🏼

There is not one singular way I can describe how I feel after spending yesterday in Philly at the DNC. When we started our day I felt bright-eyed & optimistic. I saw ppl w Bernie shirts, Black Lives Matter pins, & signs that preached beautiful messages of equality & love. The excitement was palpable & I can’t even describe how humbled I am to have been a part of it. The 1st interview we conducted was with a Muslim, African American police officer. Imagine that insane perspective? I gained so much knowledge from spending less than 10 mins w him. The 2nd interview was but 1 min long with Rev. Jesse Jackson Sr. - YES, the same man who marched with MLK during the civil rights movement. Jahan & I were almost in tears listening to him speak to us, not daring to break eye contact with this man who held so much history, pain, & wisdom in his heart. As the day went on, we spoke w everyone from The Daily Show Correspondent Hasan Minhaj (loml holy shit) to Chelsea Handler to former Senator Chris Dodd to NSYNC’s Lance Bass (yes, you read that right). I eventually took my seat inside the arena & heard 4 speeches. A former military official (this speech was more of a battle cry to “defeat all enemies” - tbh sort of scared the shit out of me), Chloe Moretz (19 yr old who is so politically involved & urging her generation to vote, really respect that), Chelsea Clinton (sweet speech about her relationship w her mom but made me wonder if it was a strategic move to humanize HRC more?), & then finally, Hillary. The whole place went fucking bananas🍌 for this woman. I think I was literally the only person in the building not standing as she entered the stage to Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” (I had my face in my palm, if u were wondering). Now, pls don’t get me wrong. I don’t hate Hillary. But this was the moment in the night where my disappointment & anxiety rushed in at full force. Here was an arena full of screaming, rabid HRC supporters from all walks of life - gay, POC, Muslim, feminist, etc. But Hillary didn’t openly & fully support gay marriage until 2013. She voted in favor of the Iraq war. She wholeheartedly supports Israel even though in doing so, she ignores & dismisses the innocent Palestinian women raped & killed by the opposing force on the daily. Again, pls do not misunderstand my words. I don’t hate Hillary. But 5 mins into her speech when she thanked Bernie Sanders for engaging the youth & helping bring to light so many real issues for voters, my heart sank as his face was shown on the big screens around the arena. In the same place that corruption & consumerism were greedily smiling down upon all of us was a man who could’ve been a gateway to the truth. A gateway to a more real, fair, & honest govt. - but the cards were stacked against him from the jump. So I walked out on HRC’s booming voice to catch some air. My mind started to run with these thoughts;

I am not afraid to admit I’m the least patriotic person. I am not afraid to admit that the “good” & “liberal” Democratic party that I’ve spent my life identifying with is overflowing with crooks. I am not afraid to admit that America has committed the WORST acts of terrorism in countries around the world & to our own citizens. I am not afraid to admit that the US hasn’t really been “great” since its inception. I am not afraid to admit that I feel forced to vote for the lesser of two evils. I am not afraid to admit that I wish I felt more pride in knowing that the US will finally have its first woman president.

I am a proud Muslim-raised Pakistani American woman. I was born in the US, I still live here, & I might die here. The only thing that brings me solace is that I have faith we can be better. But in turn, I refuse to ignore the injustices our very own govt & media impose on us every single day while we live in our distracted bubbles, content w consuming bullshit. & if you have a problem with a musician or public figure speaking out about their political & moral beliefs on social media, please look inside & ask yourself what you’re missing. It’s time to open our eyes & open our mouths. Because THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A SILENT REVOLUTION.

my edit :) these pics are from a new interview.

July 12, 2016 by Michelle Lhooq via THUMB/VICE

It is one of those comically beautiful afternoons in May when the sidewalks of Manhattan are drenched in gold and somehow don’t smell like piss. Even the two chronically grouchy men outside a corner store in the East Village have uncrossed their arms and are smiling at the stream of sun-drunk pedestrians walking by—including Krewella bandmates and sisters Jahan and Yasmine Yousaf, both dressed in body-hugging, all-black outfits from a recent shopping trip to VFILES. Aged 26 and 24 respectively, they’ve just stepped out from the shadows of a restaurant next door, and are scanning Avenue A for a scenic spot where our photographer can take some pictures for this interview. Suddenly, Yasmine’s eyes light up.

“Tompkins Square Park! It’s like the Mumford and Sons song!” she says, pointing at a metal placard with a hand covered in snaking tattoos, her brown eyes wide with childlike glee. Without a hint of self-consciousness, she starts singing sweetly, “Oh babe, meet me in Tompkins Square Park…” Jahan, whose angular cheekbones stands in contrast to Yasmine’s baby-faced features, joins in with a sardonic grin: “I wanna hold you in the dark…” Clutching each other’s elbows, the sisters double forward in contagious laughter.

Learning to laugh at themselves hasn’t always been easy for Jahan and Yasmine, who for the last two years have been subject to intense online scrutiny due to a highly publicized—and very ugly—legal battle with former bandmate Kris “Rainman” Trindl, who left the group in 2014. (Trindl and Jahan also dated from 2006 to 2011.)

Back in 2012, Jahan, Yasmine and Kris were the new faces of the burgeoning EDM movement—charismatic poster kids for rolling face to nasty dubstep drops, thrashing your wet hair against thousands of sweaty strangers, and giving in to every impulse. The Yousafs acted as the group’s vocalists and songwriters, while Trindl produced the beats. Together, they developed a trademark sound that hijacks every nerve in your body and blasts you into a confetti cannon of mindless euphoria: sweet and synthetic pop hooks floating over chainsaw basslines that sound like Transformers kicking each other in the testicles. The video for one of their early hits, “Alive,"—which currently has 53 million views on YouTube—follows a group of hot teens hooking up amidst an apocalyptic demolition derby. It perfectly sums up their visual brand: dirty, playful, sexy, unstoppable.

