Photo by Elise Bergmann
It reads like a fairy tale, because it kind of is one. Jade Alcantara lives in California. Grace Bennett lives in New York. Two teenagers, strangers except for a shared obsession with One Direction and The 1975, find each other in the wilds of stan culture; Twitter first, then Instagram, then a constant stream of texts and DMs. Music is the common ground, fandom is the language.
As they grow into their early 20s, they finally meet in person and both know immediately they’ve found something rarer than a favorite band: a genuine musical compatriot. Neither has ever played an instrument. Neither has been in a band. But they know, with the kind of certainty that’s hard to explain, that this is what they want to do. Then the pandemic hits, slows everything down, and suddenly there’s time, real time, to actually learn. They dive into guitar, into songwriting, and in 2021, now calling themselves Sub*T, Alcantara and Bennett release the So Green EP, produced by Alicia Bognanno of Bully.
A second EP follows, Spring Skin, produced by Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma), in 2024. In my review in Big Takeover issue 95, I wrote that if Sub*T kept crafting tracks that strong, a full-length album would be a welcome next step. Two years later, here it is.
How My Own Voice Sounds finds Alcantara and Bennett building on the confidence of Spring Skin, delivering a collection that pays homage to the female-fronted alt-rock heroines of the ’90s and early ’00s while sounding entirely contemporary and fresh. What makes it kind of mind-boggling is the context: these are musicians still in the early stages of learning their instruments, and yet they sound like seasoned pros. The fairy tale, it turns out, keeps getting better.
You’re living in my Disney World, and you have a fairy rock mother. Tell me who your rock mother is, and what three wishes you’re going to ask that rock mother for.
JADE: I feel like it has to be Courtney Love. Could she be our shared rock mother? Because I seriously want her to grant me her ability to be so fearless. I think she is so inspiring when it comes to being a performer and an artist. She’s my favorite person to watch videos of, because everything that she said in interviews, like, 20 to 30 years ago, I think is even more relevant now. That wisdom is so valuable. Maybe wish number one would be her confidence, maybe instilling that in us, or maybe a grain of it.
GRACE: Wish number two would be the ability to just speak in an endless train of thought the way that she can, and it’s so entertaining, and so informed. She sounds ditzy, but I’m not trying to be offensive. She uses that to her advantage to catch you off guard. That’s a superpower. And wish number three would be to have her speaking voice.
JADE: All of those things — her talent, her confidence, her voice — we want it all. Maybe this could be, like, a Little Mermaid moment. I think everyone could use a little bit of her as a fairy rock mother.
You have this origin story that’s in the press release. I heard you on another podcast recently talking about the whole Twitter thing. But I feel like what I’ve read and what I heard you talk about only scratches the surface. Can you tell me more?
JADE: To dive in below surface level, we met within a subgroup of people who knew each other through the internet. But I think the thing that’s really interesting is, once we connected, there was this undeniable connection. It sounds a little bit corny, but we would just find so many parallels within things that we like, and things that maybe we saw in each other that we didn’t necessarily see in ourselves. It was just such a rapid build of friendship. Not only were we connecting about music, but we were connecting about all of these things that we wanted to see in our future, and so many experiences that we shared were formative within those years leading up to starting the band, just going to shows and looking around and thinking there’s so much more under the surface here.
That created a bond deeper than anything we had experienced in that world so far. The ability to actually commit to each other and really be all in on starting a band was the thing that really unified us, because we didn’t come from places where that was normal. Kids at school weren’t doing that where I came from. Seeing Grace living in New York was really empowering for me, because it made me get out of my bubble. The bands were just the beginning of it, and friendship was the real catalyst for everything that came out.
Did this all start on Twitter?
JADE: I would say we followed each other on Instagram, because it was after Twitter. It moved more quickly in text messages. We became friends in group chats and would talk every day, just laughing, making inside jokes, and we were making plans to travel across the country all the time. The worlds that we come from as far as being fans of music are very different. We did have different experiences, it just happens to be both of our backgrounds, and then we met each other through those backgrounds, but we didn’t actually share those experiences, if that makes sense.
Were you using your real names on social media?
