Amanda Mack
For several months, I’ve been watching clips of Of The Roses on social media playing in various bars and stages around Austin, TX. Some of the clips are shot with steadier hands than others are but they all showcase the duo– made up of Serenity Autumn Hernandez Bogert and Josh Delarosa who share lead guitar, rhythm guitar, and vocalist duties–oozing blistering rockstar prowess years beyond their combined ages.
Sitting on Google Meet with them, the rockstar energy is turned down a bit. It’s 7pm on a Sunday night where they are, 8pm on my end. Hernandez Bogert is in prescription glasses, an accessory she’d never wear while straddling the stage during the band’s cover of Yeah Yeah Yeahs‘s “Black Tongue”. And Delarosa is in a room by himself, swathed in a red light that has been given a certain calmness by his laid-back demeanor. It’s a long way from his knee-buckled, guitar-slicing stage persona.
The band’s first E.P., Mirror’s Always Round, was released on December 2nd for digital download, streaming, and good old-fashioned compact disc format. It’s a beautifully penned love letter to the music that made them, and the list of recipients is varied and eclectic. That’s thanks to upbringings for both of them that were enriched with music, some of it particularly un-Hispanic. Delarosa’s father played drums in Tejano bands in his youth, but he also dug Talking Heads. Hernandez Bogert excitedly interjects that his father was also a fan of mid-aughts indie rock darlings Interpol which he affectionately called “The Puppet Band”, a reference to the unsettling puppet protagonist in their “Evil” music video. “It’s insane to think about,” Delarosa picks up with, “but this very dark Mexican man who could speak fluent Spanish, that would also listen to Tejano, he got me into Joy Division, he got me into Talking Heads. He got me into all the bands he would also listen to. It was a very huge range of music.”
Hernandez Bogert’s parents began taking her to shows at a very early age and exposing her to everything from country concerts to nu-metal heroes like Linkin Park. She also credits her mother’s preservation skills for shaping her musical palette. “Growing up, my mom had recorded her favorite MTV [music videos]. When I was a baby in the late 90s and early 2000s, she would play it for me. So I got to see MTV as it was. Like, the ‘Once in a Lifetime’ video I saw at an early age. Totally didn’t get it at the time, I was five, but loved it. She’s Mexican so she loves hip hop and dance music, so I got introduced to that at an early age. My dad was white, so he liked classic rock and metal and country. So I got everything.”
Even without nods to Talking Heads from both of them, the spirit of the band’s influence lives in the danciest moments on the E.P. “Friends”, their first single and music video from the release, takes its bouncy, Remain in Light-era guitar hooks and feeds it through a Franz Ferdinand filter. It’s a sound they were so strongly committed to that they brought on Julian Corrie to mix the track. Corrie goes by the stage name Miaoux Miaoux (pronounced “meow meow”) when he performs his airy electronic synth wizardry as a solo act, but he most notably brought his sound and production sensibilities to the Scottish art-rock outfit, Franz Ferdinand, when he joined the lineup in 2017.
For them, the patchwork approach to shaping the sound of Mirror’s Always Round wouldn’t have been possible without St. Vincent and Olivia Rodrigo. For their albums, Masseduction and Sour respectively, both artists threw away conventional uniformity in their sound in favor of making well-written pop songs the thread of cohesion. From the opening track, “Falling Through (Ah)”, which contains some of the best tag team vocals this side of “U. R. A. Fever” by The Kills, it hardly seems like you’ll end up at a doo-gaze (doo-wop and shoegaze, if you will) jam, but you do. On the other side of “I Hope You Love Me More” is “Fear”, a Britpop tune with Delarosa on lead vocals that the Gallagher Brothers would proudly lie about writing if they could stop fighting long enough to do so.
The two met as Hernandez Bogert was attempting to put together a band to play cabaret pop covers for a production at a volunteer theater. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a need for two guitar players. “I felt bad because he was so good of a guitar player,” she recounts fondly for me, “and I made him play bass and I felt really bad. He got so into it! I feel like you bought that Hofner bass just to impress me.” Delarosa admits that he bought the bass for the expressed purpose of playing with Hernandez Bogert which feels as good as a confession to the other thing.
The chemistry that would bloom into Of The Roses was immediately evident. “I knew we would mesh well because we were at a rehearsal and we were messing around before the singers got there to rehearse.” That messing around included Hernandez Bogert playing the guitar riff of “Cannonball” by The Breeders. “I didn’t say anything. I just played the riff and as soon as I played it, Josh came in with the bass like perfect.” Delarosa is quiet as Hernadez Bogert goes down the list of reasons forming a band with him was a no-brainer. “I’d never met anybody who was eclectic in their tastes and who was that good at everything that he did and also a great performer. It takes time to get good at all that kind of stuff. Me and Josh would talk about Franz Ferdinand or we’d talk about the fucking Beatles or we’d talk about Motown. We both fucking love Motown. And I’d never met anyone who pulls from all those kinds of stuff. And he was always the best performer in whatever band he was in. That’s what I noticed too. Play like you’re a fucking rockstar.”
Once she gets going, Hernandez Bogert is unable to keep herself from piling the compliments onto her bandmate “He won’t say this,” she continues, “but he’s amazing at drums, he’s amazing at guitar, he’s amazing at bass, he’s a good singer when he wants to be. He’s really fucking good at all those things.” When it comes time for Delarosa to return the praises, he is more than ready to do so. “Usually, in the past in other bands I’ve been in, there’s always musicians that are better than me. And that can mean a number of things, that’s very subjective. But for me, I don’t want to be the one person who has the songs down. Serenity’s been the only person that I’ve worked with that can just nail it with ease. Her mom says that she was born to be a performer and I absolutely agree with that. When we met, I was like, okay, I need to be in a band with her.”
It’s something of a miracle the two got to meet at all. More of a miracle than momentous, soul-connecting meetings like theirs usually are. Six years prior to meeting Delarosa, Hernandez Bogert was a college student at UT Austin’s McComb School of Business. She was managing her diabetes, something she inherited from both of her parents, but in 2016, right before final exams, she was handed down an anomaly diagnosis: pancreatitis. It was an anomaly that happened to run in the family. “Both my parents have what I have which is diabetes and pancreatitis which is very rare for people unless they drink for 50 years.” Her parents both got it in their 20s, despite not partaking in enough of the fun stuff that usually causes it. For her, the diagnosis came with a six-month hospital stay where she received all of her meals through a tube. With not much else to do, she got a jump start on a quarter-life crisis. “Prior to that, I was into music obviously, but I was in college and trying to figure out what do I really like to do. What do I want to do every day?” The answer turned out to be play guitar.
After teaching herself to play by ear and a little bit of music theory, Hernandez Bogert emerged from the hospital with a renewed sense of purpose and one last health issue to battle. In an attempt to cope with frequent hospitalizations, Hernandez Bogert began to rely on opiates at the age of 14. At the time of our interview, she’d been clean for a year. That leaves lots of time and resources for the big plans she and Delarosa have for Of The Roses: play in the desert in Marfa, TX for an audience of extraterrestrials and go on tour. Probably in that order.
The next Of The Roses show is on December 9th at Smokin Beauty in Austin. It’ll act, in part, as an E.P. release show. You can find out more information on their website or their Instagram.
Below, you can watch the video for “Friends.”
Mirror’s Always Round is out now via Slaughter Lane Records and available for purchase on BandCamp.
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