After winning an International Dance Music Award in 2012 for "Best Breakthrough Artist,” the trio headlined major festivals like Ultra, Electric Daisy Carnival, and Stereosonic. Their 2013 debut album, Get Wet—which mixed hardstyle, electro, and dubstep with stadium rock, and featured guests like Blink-182’s Travis Barker and Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump—reached #1 on Billboard’s US Dance charts. At a time when main stages were dominated by Tiesto, Hardwell, Martin Garrix, Zedd, Avicii, and Disclosure, the Yousafs—who proudly talk about growing up in a Muslim family with a Pakistani father—felt like refreshing outlier next to the brigade of bland white men in black V-necks. They were also one of the few female-fronted acts in a male-dominated scene—like Nervo, but more raw.

Krewella’s fiery rise sputtered out in March 2014, when Trindl missed a flight to headline at Electric Daisy Carnival in Mexico City. According to Jahan and Yasmine’s countersuit, this final straw prompted them to stage an intervention in an attempt to curb a drinking problem they said Trindl had developed in tandem with the band’s rising profile. Per court documents THUMP obtained, Trindl refused to enter a treatment program, and in September 2014, he sued Jahan and Yasmine for $5 million, alleging that he’d been unfairly removed from the group and cut out of his equal share of their future revenue. In the transcript from his lawsuit, Trindl admitted he drank to deal with the pressure of success, and accused the sisters of not being supportive of his sobriety following an earlier stint in rehab in 2013, stating that they “didn’t like the new, sober Kris” and “thought he was depressed.” Trindl also claimed that the girls only wanted him to check into a facility so so they could establish themselves as a duo, squeeze him out of the group, and make more money for themselves going forward.

In November 2014, the Yousafs countersued, claiming in their lawsuit that it had been Trindl’s choice to resign. They also noted that Trindl had refused to learn how to DJ for their live shows, wasn’t holding up his end of production duties due to missed studio sessions, and had acted belligerently on tour due to his alcohol abuse. The spat quickly got messy after the court documents circulated by the Hollywood Reporter. The media started obsessively scrutinizing every new development in the story, with TMZ salaciously reporting that Trindl had been “forced out” for “being too sober.” At one point in 2014, the fallout became the number one trending topic on Facebook. Deadmau5 jumped in with a sexist Tweet, advising would-be trios like Krewella not to “fire the guy who actually does shit.”

In December 2014, Jahan penned an op-ed in response to Deadmau5’s tweet, writing, “It’s almost as if being the female in the group, it’s assumed that you are purely there as a puppet and completely void of any musical abilities, creativity, or vision… I am asking for everyone to think about girls who are looking at this public reaction who might now be discouraged to pursue an authentic place in a male-dominated industry.”

However, other than the op-ed and their first single as a duo—the not-so-subtly-titled “Say Goodbye,” where the girls sing, “Read my lips and shut my face/Maybe you’re the one to blame… The truth is going to find you"—the Yousafs refrained from commenting further on the breakup. In fact, they practically disappeared from the limelight, taking a hiatus from their (normally very active) social media accounts. They declined interview requests from the media, including my own attempts to find out their side of the story, explaining via their publicist that they had been advised by their lawyers not to talk about the ongoing lawsuit.

In August 2015, both sides reached an undisclosed settlement. Meanwhile, Trindl had embarked on a solo career, releasing music on Borgore’s label Buygore with Grammy Award-winning rapper Sirah in March, followed by a mini US tour that spring. The Yousafs were also planning their own comeback, and in May, they dropped an EP as a duo called Ammunition, to rave reviews.

In late April, a publicist from Sony Music reached out to me, saying that the sisters were finally ready to tell their side of the story, with the hopes that this would help both themselves and the public to move on. We arranged a Skype interview from their home in LA, and a few weeks later, when the girls were in New York for a press trip, we met in person for a second conversation.

Which is how I found myself walking around the East Village with Jahan and Yasmine that afternoon in May. Earlier, leaning across the wooden table over a brunch of scrambled eggs and beet salad, with their Sony Music publicist and manager Nathan seated across the room, Jahan had explained why it’d taken them so long to open up: "I wanted to make it seem like we were just having fun, because we didn’t want to disappoint our fans, she said. "But it’s like living a lie, and when the lawsuit happened, it all unraveled. To fans it seemed like something new, but this downward spiral was something we had been dealing with for years.”

She held my gaze and continued: “I’m going to say it point blank: the truth is very ugly. We don’t want to make him look bad—when someone is dealing with a mental illness, you don’t want put them in a situation where they feel like they’re being attacked—so we’ll try to put everything in the nicest way possible.” In the following interview, which combines our Skype and brunch conversations and has been edited and condensed for clarity, Jahan and Yasmine discuss what they experienced behind-the-scenes during the fallout, their tearful last encounter with Trindl, and how they’re reinventing their sound as they return to the spotlight, this time on their own terms.

THUMP: Let’s start with your matching tattoos “6.8.10"—the date you guys took an oath to dedicate your lives to the band. Can you tell me more about what those early days were like?

Yasmine: June 8, 2010 was a couple of days after I graduated from high school. Kris had already dropped out of college, and Jahan had decided not to go back to college. The four of us, [our manager] Nathan included, took that oath to drop everything and work on Krewella full-time. It became our "dedication day.”

