Words by Alex Rigotti
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Below the streets of Hackney, neon lights skitter across the floor of EartH Hall. The tiles are slick with sweat and drink. We’re in a stuffy basement during a historic heatwave, but that hardly deters over a thousand goths in canine tails, cat ears and soaked black clothing from moshing at Femtanyl’s biggest headline show to date. Juno Callender’s hair frames her oval face as she handles the mixer, guitar and drums; vocalist Noelle Mansbridge takes centre stage, her tousled fringe shrouding her eyes as she hypes up the crowd with ease.
The sticky London gig is one of many the digital hardcore duo have sold out on the strength of their live reputation and cult following, which counts Machine Girl and Danny Brown. Their debut album ‘Man Bites Dog’, released in February, has taken them to exciting new heights; this September, the Canadian-American duo will open for big beat legends The Prodigy. For Femtanyl, a blitzing live show isn’t just an evolution beyond their chronically online origins, but also a way to prove their artistic mettle.
“The live stuff matters so much to me,” Mansbridge tells NME at their photoshoot for The Cover the day before the London show. “A lot of people get too online with it – and that’s rich, coming from this project. But I feel like they don’t value the live element as much… how an artist chooses to represent their songs live can teach you how much that artist cares.”
Femtanyl began as the solo project of Mansbridge, 23, who made her early songs in her bedroom as a hobby while studying for an animation degree. It soon became an outlet while she was “very upset and manic”. “I really had no expectations,” she recalls. “There’s a couple things that I did under other names, but they’re terrible. I was just blowing up my computer speakers and getting really freaky with it, putting it out there for nobody to see.”
She thought nothing of her 2023 debut single ‘P3T’ when she quietly dropped it, until one YouTube user, inspired by the song’s self-degrading lyrics and punishing drum breaks, used it in their furry animation. As she released more singles, a litany of fluorescent, fan-made videos followed: from a snippet that matched ‘Katamari’ with the first-person shooter game Ultrakill, to a visualiser for ‘Girl Hell 1999’ that depicted the band’s mascot, the feline Token, in a kaleidoscopic rage. Seeing the success of her debut EP ‘Chaser’, Mansbridge decided to drop out of college to focus on music full-time.
Draw a Venn diagram of the gaming, breakcore and furry communities, and you’ll also find queer people smack bang in the middle. Both Mansbridge and Callender are transgender women, and many Femtanyl fans, too, are young and trans.
The lyrical themes of alienation, suicide and self-harm in Femtanyl songs have resonated with their fanbase. Today, Mansbridge assures us she’s in a “better place now”, adding that the self-destructive sentiments in her older material were, in part, a psychological exorcism. “That was stuff that I was dealing with,” she acknowledges, “but there were a lot of thoughts I was having that I really didn’t like. I wanted to explore those [thoughts] in music and imagine a worse version of my current self.
“How an artist chooses to represent their songs live can teach you how much that artist cares” – Noelle Mansbridge
“It’s very difficult for me to get back into that headspace, or even imagine the person that I was being so upset and angry,” she adds. “I have definitely grown a lot as a person.”
Mansbridge credits music with saving her from perpetual bitterness. “At that point in my life, I had two people who were my friends, and I’d been in and out of the hospital,” she explains. “I felt very destitute and alone. When [my music] started getting traction, I was able to feel like someone that had something to offer to the world. People wanted to talk to me, and I was able to show that I wasn’t just a crash-out. I stopped isolating myself in my own bedroom, and I let myself be a person.”
Mansbridge soon took Femtanyl to the stage; her debut show in January 2024 sold out in two hours. But she wasn’t happy with the results. “I was like, these songs sound fucking terrible live!” she laughs. Her conclusion: “I need to elevate this and make this something that you would pay money to go see, not just because you like Femtanyl.”
Enter Callender, 28, a “live scholar” who’d toured extensively with numerous hardcore and screamo bands. When they met, the two clicked instantly; a relief, given both had “experiences of working with people that we fucking did not like”. They bonded over their mutual love for gonzo horror films, left-field animation websites and, of course, musical taste. After two months, the decision to join forces became obvious, and Callender joined Femtanyl in August 2024.
“We’re very lucky that we match each other so well,” Callender acknowledges. “We’re both very strong personalities. There’s so many worlds in which this wouldn’t work, but it’s not this one.”