GRACE: When I got on Twitter, like, in 2011 or 2012, I was definitely not using my name or pictures of myself. That’s how it was for pretty much everybody that I became friends with online at that time. Everybody had an insane username, and like, a picture of Harry Styles as their Twitter icon. I didn’t know what anybody looked like. You kind of just randomly connected with people. There was really nothing behind it, I didn’t know their name or their face. One of those girls is how I met Jade, one of the people that I met kind of anonymously on stan Twitter. And then, you would meet up at shows, and beforehand you would just have to text them or DM them and be like, “This is what I look like.” After a couple years, everyone would change their icons to their own face. By the time I met Jade, she knew who I was. Everybody was seeing me.
Where did you live?
JADE: I lived in Oakland. We were literally on opposite sides of the country. And then something really cool happened where we were able to get a lot of good together time during the pandemic, because Grace was in school at the time and taking classes from home, so we spent a lot of time together. We’ll always think of that as formative years, because the thing we connected over, which was music and going to shows, we couldn’t do it anymore. And so no other time felt more inspiring in that way. There were no distractions.
Was the first time you met in person really at a concert?
GRACE: Yes. It was at Madison Square Garden, and it was a 1975 show.
JADE: Yeah, and I think it was either the day after or two days after, at the old Rough Trade location, Bleachers or Jack Antonoff was doing some kind of random performance. It wasn’t even a show, it was five songs or something. And I remember seeing Grace and being like, “I met you again!” It was also my first time ever in New York. I was visiting New York and kind of meeting all these people I had met on Twitter. A lot of that gets fleshed out when you meet people in real life. Everyone can be friends online, but it’s like, who do you actually gravitate toward? Who do you want to sleep on their couch and wake up and have conversations face-to-face with? A lot of it was becoming really real for both of us around that time.
Is it true that neither of you had ever played instruments when you met?
GRACE: Yes, that’s true.
You know how mad that makes me? (laughs) I’m sure I won’t be alone in that feeling. I tried to play guitar in middle school but gave it up very, very quickly after realizing that I couldn’t just pick it up and play like Eddie Van Halen. It blows my mind that five or six years ago you had never played guitar and now you’ve got a full length album out.
GRACE: I had never even sang in a serious way. I was forced to play the flute in elementary school, but there was no rock and roll. I got an acoustic guitar for my birthday one year, and I don’t think I touched it more than ten times. When Jade and I decided to start a band, that’s when I was like, okay, I guess I gotta pick this up now. I ordered an electric guitar that day when we decided. That guitar was my 21st birthday present.
JADE: I kind of feel that same annoyance that you’re talking about for people who have been playing a guitar since they were five years old, or come from a musically inclined background, or even had parents who were playing really cool records or teaching them cool stuff other than the mainstream. I just feel like you have to want it so much more if that’s not already your background, because it’s an uphill battle at that point. Learning guitar later in life is obviously more challenging. But that’s what happened.
Did you learn to play by watching YouTube? Did you learn any music theory or was it just finding songs by bands you liked and learning to play them?
GRACE: It was a little bit of both. First thing, you look up chord shapes and all that kind of stuff, get that down. And then I was like, okay, maybe I should look up music theory. That endeavor lasted about four days. I was like, “I don’t want to know.” So then I went to: let me just pick a song that I really like, learn the chord shapes, learn the chords, learn the song, and then write a song with those chords. So I learned a whole Cherrybombs song, I learned a Liz Phair song. I was just learning random songs that I liked or that Jade told me about. That’s how I started, and then from there, kind of find your own style.
JADE: For me, I was basically learning to play parts that Grace wrote on the guitar because I was so terrified in the beginning to write my own songs. I was doing that at the same time as I started taking guitar lessons with this really funny classic rock guy. He was just this Oakland rock and roll style guitar teacher. He wore a bandana with a wig attached. I could tell it was a wig connected to the bandana. But he was amazing. He really helped me open up. I think so many things in the beginning were just me overthinking it. He helped me see that there really are no rules, and I needed to know that there were certain things I was doing right. It was around that time when I got to the level where I felt like I could write a song. After that, there’s this app that’s seriously like Duolingo for guitar. After that, it was just playing our songs and playing stuff that I wrote. That’s really how I learned. No theory involved anywhere.
Has anybody you went to high school with reached out and been like, “I can’t believe you’re in a band and have a record out. I just knew you when you were hanging One Direction pictures up on your bedroom wall”?
JADE: I think it might be more surprising for people that knew Grace because she was a lacrosse player and very shy in a lot of ways.
GRACE: Yeah, I was into sports and a little shy. But I have had a few of my friends that I still know, that I was friends with in middle school and high school, be like, “I can’t believe you’re doing that.” Even some people that I knew from Twitter, that we met ten years ago or more at this point, are equally as surprised that we’re doing this.