Jahan: I think Kris was hugely responsible for my and Yamine’s work ethic. When we first started [and were working] in his grandma’s basement, he showed us what it’s like to be a hustler and focus on your craft. He would say, “Look, Katy Perry writes a song a day, you should be doing that too.” Yasmine was a teenager, and he would threaten her—not in a mean way—like, “You can’t be in this group anymore unless you step it up.” That lit a fire under Yasmine’s ass. He set a precedent that if you were not pulling your weight, it’s not fair to the other members.

Kris’ lawsuit claimed that you guys went against what you had agreed to in that oath, regarding the band’s financials. Was part of the oath that you would split your income evenly between the three of you?

Yasmine: We never had a contract or any sort of agreement about money. I was still in high school—I was not focused on my future at all.

Jahan: After [Kris and I] broke up, we were forced to work with each other, live in the same loft, tour with each other—so we had to make it work. We went from being in love to best friends. When you feel like someone is your brother, you don’t think that you’re going to screw each other over. My money is Yasmine’s money and vice versa.

You guys are known for having this “give no fucks” attitude and a lot of your music and videos depict a hard-partying, rock star lifestyle. How hard were you partying when you first started out?

Jahan: I was a heavy drinker when we first started touring. We were just DJing [instead of singing live], and I would take a few shots during our sets. It was like a honeymoon phase: bottle service clubs and anything we want at our fingertips. It was very exciting, but you could easily go down the rabbit hole and get trapped in this lifestyle. Even before that, I was clubbing all the time and would get shitfaced. I would black out a lot. But I feel like I got it out of my system. We had very rigorous touring schedule, and Yasmine and I realized that in order to give a passionate performance to our fans, we had to take care of ourselves, so we stopped drinking. The success of Krewella kicked me in the ass and made me think, “I can’t fuck this up.”

Yasmine: We don’t want to be the sober poster children. Look at any of our old videos and we look wasted. It’s funny. I think we found over time that we couldn’t drink [and stay professional]. And I’ve never done drugs, so I don’t know what that feels like.

You’ve never done drugs?

Yasmine: No. To be on stage like that, it’s never worth putting on a bad performance. I feel like I’m my most genuine, authentic [self] when I’m sober. I’m able to give out every bit that I’m feeling, and to have it [be] completely untainted.

Jahan: I want to have a long, healthy life. I want to tour for years and years and I don’t want to burn out. We do respect our bodies in that way.

Yasmine: On the flip side, after we were accused of kicking Kris out for being sober because it was boring, I didn’t want to be caught out in public with a drink in my hand. It felt wrong for me to be even holding a beer. For about six months, I didn’t go out, and if I did, I wouldn’t drink. I definitely felt this pressure to prove that I was sober and I didn’t want to party, and I didn’t want him to party. Now I definitely don’t feel like that—I realized that it’s stupid to let other people govern how you’re going to live your life. I know my limits. If someone sees me drunk, who gives a fuck? I can’t be perfect.

I think Kris was hugely responsible for my and Yamine’s work ethic. He would say, ‘Look, Katy Perry writes a song a day, you should be doing that too.'— Jahan Yousaf

How would you describe the series of events leading to Kris having to go to rehab in 2013?

Yasmine: In August 2013, Kris had gotten over-intoxicated and was hospitalized at a show in Phoenix. His sister, mom, and [our manager] Jake flew to Phoenix to bring him back to LA, and at that point they made the decision that his problem had become very serious, and that he needed help. Unfortunately, the timing of that coincided with Krewella’s first really big headlining tour, the “Get Wet” tour in September 2013. We had to figure out a way to explain why Kris wasn’t on the road for the first half of that tour, and we just said he was sick.

Jahan: Despite whatever you’ve seen online [about how] we tried to squeeze him out of Krewella, it was actually very traumatizing for us to go on tour without him. We felt that it was very important to have the male member of the group there, who fans thought was the producer. I remember not wanting the fans to think that it was just about the two of us.

Kris lawsuit claimed that when he got out of rehab, you and Yasmine “didn’t like” him being sober and thought he was “depressed.” TMZ even made it sound like you were forcing him out because he was sober.

Jahan: The most hurtful part of that headline was that it said we kicked him out because he wasn’t fun anymore—because he was sober and we wanted to party.

Yasmine: The funny part is that we went sober long before he ever went to rehab. I always looked up to Kris like a big brother that could do no wrong, so it was very hard for me to accept the fact that he had a problem. I didn’t think that he was an alcoholic until the day he went to rehab.

Jahan: We respected his sobriety, but we were kind of in denial—we didn’t want to think that our brother had alcoholism issues—so when we saw him drinking [during the “Get Wet” tour], we had to almost laugh at it, like “Oh haha, you’re drunk again.” Because it was too depressing to know that nothing we did worked. I remember so many times we were waiting in the car at 5AM because we didn’t know where he was.

He would just disappear after the shows?

Yasmine: Yeah, a lot of the times he would disappear. We would feel like his mother on the road: worrying about him, tucking him into bed, carrying him to his hotel room.

Besides the TMZ headline, do you feel like there are other misconceptions floating around about the band?

Jahan: I think the biggest assumption that pissed me off the most was that [Yasmine and I] didn’t work. [Kris] was getting all the credit. That had a lot to do with us being females. Right before he decided to leave Krewella, Kris himself told me, “I should have known never to trust two beautiful girls.”

Did it surprise you that he said that?