Femtanyl’s friendship proved instrumental to the creation of ‘Man Bites Dog’, especially given the extensive challenges they faced during the album’s production. Mansbridge was stuck in her native Canada for nine months waiting for a visa to visit Callender in Seattle, meaning the pair had to work long-distance with misaligned sleep schedules. “We were not awake at the same time except for an hour out of the day,” Mansbridge recalls.
Callender’s own working conditions weren’t totally ideal, either. She recalls fine-tuning the particularly ferocious track ‘Helltarget’ while visiting her parents’ house in Southern California, which was in the midst of renovations. “All the doors had been taken out, and there were white sheets everywhere,” Callender recounts. “It was one of the most privacy-less, dreadful, terrible, scary environments to have headphones on for 12 hours a day, adding ever-so-tiny variations over and over and over again.”
“I thought it was gonna be that lady who came to your house while you were working and was like, ‘my dead sister’s ghost is in your basement’,” Mansbridge interjects.
“That also happened,” Callender confirms. “There’s some weird stories…”
“We’re both very strong personalities. There’s so many worlds in which this wouldn’t work, but it’s not this one” – Juno Callender
The frustrations of being apart and their unsettling encounters partly informed the earsplitting abrasiveness of ‘Man Bites Dog’. Mansbridge was already set on doing things differently for the debut album even before Callender came into the picture: “There was a very specific idea of what a Femtanyl song was. I wanted to get more experimental and freak it out a little bit.” Gone is the prismatic instrumentation of ‘Murder Every 1 U Know!’ and Danny Brown collab ‘M3 N Min3’ – instead, the duo push rusty clangs, acidic gurgles and metallic breaks to their amplitudinal extremes. The many horror movies the pair enjoy, including the titular Man Bites Dog, Lake Mungo and British low-budget “video nasty” films, bled into the record; Callender also cites her memories of driving back from concerts in LA, listening to British rave icons like Orbital, Leftfield and The Chemical Brothers.
‘Man Bites Dog’ also flips a transgender coming-of-age story on its head. On the album, Mansbridge imagines a life where she never transitioned, becoming a “terrible guy who sucks”. “People are viewing it through the lens of how these lyrics correlate to being trans, when in fact, it’s the opposite,” she explains. “A lot of it is written from this very indignant, self-righteous, self-destructive point of view – you’re seeing all the negative space around somebody who should be there.”
For Femtanyl, the conversation surrounding the relationship between their music and transness is a “double-edged sword”. Of course, their music draws from the “specific, very difficult and upsetting” aspects of transitioning, and they empathise with fans who look to the band to navigate what can be an isolating and traumatic experience.
But Mansbridge takes issue with Femtanyl being reduced to “trans music” by cisgender male commentators, who group them with contemporaries like 100 gecs and Jane Remover – despite their distinctly different sounds. “It can be a little frustrating, because it feels like they’ve accepted us as people, but now they’re just a bit too vocal about it,” she explains. “It’s like your uncle getting to terms with the whole thing, but he’s still awkward about it.”
Another unique challenge, Callender adds, is how the band can evolve out of their emotionally heavier material, which still means a lot to many of their fans: “There’s a pressure to remain in the same negative headspace that you were in.” Though she thinks fans don’t “necessarily, actually” want this to happen, she nonetheless theorises that “a part of them wants you to remain in a state where you’re not happy, because then they feel like they can connect to you more”.
“They should be able to look at this as a sign of: ‘Hey, this is something that you can do’,” Callender adds. “This is aspirational. You can improve, you can get better… but it’s very challenging when you’re not doing very well.”
Femtanyl certainly aren’t waiting around to move on. With Mansbridge finally relocating to Seattle to work in-person with Callender, they’re returning to the “bright” and “melodic” style of their older songs, which you can hear in their latest single ‘Magfest’. Callender adds that Mansbridge is “expanding so much as a frontwoman”, her bandmate blushing in response.
“We talked earlier about what it was like when we first met each other, and now it feels like we can really interface on that level creatively in a way that’s very compelling,” Callender affirms. “We’re not taking any shots in the dark – we’re very fucking confident in what we’re doing right now.”
Femtanyl’s ‘Magfest’ is out now.
Listen to Femtanyl’s exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify or on Apple Music here.
Words: Alex Rigotti
Photography: Jacqui Sharah
Location: Flash Studios