Guitar takes skill and training. So does singing. Where does that confidence come from?
GRACE: I don’t know. I guess maybe both of us have always just felt that we were good singers. It has to come from somewhere.
JADE: I was doing karaoke my whole life. I’m Filipino, so that’s a staple in my culture. I remember buying my first karaoke machine. Me and my dad and my sister and my mom, we took the minivan to San Jose, because that’s where all the big tech was, and my dad was like, “There’s a new karaoke machine on the market.” And we got it.
I’ve always been performing for my siblings and my friends. People that knew me in my childhood aren’t really surprised, but it’s not like I was in the talent show or anything. All of that was just impersonations, and that’s basically what karaoke is. It wasn’t until Randy Jackson said on American Idol, “You really made that your own,” that people were stepping out of their comfort zone in karaoke.
GRACE: We were just talking about the video game Rock Band in a recent interview. I was obsessed with Rock Band when I was a kid, and I think that might have taught me how to sing. You have to keep your voice within the lines, stay on pitch. And I had karaoke games on my PlayStation 2. I just loved singing, I guess, weirdly, but that was a living room thing.
How do you go from listening to pop artists like One Direction and the 1975 to creating rock music?
JADE: We’ve evolved so much. I feel like one thing that’s getting confused in the press coverage is that that’s like our background, but ever since we’ve known each other, we’ve been huge music nerds, developing our own style. We were both big fans of pop and alternative music growing up, so those are the things that brought us into stan culture, but we’ve been fans of so many different types of music, and that’s what really helped develop our style.
The bands that we were traveling to go see were evolving at that time as well. One Direction was a moment in time, and after that it was more like these fun American or even British rock bands: garage rock and post-punk. We were seeing all of those dude-driven trends that were happening in the late 2010s and early 2020s, and I feel like that’s what really helped us develop our sound, because we were so nostalgic for things that sounded like a woman could have made them. Just so many nods to emotional-based music and things that are more fun than too serious and heavy. We evolved a lot together.
That makes sense. It’s so easy to find an artist you like on Spotify and then dig into their influences and go back in time and discover all sorts of cool music. Did your discoveries take you back to the ‘90s and artists like Courtney Love?
JADE: It’s inevitable. There was so much good alternative music then, and even in the early 2000s, after grunge, when it became this really fun, polished, girly rock that would even play on the radio. I felt so inspired by Avril Lavigne. She really kind of is the GOAT when it comes to being a little girl and wanting to make music. Everything in that range, we pull a lot of inspiration from. But the ‘90s are very influential, of course.
So you’re learning to play guitar. You’re learning to sing. When did you decide that you wanted to form a band?
GRACE: I think it was pretty immediately like, “This is a band.” We were both gonna sing and write our own songs.
JADE: It was never just for fun. It literally felt like a necessity. I think we were both completely starving for this experience. It was never like, let’s just have some fun. That’s what we play board games for.
That’s awesome, to have that vision and those dreams.
JADE: I feel like we both, deep down, wanted this for so long, and we just had to meet each other to make it happen.
Once you give yourself a name, I imagine it becomes very real. Did Sub*T come to you quickly or were you playing around with different names?
JADE: I feel like it happened pretty early. Once we decided on it, I was in Photoshop, we were opening magazines, we were making logos, we were making posters for the one song we had on Bandcamp. The vision was clear, for sure.
GRACE: The name started off as a joke, and we just kept saying it over and over until it stuck. We were like, “Now it can’t be anything else, because we’ve been saying it for so long.” I don’t know which one of us came up with the asterisk, but I feel like it was probably Jade. I just like that it stylized the name a lot.
JADE: Once we got the asterisk, I felt like the imagery was happening for me, because “Subterranean” just sounded very serious, and I loved that Sub*T was a play on the seriousness of that word. It’s like, “We’re doing music, and we have this characterization of ourselves, but we’re gonna do it our way. It’s gonna look like us, and it’s gonna sound like us, and everything we do is gonna follow that.” I think we’ve been able to stay true to that. There’s also a venue in Chicago called Sub-T, and I thought that was really cool. And, at the time, I had a coworker from Colombia, and the subway there is actually called the “Subte.” He just thought it was the coolest name ever. It did feel right, and I saw a lot of identity in it.