Jahan: It was hurtful because he thought we were screwing him over. No matter what we said, we couldn’t get it through to him that it wasn’t fair that Yasmine and I were working so hard and exhausting ourselves on the road—and that [he] had to step it up.

What was your live setup like when you first started out?

Yasmine: When we first started playing shows and DJing, he didn’t really want to be [on stage] with us. But we saw that the fans really cared about the production, so we were like, “You have to be up there performing; the fans want to see all of us.”

Jahan: [The electronic music] scene really appreciates producers—it’s not the pop music world. That’s why we encouraged him to be a face in the group. In every single photo shoot and music video, we were always telling him to be in the front. It was really important for us to counteract the assumption that girls get all of the attention because of sex appeal.

Do you almost feel like that backfired when people later accused you two of not having anything to do with making your music?

Yasmine: I think people will be saying that for the rest of our careers. Our hands are all over everything we do, from the music to the visuals to the live show. It’s horrible to have your credibility stripped from you, but that’s the ego getting in the way.

Kris started off being the main producer of the group—when did that change?

Yasmine: I’d say he produced a chunk of our full-length album Get Wet. But that’s when he was drinking very heavily and not working, so we had to outsource producers. I remember a couple of tracks on the album nearly did not make it in because Kris wouldn’t work on them, so we couldn’t get them finished. After Get Wet, he wasn’t the main producer anymore.

Jahan: We write every song. But we never claimed to be [sound] engineers. People will say, “Oh, they’re being ghost produced,” but almost every artist out there has production done—if you look at [album] credits, [it’ll say] “drum work done by someone, guitars by someone.” You could almost call us executive producers, in that we oversee the entire operation, and are in the studio with producers, relaying our vision to them.

Can you elaborate on your charges in the lawsuit that Kris “pretended to DJ” while you guys were on tour?

Jahan: Here’s the problem: he couldn’t retain his sobriety after rehab and continued to be destructive on stage when he was touring with us, which compromised our shows. Yasmine had to literally program a controller for him that did nothing, to make it look like he was doing something. But we were OK with it. We said, “If you can focus on production, we’ll carry the live show.”

Didn’t he say that he was staying home to produce music while you guys were on tour?

Jahan: The product being delivered wasn’t showing that he was working and putting in his equal part.

Nathan: We were doing regular weekly meetings to keep everyone updated and accountable, because they were living separately. It was very different from the first EP, where we were all in the same loft and they would constantly be bouncing ideas around. It came to the point where he wasn’t making progress, and didn’t even want to meet with his bandmates anymore. For weeks and weeks, we didn’t really know what was going on. I think that he was equally frustrated with the pressure, and it was hard because he holed himself up in his room. He was living with Jake in a house with eight other people, and no one would ever see him.

Isn’t it ironic that he gave you your work ethic, but in the end, you’re saying he had to leave the band because he wasn’t working hard enough?

Jahan: Yeah, and his dream was to make it big—he wanted Krewella to be the biggest act in the world. Then we got a record deal and had all these fortunate things happen to us. I’m not a therapist, so I don’t know what was going on in his head for him not to seize that opportunity and be incredibly thankful.

Yasmine: Looking back, I think success kind of cracked him a bit, but not because success is what he was afraid of. Let me put it this way: there’s Jahan, me, [our managers] Jake and Nathan, and him. We expected the world of each other—not because we wanted to push each other to the edge in a bad way, but because we believed in one another. I think the pressure of other people working so hard around him kind of made him scared that maybe he wasn’t good enough. There were several times where he was like, “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.”

Fuck it: there are no rules for us right now. We don’t belong to a scene. We’re going to create our own.—Jahan Yousaf

Jake’s house is where you guys confronted Kris and had this big, dramatic intervention in 2014, correct?

Jahan: Yes. That house was like an office for Jake’s management company,TH3RD BRAIN. [On the day of the intervention], we invited the closest members of the team, including our lawyer, booking agent, and tour manager. There were maybe 10 people in the room. We all wrote letters to Kris and went around in a circle [reading them to him]. It was very emotional for us, but for Kris, there wasn’t much of a reaction—even with [Yasmine] crying and reading this letter about how she used to look up to him like an older brother, and was feeling very sad seeing someone she cares about not caring about themselves.

He says you kicked him out, while you say he resigned. It’s difficult to reconcile these two completely different stories.

Yasmine: We had an intervention, and he perceived it as us trying to kick him out of the group. We didn’t ever want him to leave. We wanted him to get healthy. It was the worst timing in the whole fucking world because we were about to play Ultra, Coachella, Lollapalooza South America, and then go on a big tour in America. Remember how we said he missed the first half of the “Get Wet” tour? It was like, not this shit again. We didn’t want to tour without him, but we had to, obviously.

What was the last interaction you had with him?

Yasmine: Our last face-to-face was in mediation. We were crying in each other’s arms, holding each other, and then his lawyer came and took him away.

Why were you in each other’s arms?

Yasmine: Because I love the dude, you know? It’s weird to go from seeing someone every day, and suddenly you’re fighting over this horrible thing, and you don’t know what the fuck happened. When we both walked out, I pulled him to the side and I told him, “I’m so sorry.” I started crying and he just gave me a hug and we just held each other. That was it.

So he was in pain while this was happening?

Yasmine: [Tears up] Absolutely he was in pain. I don’t want to ever take that away from him—that this was so hard for him.

If I can be totally honest, it looks like it’s still hurting you.

Yasmine: It’s just the memory. It’s a hard thing to remember. Hard to talk about.

