The reunion of Gossip couldn’t have come at a better time. The band, fronted by singer Beth Ditto, was a keystone of the 2000s alternative music scene, making it a perfect fit for the current “indie sleaze” revival. Viewed through the rose-colored lens of nostalgia, we’re once again embracing Y2K fashion, red Solo cups, and songs that belong in the background of a Myspace page. But Ditto remembers the era with a clearer head.
“I didn’t really have a sleazy experience,” she tells me in a conference room at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel. “I got shit-faced and stuff, but I wasn’t at all those parties. I was having a very wholesome time… I mostly went home and crocheted.”
Alongside bands like Franz Ferdinand and the Klaxons, Gossip was front and center in a musical movement that married punk and dance music, planting seeds for the rise of DJ era. Their dance floor banger and breakout single “Standing in the Way of Control” was a staple of many a PBR-soaked night. The band — composed of Nathan Howdeshell on guitar and Hannah Blilie on drums — signed to a major label in 2007. But in 2016, four years after releasing their fifth studio album, the group disbanded. Since then, their activity has been intermittent: They got back together in 2019 for the ten-year anniversary tour of their album Music for Men only to fall silent again soon afterward. In late 2023, they announced a new reunion and dropped their first single in over a decade, “Crazy Again,” from their upcoming album Real Power, out March 22 via Columbia Records.
For Ditto, going on hiatus was always about exploring her solo work, with the break incited in part by Howdeshell’s turn to born-again Christianity and his move back to their shared home state of Arkansas. The singer, a staunch atheist, couldn’t reconcile those life decisions at first. “I had a really hard time with Nathan,” she tells me. “But that’s what you do when you love somebody. You love them enough to be angry.” When I reach Howdeshell for comment over Zoom later, the guitarist waxes passionate, saying, “I hate to break this to everybody, but when you love somebody, you accept them for who they are.” Having experienced an unimaginable set of tragedies in the period between albums — the deaths of both his wife and his father — Howdeshell has found himself back in Ditto’s good graces. “If we can come together and understand how beautiful life is, make things, love each other, that’s the fucking magic,” he says.
Despite the passage of time, neither of their quirks have changed, including Howdeshell being impossible to pin down. In fact, he was supposed to join our interview at the hotel instead of speaking with me over Zoom, but on the day of our meeting, no one can find him. “He’s always been like that since we were kids,” Ditto assures me. “You can’t be mad at a cat for being a cat.”
In ways, the group has already achieved their rock-star dreams. The band once played massive festivals like Coachella and Glastonbury. Ditto famously posed nude on the cover of NME in 2007 and later modeled for Jean Paul Gaultier in 2011. But while the industry has changed, their music and their aesthetic are now being embraced by a new wave of young listeners. Unlike some of her peers, Ditto embraces Gen Z’s newfound interest in that wild time. “I think it makes some people feel old and uncomfortable,” she tells me — but for her, it’s more like taking stock of a life well-lived. “It was a really wild, fun time.”
That’s not to say that their meteoric rise from DIY punk band to household name was painless. Blilie tells me via Zoom that “there were a lot of cool bands [we played with], but there were also a lot of boring, misogynistic dude bands.” Between Blilie and Ditto, Gossip is two-thirds queer, and that made for an often uncomfortable fit with the prevailing heteronormative mores of the indie scene. Blilie remembers being backstage at huge music festivals in Europe and feeling like they were “the weirdest people” there. “We didn’t think we were trailblazing but we felt different and outcast from [bands like] Kings of Leon,” she elaborates. That homogeneity was palpable; Ditto recalls it as “a very white scene,” she tells me. “There wasn’t broad diversity.”
With its major-label turn, Gossip tried in their way to make a statement. Their queer compatriots during the band’s Kill Rock Star days were Brazilian new wavers CSS, Sleater-Kinney, and the skronky bay area rockers Erase Errata — all bands that shared Gossip’s ethos, but did not break through to the mainstream with a major label record deal at the time. After Gossip landed an agreement with Sony, Blilie says they wanted to seize on the platform. “When we put out Music For Men and [we put] my face on the cover, it was a very intentional message to put this butch and masc-presenting person front and center,” she says proudly. It helped move a needle that seemed stuck at the time — and that has since started moving much more rapidly. “Something that I've been excited about with Gossip getting back together is that, nowadays, there's a lot more visibility of queer people in pop music and a lot more celebration of that,” Blilie observes. But both she and Ditto agree that despite all of the representation of queer art in the current culture, the political situation surrounding LGBTQ+ rights is deplorable.
“That [celebration] gets clouded by all the bullshit that’s going with the administration. It is fucking dangerous and it's frightening,” Ditto says.
“You can't get an abortion in Texas, there are anti-trans laws; it’s lots of Handmaid's Tale shit,” Blilie adds.
The cruel irony is that the band’s breakout single, “Standing in the Way of Control” — a rallying cry against the unjust systems that oppress queer people — is more relevant today than ever. The track was indirectly about the Federal Marriage Amendment during the George W. Bush administration, which held that marriage was only “the union of a man and a woman” in the eyes of the law. “When you are seeing your existence being debated, you are constantly trying not to feel the pressure that people don’t want you to be here,” Ditto says. “That’s what ‘Standing in the Way of Control’ was about.” Their new single “Real Power,” which was sparked by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, feels like a spiritual sister to that 2006 hit. In the disco-inspired track, Ditto belts out the refrain, “Give me real power,” offering an even more direct rallying cry than its predecessor. Though it was written before the maelstrom of current anti-trans legislation, the band agrees the lyrics pertain to multiple struggles. And with two trans members in their touring band, Bijoux Cone on synths and Ditto’s partner Teddy Kwo on bass, Gossip's message of inclusivity has never been more poignant.
With the band doing press and touring once again, they are concerned about facing discrimination. Both Howdeshell and Blilie share that their bandmates have already faced difficulty on the road. Blilie tells me, “Bijoux is my best friend in Portland. I feel super protective of her, and I’m experiencing her experience in the world as we’re traveling. There’s some pretty shocking shit. I’m getting a window into the world of how depressingly closed-minded and hateful visibly trans people’s experiences can be.”
But they’ve also experienced queer euphoric highs this go-round, too. During their recent BBC 6 Festival performance, they were joined onstage by the art party collective FVCK PIGS who held signs reading “Protect Trans Youth” and “God Loves Lipstick Lesbians.” This performance later aired on the BBC, leading to some negative comments about people’s bodies, specifically Ditto’s weight, which only convinced the band that they were on the right path. “Gossip is identity: it’s making people feel seen and accepted and loved and appreciated and respected,” Blilie says. “[Those comments] make me feel like our work isn’t done and we’re still fighting the good fight.”
Ditto has always embodied that fearless ethos, inspiring others to live out loud and fight for a world without fear. “No matter what their law says, we’re going to be here and we have to be alive and happy,” she says. That resilience may be what she’s been singing about all along.
Real Power is available March 22 via Columbia Records.
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