GRACE: Yeah, and we even had this kind of tagline within our logo for a while that said “Not Punk.” That was just another way for us to play off our identity. We were really trying to go against all this post-punk that people were really obsessed with at the time, and we felt was super masculine, and everybody was obsessed with it. So it was kind of like, don’t call me that. So I think that was our attitude at the very beginning when we started.
I feel like a lot of newer bands do a series of EPs before they get to a full album. Was that ever a consideration?
GRACE: When we put out our first EP, it was just kind of like, we need to put music out. We had four or five songs, and we just wanted to put the music out but didn’t have enough songs for an album. With the second EP, we still didn’t have a big enough catalog that we were confident in to put out a full album. We were really comfortable with those five songs and wanted to record them and put them out so we had more music to show people, but we were a little bit nervous to put out an album. It’s a huge step. You want it to be cohesive, you want it to be representative of something, you want it to really feel like you. It’s already been six or seven years since we started writing music. We really don’t write that many songs. We were just really intentional with what we wanted to include on this album and what we wanted to say.
Initially, we wanted to put the songs on How My Own Voice Sounds out as two EPs. We were very scared to put out an album. But when we were thinking about it, we were like, “wait, ten songs, two EPs, that’s just an album.” We had planned the EPs so that they kind of were mirrors of each other and had their own themes, so it actually ended up working really well as an album. These songs are in conversation with each other a lot. We were really intentional about the songs that we were writing. When it did end up being a full album, it made sense.
I love that you’re conscious about that. I’ve talked to a lot of bands and asked whether any of the songs on the album have a sibling on the album. A lot of people are like, “I’ve never thought about that,” but it sounds like you were very conscious of writing songs that go together.
GRACE: Definitely. We even have songs called “Sister Species 1” and “Sister Species 2,” and that’s kind of the whole theme of the album for us. We talk about how this song on our album sounds like, and feels like, the big sister of this song on our EP. We’re always trying to figure out how our songs speak to each other and how they evolve.
I just want to read one sentence from the review I wrote for the 2024 Spring Skin EP. I said, “The latest EP embraces fuzzy guitars, dark tones, and emotional tension across five tracks,” and I said it evokes Veruca Salt on “Unearthly” and Hole on “The Hum.”
JADE: Oh, that’s so cool!
GRACE: What’s actually crazy about you comparing “The Hum” to Hole is that one of the songs that I learned when I first started learning guitar was “Reasons to be Beautiful” from the Celebrity Skin album, and that song, I switched the chords, and I wrote “The Hum.” The chord progression is just the opposite.
I love that. I’ve interviewed artists who have said something similar. Niko from Friko told me he’d learn to play a song that he liked and then build his own song off that. And Jacob from Narrow Head said that for his solo album, it was almost like he was making a mix tape and he’d name the demos after the band he was trying to sound like. Both of these guys did that but neither straight up ripped off anything from any artist.
JADE: I was really thinking about this the other day, because so many things that are gaining popularity now are kind of exact replicas of very specific moments in time, like My Bloody Valentine, and when you’re trying to replicate it, it’s just very, very obvious. The thing that I love about new music is when I’m listening to it, I can pull multiple references in my head. To me, that’s what makes music great, you can connect it to other things that you love. I want to hear people’s influences. I don’t want to hear a carbon copy of something else. Everyone’s influences and how those poke through their music is what makes me like musicians, and the more you can balance that and convey it while also having your own sound is such an accomplishment. We’re so into all of our influences and we never want to be ripping anything off too much.
“Overcomplicate” is a great way to open the album. I know every band has a different philosophy. Did that song scream out to you as an opening track or did you test other songs out to lead off the album?
GRACE: We definitely played around with the tracklist a lot, but we ended up settling on “Overcomplicate” as the opener because it’s just a pretty forceful song and introduction to the album. Jade and I spent a lot of time mapping out the meaning of the songs against each other more than the sound of them. We ended up with “Overcomplicate” as the first song because it’s like this declaration of, “I’m not gonna think too deeply about things, I’m gonna just be straightforward,” and then there’s this whole album of going too deep into your feelings and thinking too hard about stuff. So we just like that it’s kind of contradicting everything that comes after it. I really like that it’s the first song for that reason.
I’ve seen the videos you’ve made, and it seems like you’re doing them because you want to, no one’s telling you. I’m assuming you picked the songs that you wanted to be the pre-release singles. Is there a song that you personally love that maybe might get lost in the shuffle, the secret song in plain view? For me, it was “Too Much.” I really like that one, but it gets shadowed because it’s surrounded by singles.