Jahan: I haven’t fully let go. I still get tempted to email him. With his most recent song, I wanted to email him and say “Congratulations.” Sometimes I still pretend that we’re friends, and I’ve created this weird fantasy in my head where I’m like, “Oh I’m going to hit him up for tacos!” Because last time we talked on the phone, he said, “I just want to be friends again and get tacos with you and Nathan.” In my head, I’m still thinking that it could happen.

Do you think you could be friends again?

Yasmine: I feel like if he ever came back and wanted to make amends and be friends— obviously the amount of trust we have for each other could never be [at] the level it was— but I would never close my door to having him in my life. Never. We went through so much together. I would never ignore his calls or emails if he wanted to meet up or needed help with anything.

Jahan: Yeah, I’d be like, “Sup bro, how’s life?”

I would never close my door to having him in my life. Never. We went through so much together.—Yasmine Yousaf

Jahan, what drove you to write an open-letter to Deadmau5?

Jahan: I’m glad you brought that up, because I think Deadmau5 misinterpreted it as me saying he was sexist. I didn’t say he was sexist, I said he was promoting the sexist idea of the man doing all of the work. When he tweeted, “If you’re a trio, don’t kick out the guy who does all of the work,” he was completely negating the fact that Yasmine and I were doing more of the work.

Yasmine: Eight months later, he tweeted that [our CDJs] were unplugged at Ultra. And that further solidifies that he thinks we’re just figureheads.

Jahan: If you have an immense amount of power and influence, I think it’s important to make sure the facts are straight. You can ruin people’s reputations. He got more attention than the TMZ article, so I think he was the main one to spread that lie about us.

Yasmine: He was also saying that you were whining, when you were trying to make a point that was super relevant.

I think it’s about the way society values different types of labor. Like, a certain type of technical labor is assumed to be male and given almost an exaggerated importance, while all this other creative labor—like vocals—is not valued as much.

Jahan: You just gave me a realization. It doesn’t matter how many hours you put into the work—[people will think] the production is more important.

Yasmine: The reason why we’re as big as we are is because we had a song on the radio. How do you think a song gets on the radio? It has vocals. Who’s to say one type of work is more valuable?

Jahan: I don’t think it needs to be about who’s more technically competent. In the EDM scene, a lot of producers and vocalists aren’t even credited on songs. So how come we don’t hear the reverse [outcry] about ghost singers? [With our music], the production carried the same weight as the lyrics and the emotion of the song. The fact that people put so much focus on production, like that was the only value, kind of discredited our work as vocalists

What was your equipment set-up? Why would Deadmau5 say you were unplugged at Ultra?

Yasmine: Because the way we plug in our equipment is through a completely different mode than he has probably ever used. So he was ignorant. We were using CDJs and a mixer like everyone else, but the mode we use is called HID mode. It’s something that more and more people are using. My boyfriend uses it when he DJs, and he never gets called out.

How does HID mode work?

Yasmine: It takes away the sound card so it’s just computer plugged straight into the mixer. You just have to have a certain driver on your computer to make the software work. Without the middleman, there’s a million less wires. It’s less convoluted and easier to set up with better sound. But if you look at other DJs’ equipment, it has a bunch of wires coming out of everywhere, and we had three tiny little cords plugged in. People look at that and think, “oh there’s nothing plugged in.”

Some amazing dude made this video on YouTube after Ultra. He’s not a fan—actually, he hates our music. But he made this video discrediting what Deadmau5 said, explaining, “Yes, they were plugged in; let me show you how.” And it’s funny, because you can tell he has so much contempt for us, yet he can’t stand the fact that someone called us unplugged because he knows we weren’t.

In your open letter, Jahan, you speak out against online harassment and the negative effect it has on social media culture. Both of you were really active on Twitter—why did you decide to take a break? And now that you’re out of hibernation, is it different using social media?

Yasmine: Between [our last release] and “Beggars” coming out last month, there was a year of no music for us, so I felt strange going online when people would ask “So when’s the new music?” and I would say “Soon!” but I didn’t have anything to back up what I was saying. Now that we have all this stuff coming, I think there’s more reason for us to engage now.

Jahan: We still get hate, but everything that happened in the past two years with the lawsuit and a lot of fans picking a side, it kind of filtered certain people out. So the remaining group is our core group [who are] so dedicated and passionate. Those are the best fans that you can ask for.

Tell me about “Ammunition,” the title track off your new EP. Where did the name come from?

Yasmine: The actual song “Ammunition” is what we like to call a “love song to dead ears.” But it means so much more than that. It talks about everything we’ve been through in the last two-plus years. All the amazing, the bad, the ugly shit—all of that acted as ammunition for us to do what we’re doing now and to rise above anything that held us down. We hope “Ammunition” will give people strength to know that anything bad that happens to you, you can turn it around and make the best of it, and keep being powerful.

Jahan: I still feel like I’m a 16-year-old boy sometimes, but we’ve matured—we learned how to be happy artists while feeling like our career was going downhill, while people were telling us we were irrelevant. At times we felt irrelevant. But your life is going to be a roller coaster ride if your self-worth is based off what thousands of people think of you.

Do you feel like your sound has changed without Kris? “Beggars” on the new EP doesn’t sound to me like a huge departure from the stuff you put out when you first started.

Yasmine: Thank you for saying that. A lot of people are like, “The old Krewella is better!” I would say that [our sound] has evolved rather than changed. Because at the end of the day, us writing the songs was the common thread through everything. We still love hard-hitting music. We’re emotional girls. We sing and write from our hearts.

