Before they had a band name, they had a bedroom.

The summer before their first year at The New School, three girls who didn’t yet know what they were building moved in together. By the time they surfaced, something had clicked. “After that first year of bonding as roommates and as best friends and doing everything together … Lua and Nailah really blossomed this aesthetic and this idea of having this rock trio band,” said Amber Diaz, a second-year Jazz Vocal student at the College of Performing Arts and politics major at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts.

Diaz, alongside Lua Lamounier, a second-year Jazz Bass student at CoPA and a politics major at Lang, and Nailah Jappah, a second-year Jazz and Contemporary Voice student at CoPA and Culture and Media student at Lang, make up Misery and Company, a cross-genre girl band here at The New School. 

The band’s premise is both simple and not simple at all: redefine what a girl band gets to be. Their reference point isn’t the polished pop trios of recent memory but the scrappier, angrier lineage of riot grrrl — the late-’80s and ’90s feminist punk movement that made noise for the sake of making a point. Misery and Company are its inheritors, carrying the movement’s spirit into the present day.

Their debut came last September at Brooklyn Music Kitchen, a show Jappah had originally booked to release a solo single. She pivoted. “We had a blast. It was a lot of riot grrrl stuff,” Jappah said. “We only did one song by a guy, which was ‘Supermassive Black Hole’ [by Muse], and every other song was by a girl.”

When Misery and Company started building out their image, pink stood out as the key color for their branding. “I really liked us kind of taking back that color and rewriting the narrative of what a girl band is,” said Diaz. 

It’s a tension the band plays with deliberately. “The pink aesthetic and all this women-y stuff we do makes people think we’re gonna perform very ‘feminine music,’” Lamounier said. “Cutesy stuff. But we do so many different things, and we all bring our different tastes in, and I feel like it surprises people.”

From TNS practice rooms to Brooklyn Music Kitchen to the NSFP Live newsroom — where they performed stripped-back versions of boygenius’ “$20” and Greta Van Fleet’s “Light My Love” for the series’ comeback show — Misery and Company have been quietly building momentum.

Behind the scenes,  Diaz manages the band through her production company, AMBSEYE,  learning how to navigate a difficult industry. “I’m starting to understand what it takes to market a band that is one, local, two, independent, and three, all in college,” said Diaz.

This summer, the plan is to stop covering other people’s songs and start writing their own. “We all individually write music and have our styles of music pretty set in, but we want to find our sound together and just write some stuff on top of covering songs,” Lamounier said.

Though less than a year old, the band maintains steady aspirations for their future and the impact of their work. “The goal isn’t, for me personally, to be famous, or get a bunch of money and stuff,” said Lamounier. “It’s more for people to see us and believe in what we’re doing and for other little girls to be like ‘I can do that too.’”