All Bangers, No Ballads: Mandy Lee’s New Chapter as Cherry Bomb

Sometimes you just have to lash the dynamite to your heart and light the fuse.

Mandy Lee, known for her work as the frontwoman of indie-pop act MisterWives, is doing just that with her solo electropop project, Cherry Bomb. In September, she announced the release of her debut solo album The Pursuit of Pleasure, scheduled for November 13th, and dropped her latest single, “Crash!”

After more than a decade-long career fronting MisterWives, Lee challenged herself to write “all bangers, no ballads” for The Pursuit of Pleasure as she found comfort in pop anthems and dancefloor revelations during a challenging personal era of emotional struggle and significant life changes. The catharsis is evident in the music and lyrics – she characterizes The Pursuit of Pleasure as an exploration of “what it means to move through pain while still finding pleasure,” and an “un-forbidden liberation back to self.”

One of the first songs she wrote as Cherry Bomb and a personal favorite, the latest single, “Crash!” is “perfect for your next crash-out” and the song that “sparked the sonic world and sentiment [of The Pursuit of Pleasure],” according to Lee. She further characterizes “Crash!” as “a reminder to anyone who listens that you don’t have to keep craning your neck looking back at a past you once had to shrink to fit into.”

With a music video shot in a laundromat (perhaps a not-so-subtle nod to the unconscious “cycles” we all tend to repeat), Lee dances atop laundry machines and invites the viewer along on the journey through her own personal spin cycle. The song itself is a dance-pop fever dream, with a restless, driving beat and Lee’s vocals soaring over punchy synth figures and hypnotic bass.

Cherry Bomb crashed the party earlier this year with the single “Never Be Me (M*therf*cker),” a ferocious dancefloor banger about freeing oneself from a broken, dysfunctional relationship. Lee says of that single, “I knew I desperately needed to reconnect with parts of myself I lost along the way and [‘Never Be Me’] was the catalyst to reclaiming my power, saying farewell to spaces that made me shrink while welcoming back the energy of the little girl who once wore boas routinely, blasting ‘You Don’t Own Me’ through a bedazzled boombox.”

The liberation story also shows up in the accompanying music video, co-directed by Lee and collaborator Matty Vogel. We see her clad in a wedding gown at a running track with a bevy of other women in fancy dresses, sprinting headfirst into her future. The supportive presence of the other women could be interpreted as a nod toward collective liberation, not just one woman finally choosing herself.

As a follow-up to “Never Be Me,” which she describes as “a mantra in learning to let go of old painful patterns and letting in the pleasure of self I once abandoned for the love and acceptance of others,” Lee released “Digital Girl,” a danceable, Y2K-nostalgic meditation on the cross-purposes of trying to be both artist and human in an increasingly algorithm-driven culture of viral social media trends. The incisive lyrics cut straight to the chase:

“Oh why keep bending into these impossible shapes?
Comparison is the drug you take and never satisfied
Would you make a deal with the devil
If it made you a god?”

These two tracks interrogate the same question from different directions. “Never Be Me” is an assault on self-abandonment in the name of love, while “Digital Girl” asks why we shape ourselves around the expectations of others on a much larger scale – via a system that commodifies identity and rewards conformity through visibility. In the “Digital Girl” music video, Lee alternately poses for the algorithm and screams at screens, herself the embodiment of the battleground between creation and self-destruction. Of the video, Lee says, “I wanted to visually represent the tension that exists between conforming to the pressure or rebelling against it and what it feels like when the two coincide.”

The disco-fueled journey continues with the next single, “Sorry You’re Not Sorry,” a sonic blurring of pleasure and pain that celebrates both the grief and the joy of letting go and “choosing closure over receiving it,” according to Lee. With its driving rhythm and percussive strings, the song is an unflinching yet uplifting reckoning with loss that transforms heartache into courage in that ultimate sanctuary of re-making: the dance floor. Not surprisingly, Lee chose a church setting – a funeral – for the music video, and the visuals suddenly transform from somber-yet-fabulous funeral attire and nuns in habits to drag queens and showgirls as Lee herself is reborn resplendent in fringe and sequins. The music video “dismantles a world I didn’t feel love and acceptance in and it puts it back together anew with the help of a congregation of divas, a dazzling drag priest, and convent of showgirl nuns.”

Cherry Bomb’s next release, “Myriad Reflector,” keeps us on the dance floor even as it takes the theme of transformation a step further: reminding the listener that the fragments of ourselves – like the thousands of tiny mirrors on a disco ball – can work together to reflect light. According to Lee, “Much like our own experience, the good, the bad, and the painful jagged parts soften with time and you learn to embrace all sides.” Taking its title from an early name for a disco ball, “Myriad Reflector” blends two distinct ideas of transformation in its lyrics. The opening line, “angel in the marble had to set her free,” invites listeners to free themselves from anything non-essential, while a later lyric, “need the broken pieces for light to get in between,” suggests an exploration of what brokenness can make possible. The song is a celebration of both liberation and integration, and Lee’s vocals floating over the track’s synth-pop foundation defy us to stand on the sidelines as we find our way back to ourselves.

As in the earlier music videos, the story within “Myriad Reflector” gets room to breathe in its video, too. It drops the viewer into a New York subway car that has transformed into a nightclub, turning an ordinary place shared by strangers into an expression of collective joy. Describing the video as “an ode to the city that raised me and my love of music,” Lee explains that it “takes place on the subway that, akin to a myriad reflector, brings together a constellation of individual fragments to create a single mosaic.”

If Cherry Bomb’s initial singles are any indication, The Pursuit of Pleasure promises the listener a disco-fueled journey through transformation without erasure. As an artist with some mileage on her heart, Mandy Lee invites us along as she makes music about the complicated, unfinished business of returning to herself.

And you can dance to it.

Cherry Bomb’s album, The Pursuit of Pleasure, out November 13th.