Jahan: Kris leaving kind of forced us to make it about the vocals and storytelling. So anyone that says, “You sound different,” well yeah: now it’s more about the lyrics and the song. Which is exciting, because that empowers us as well.

Yasmine: If you listen to other tracks on the EP, like “Marching On” and “Ammunition,” it definitely doesn’t have much of a dubstep sound. We’re calling it “alternative dance music. "Ammunition” almost isn’t a dance song anymore—the main sound on that drop is a guitar and a vocal. Despite the lyrical content of “Say Goodbye,” “Somewhere to Run,” “Beggars” and “Broken Record” sometimes being written about Kris, I can see every one of those four songs being released while Kris was still in the group. It was exactly the musical trajectory we were going on.

Jahan: Our sound has evolved in the sense that we’ve worked with producers to incorporate real elements like guitar and tribal drums [on the new EP]. But this “rock and rave” [sound] was something we were trying to achieve even when Kris was in the group.

A lot of the EP was inspired by all of the things that happened. It almost seemed you’re trying to send a message across the airwaves.

Jahan: It’s weird. We don’t want to shit talk, because things are ugly, but we found that art is way to say things that you can’t say in real life. Because we felt rejected from the rumors, it kind of felt like we didn’t belong anywhere, and it was almost a blessing in disguise. Like, fuck it: there are no rules for us right now and we’re going to make whatever we want because we don’t belong to a scene. We’re going to create our own.

Yasmine: Our EP was a lot of stuff that we were never able to say, so we wrote it in a song.

You still do want to play the big EDM festivals right?

Yasmine: We do—eventually. But I don’t think we have to rely on the EDM [establishment]. As much as I love EDC, if we never play [there] again, it’s not going to be the end of the world. If Lollapalooza becomes a staple for us, or Coachella becomes a staple for us, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that that’s the way we could go.

Jahan: I’m an optimistic person. I think we’re going to be back on the festival stage. It just might take a while.

What’s coming out after Ammunition?

Yasmine: We have a follow-up song coming out. I hate to say it’s a “Fuck you” song, but it kind of is. We just wrote in the stream of consciousness [style], and produced it out with our buddy Chaz.

Jahan: Michelle, there will always be another project. Yasmine and I will never stop working. The work ethic Kris set up for us is still in our bones—I feel like it’s in our musical DNA.

Last night I was haunted by thoughts about the murder of singer Christina Grimmie that happened a couple days ago. I never met her and nor did I get a chance to listen to her music prior to her death. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Christina. I caught her live once at iHeartRadio music awards in 2015 and she sounded like an angel. Now she is with the angels. As I was drifting off to sleep, I was possessed by imagining the peace of Christina’s meet and greet at the venue in Orlando, and how the moment was disrupted by bullets.

Little did I know, as I was wondering what Christina’s personality must have been like and how many people are mourning over her, another attack was going down in Orlando. As I was wrapping my head around how someone could possibly be motivated to shoot an innocent human, a gay nightclub turned into a bloodbath.

It is so troubling to think that a place where people come to dance, celebrate, and forget about their worries, has been violated. Music venues are like second homes for some of us. When I am in that space, I am completely present. The last thing on my mind is whether or not my life, as well as the life of my sister, crew, and fans is in danger.

These music events are often symbolic of tolerance and coexistence, as we just experienced at LA PRIDE festival a few days ago. Our safe places have been threatened.

And as I trying to make sense of these shootings that happened in the past few days, I am reminded of the shooting at UCLA that happened just 10 days ago.

How many times do we have to hear about someone’s life being taken for us to realize that we need to reform our gun laws? I don’t know what the right decision is regarding gun control so I’m not going to act like a purveyor of wisdom regarding the law and how background checks should be done…

But what I do know is that humans are fucking crazy. Humans have the capacity to hate, go insane, hold grudges, abuse drugs, have a temper, develop violent tendencies…

Our primitive brains are simply not equipped enough to handle guns.

6/08/10 is the day I decided to drop out of college and quit my side-hustle job along with my sister Yasmine, our former band-member Kris, and our manager Nathan Lim who found us on Myspace. Letting go of the security of my college education as well as my source of income was terrifying, but in the back of my mind I knew that Krewella would never see the light of day if we didn’t nurture the project with daily practice, discipline, and work ethic. If we didn’t make the decision as a group to abandon all other pursuits to commit ourselves to music, I think I would have spent my life always wondering what Krewella could have been. I think I would have been tortured with resentment for not taking a risk. When we got the date tattoo’d on our necks, it was symbolic of our promise to Krewella, to never give up, and in a sense trapped us from ever getting jobs that required us to cover the ink in such an exposed place.

Before 6/08/10, I just assumed that life happens and you grow up and abandon your creativity and pursue a conventional job to survive. I didn’t think it was possible to love your work like a child loves creating and being imaginative…with responsibility and professionalism to maintain, of course. It’s just surreal to think I have a job that allows me to explore my creativity.

Every year that passes, we still commemorate the dedication day. I see it is a marker for progress and artistic evolution. It’s also a reminder to myself that stepping outside my comfort zone and following an unpredictable path led me to a fulfilling and stimulating life. 

When I look back on my attitude on 6/08/10, I was desperate to feel growth as an artist and hungry for success. I don’t want to lose sight of that urgency by settling and feeling like my work is done simply because I’ve toured the world. The desire for progress not only as an artist, but as a human, is what I live for. The hustle keeps us young and alive.

The reason why we talk about 6/08 so publicly with our fans, is because I hope it inspires them. I hope it is reassurance that sometimes it takes years to see results of hard work, and those years are often filled with self-doubt. I also hope it is a reminder that it’s ok to switch up your game plan and reinvent yourself. Sometimes the very act of quitting something you’ve invested so much time into in order to explore another path takes so much courage.

Before this turns into a full blown rant, I will end this letter with a quote I keep reminding myself to live by:

“..what stands in the way becomes the way.” -Marcus Aurelius

That is how our EP Ammunition came to be. Yasmine and I shall rock this attitude as long as we keep making music together. PEACE AND LOVE!

below is a pic showing how thick and muscular my neck has gotten from head banging from touring over the past few years…. compare with first image at top of letter. girls with thick necks are unfuckwithable

I have to admit, the photograph for the Ammunition EP is my favorite image of Krewella to date. In the past, that might have been determined by vain reasons, like the selection being 1 decent angle of me out of the 300 where I look constipated.

But I don’t think I look pretty here at all. 

I look fucking handsome. I’m actually turning myself on.

What I am seeing in myself is exactly what I admire in images of men: A crinkle in between the eyebrows showing determination and focus. A weathered face with a constellation of acne scars along the jaw, fearlessly exposing flaws.

I bet you thought I had defined cheekbones, but the shadow of my furry side burns must have fooled you.

The only soft thing about me in this photo is the peach fuzz on my chinny chin chin.

When I look at Yasmine’s face, I see an experienced young woman stoically overcoming weariness. Maybe she’s tired of women “smizing.“ Tired of women erasing the lines of their hard work and labor.

What makes a woman powerful is not her mummified face, but her embrace of mortality.

Yasmine’s relationship with my body in this photo is particularly meaningful to me. First of all, I want to mention that if her large, un-manicured hand was 5 inches lower, it would cover my small boob. I just wanted to get that off my chest. 

My face and body language is reading, “fuck you,” in disbelief, displaying toughness through anger. Yasmine is exuding strength through acceptance and patience.

The position Yasmine holds is one of protection and restraint. She guards me when I am vulnerable, and is a voice of reason when I want to charge. “It ain’t worth it, bro, it’s ain’t worth it,” she says.

I refer to Yasmine as my bro, basing the spirit of our relationship to that of male friends you read about in books and see in movies, who demonstrate loyalty, honor, and security. I love the endearing title “bro.” I use it so much to describe my sister and close buddies, that I often forget the power of sisterhood.

The female bond is often perceived as being born through gossip and boy talk, and easily severed by competition and jealousy. I am constantly hearing, “do you fight?”, “who does this better?, and "who is hotter?,” as if rivalry is obligatory for sisters, or females, working together.

When I think of my other half, I think of my team member. We cross-check each other, we have each others backs, we safe guard each other. Allegiance to your girlfriend makes her more powerful. Encouraging your girlfriend’s aspirations and being proud of her achievements makes you stronger.  

We remind each other to respect our bodies, nurture our souls, take care of our minds. We remind each other to never settle for less, but also advise when to let go of a battle if “it ain’t worth it.”

I love this photo because it shows the grey area between the culturally constructed masculine and feminine. It shows acceptance of mortality and imperfection. I see two women that won’t be taken advantage of. Two women helping each other fight their demons.

Epiphanies are born in emergency rooms. It’s a strange and depressing place where your mind replays scenarios, or creates hypothetical ones, as you wait for someone you almost lost- or are about to lose. On the evening of Saturday, September 12, 2015, I found myself in the lobby of an E.R., texting my two sisters on my blood crusted phone, reeking of B.O. and mildew from marinating in my bathing suit all day. My mom’s blood splatters were painted on my shins, but I wore them like armor to remind myself of her strength and suffrage.

This sounds like I’m about to describe a scene from Gone Girl. I’m slightly morbid, but when it comes to my family, I am extremely sentimental. Thankfully no one died. My mother, Neda, is alive, well, and at almost 60 she’s still kickboxing.

Earlier that day, we were swimming with my mom, who was visiting her daughters in Los Angeles and escaping Chicago. On the way home, my mom and I were in the backseat fantasizing about the epic dinner we were about to cook, completely entranced in our conversation and oblivious to the traffic-congested streets of L.A. I replayed sweet memories of how I used to crawl on the kitchen floor in my nightgown as a kid, pretending I was a cat, while tugging at my mom’s apron as she hovered over the stove. Nostalgia coated my brain like warm blanket as she described her secret recipe for garlicky red sauce. I admired her dewy, sun-kissed face in the car as she spoke so confidently about her ingredients..

And then it happened. “Fuck!!!,” my boyfriend yelled from the driver seat in a way I’ve never heard him say the word. I was awoken from my reminiscing in a panic and the second I looked at the road, a reckless driver was making an illegal U-turn toward us. Before I could even process the collision, the air bags exploded, filling the air with smoke and debris, followed with screams of agony from my mom. The shock from the impact left me feeling powerless and paralyzed for several seconds. It took me a minute for my senses to reawaken so I could look to my left in the backseat to see if she was even alive.

The grim reaper dangled my mom’s life in front me. The Angel of Death gave her back to me.

The result of the car crash was my boyfriend’s totaled Prius, my mom’s mutilated fingers, and a new pair of eyes for how I see her.

As a child, the garlic red sauce Neda was describing seemed like it magically appeared on the stove. It magically appeared the same way the bills were paid, the house was clean, vacations were made, and our wardrobes were full. What was expected and taken for granted as a child, was a daily struggle for my mother.

Neda could have been the poster child for the Supermom movement.

To make our world comfortable, she worked 14 hour days including weekends, slaved away in the kitchen to feed a family of 5, drove us and the neighbor to school, dusted every corner of the house, consoled three hormonal teenage girls, converted to Islam and raised us Muslim, took us on her business trips, and still managed to come out of the daily circus of life appearing fully capable, tough, and immortal.

It wasn’t until my late teens, during the crumbling marriage of my mom and dad, where I observed her fragility. But my priorities didn’t concern my parents, and maintaining a social life was paramount to everything. With a family reduced in size, dinners were shorter and ended with us teens headed straight to the computer to continue our Myspace chat conversations, or getting dressed up to go out. My mom was left in the kitchen alone, slowly picking at the remains of her home-cooked meal. While tears fell into her plate over the broken family, her only company was a super size bottle of red wine from Costco.

“I think my finger is off,” my pale-faced mother said as I held her hand in a bundle of pool towels outside the scene of the car crash. Her blood was pouring into a stream of gasoline that was dripping from the totaled car. I had to pretend it was red wine to prevent myself from getting squeamish.

When the ambulance arrived, I begged the EMTs to let me ride with to be near her. In the back of the truck I was really shaken up, but I tried to act unaffected and emotionally stable around my mom who was losing more blood and color in her lips. Still not knowing if her finger was on or off, she managed to be so calm. Barely complaining about the pain, she just said “I feel like throwing up.”

With three kids in the house, my parents dealt with a lot of puke. The stomach flu made me miserable, but I secretly loved the attention my mom gave me when I was sick. She would set up a sleeping bag outside her home office, nurse me with tea and toast every couple hours, and brought home rented VHS movies for me to binge watch.

She cared for me that same way even as a 19 year old, except that time I was in a full-size bed and nauseous from drinking too much on Halloween the night before.

Most of my teenage years, my mom enforced rules of Islam that forbade drinking, but at that time she was amidst a divorce and loosening her grip on us. Maybe feeling like a single mother left her with no choice but to let go and allow us to make our own mistakes. When I fucked up, she was disappointed and stern, but was always by my side giving me a lesson, whether that was in the the courtroom after I got caught stealing from Macy’s, or while watching me get breathalyzed at a busted high school party.

I have to pry stories out of my mom to hear about her self-admitted mistakes, from an unwanted high school pregnancy, to unfaithful boyfriends, to mescaline and cocaine. I remind her not to be ashamed or embarrassed, and that I can vicariously learn through her life.

“I cheated death,” my mom profoundly said as her hand got wrapped with gauze in the ER. In other words, we got lucky.

I will never forget the site of the artery dangling from her finger, dripping blood slowly like a leaking hose. She still wore a smile, even before the pain killers trickled into her bloodstream through an IV. I kept begging my mom to power through the discomfort and resist getting a morphine drip. I’m scarred from the horror stories I’ve heard about medical drugs leading to addiction, especially the one about my mom’s father.

I never met my Lithuanian grandfather. He was addicted to heroin during the aftermath of WWII. My mom’s immigrant family was on the edge, living paycheck to paycheck in a blue collar neighborhood of New Haven, Connecticut, during the civil rights movement. One night after curfew, as my grandfather was walking home from work as a cook, he was brutally mugged. He was killed when she was 10 years old.

Neda has gone her entire life without the closure of knowing who took her father’s life. But bitterness and vengeance never surface when she talks about her murdered father, which is not often. She never victimizes herself or blames her struggles on the traumatic loss.

My mom just admits that the reason she always had a man in her life, is because she didn’t have a father. I admire her accountability and honesty.

“I was a lost child, lost teenager, now a lost adult,” she recently told me. What I see is a misguided girl who made mistakes and was forced to grow up fast, thrusting herself into adulthood, into a woman who learned to embody the characteristics of culturally constructed male roles…

Work ethic. Strength. Bravery. Physical endurance. Self-discipline.

Sometimes I imagine her father frozen in time, still wearing mid-century fashion, watching over her from Heaven. I imagine him watching his daughter’s life like a movie throughout the decades.  

I wonder if he was proud of Neda when she risked dropping out of college to move across the country alone, to build a career for herself as an independent graphic designer. I wonder if he was proud seeing his daughter of the civil rights movement challenging the stereotypical image of the white American couple, by marrying a Pakistani man and converting to Islam. I wonder if my grandfather is mind-blown watching my mom’s biceps flex as she lifts weights and does kickboxing, well into her late 50s. I can’t imagine how helpless he must have felt from Heaven, watching my mom get held up at gunpoint at a laundry mat in L.A in the 80s.

When the time came for surgery to get her artery repaired and fingers readjusted, my mom forced a smile as she got wheeled into operating room. Jokes filled the air about how her eyelash extensions were still in perfect condition, despite the car wreck. She insisted that her daughters go home during the operation, and reassured us that she was in good hands with professionals.

My entire life Neda has proven to be strong and independent. But I know that when she says she’s fine alone, those words secretly mean she would love the company of her children. Behind the smile is a woman who suffered most of her life.

I often hear the assumption that women are needy and attention-seeking, usually attributed to having “daddy issues.” I also have observed how a women is devalued in our society once she gives birth, as if arriving at motherhood strips a women of her sexuality, youth, and relevance. Let us be reminded that not only giving birth, but raising a child as a working women in the modern world while navigating prevailing gender inequalities, is a job that requires an immense amount of labor, responsibility, and strength. Overlooked and often discarded, these women are walking female heroes.