JADE: That’s so cool that you think that about “Too Much.” When placing songs in the album, we’re like, “Too Much” isn’t a single, but I love that it has its moment right after “Overcomplicate.” It has that cool intro that’s like, “Okay, listen up.” It’s also the most different from our other songs, it’s really production-heavy in some ways. I have that feeling about so many of them, honestly.
“Imaginal Cells” is the focus track for the album and the release, and I hope to treat that as a single as well, because I love that song.
But maybe “Standing Room,” which is actually track seven, is one that’s coming to mind right now. It’s kind of such a classic Sub*T song — the lyrics are melancholy, but it’s kind of like a powerhouse, punchy song, and we’ve been playing it live for a long time. Even though it’s not standing out in the promo, it’s gonna be a classic for us. But I could say it about pretty much every other song. I have an argument for each of them, which I guess is a good thing.
Have you had a viral moment, or something that’s gotten you attention? Have you had a TikTok viral moment where people use your songs for their video?
GRACE: Not really, and that can definitely make you feel a little bit unworthy of things if your song doesn’t go viral. But we also haven’t really tried. Something about that feels really unnatural for us to post a clip of your own song fifty times on TikTok, or sing your song to a camera and post it on Instagram fifty times. I don’t think that’s ever going to happen, because we’re just not going to do that. Maybe that’s to our detriment. But our song was in a video game, and that was pretty cool.
JADE: Shout out EA Sports for buying “Unearthly” for the Skate 4 soundtrack. All of our YouTube comments are like, “Skate brought me here.” I would rather have someone DM us and be like, “I love your music, and I found it from this skateboarding game,” than have ten thousand streams. One is a lot more meaningful, but they kind of come together, which is nice.
Something really random and special. One of our favorite bands is Wolf Alice. Ellie knows me from going to so many Wolf Alice shows. I’m literally in the first ever Wolf Alice U.S. tour diary, before My Love is Cool came out. They were playing a show at The Independent in San Francisco, and me and my friend were sitting outside early and they came out and interviewed us. So Ellie knows my face. And then, basically, we were playing our second show ever and for some reason she was at that bar in Brooklyn that night, visiting friends. She posted one of our songs, us performing live, on her Instagram story. Through that, a bunch of people followed us, and it got the attention of Matt Wilkinson, who does an Apple radio show, and he premiered our next single after that. That was really random and cool. She bought our shirt, she’s like the first person to buy merch when we post it. Those are just little special things. The big viral moment hasn’t come yet, and I doubt it ever will, but never say never.
Do you have a live band? You both play guitar?
GRACE: I play bass, but I do play and write other guitar parts in the songs, and I usually play guitar on the recordings as well. We have a live drummer and another guitarist that plays with us. I play bass live.
Are they permanent members, or do you look for who’s available when you have a show?
GRACE: Yeah, we’ve cycled through a lot of people.
JADE: That was one of the most adamant pieces of advice that Alicia from Bully gave us. There was a misconception for so long that she was trying to uphold that Bully was a band. But Bully is her. She wrote all the songs dating back to forever. She was just like, “I wish I hadn’t done that. If someone writes music with you, that’s great. If they don’t, they don’t matter.” We really value being able to have friends play with us, and that is a huge plus. It’s really fun playing with a band, and obviously we can’t do it alone.
Do you have tour plans this year?
JADE: Not yet. We are playing a release show in New York, and hopefully we’ll be doing things in the fall, or whenever, depending on what happens with the record. Hopefully people like it and want to hear it.
Is touring something you want to do, or is it kind of like, if it works it works, and if not, we’ll just make another record?
JADE: Both. We would love to. We got to do some touring with Bully, and it was the most fun ever. We made so many good memories and got to go to the most random places, and it really seemed like people liked our music. That’s just something so valuable that we can’t get at home. Any opportunity we get to do that will be prioritized.
We did our first EP with Alicia in Nashville. She’s so talented. She studied production in school, and I don’t think many people know that, because her music is just so good in itself. She was wanting to do production. She’s the GOAT.
There are so many female bands right now that I love: Rocket, Momma, Nine Perfect Lives. There’s a band in Columbus called Snarls. Do you know them?
JADE: I’ve definitely heard of them.
Very in the same world as you. You should check that out.
JADE: I think we might follow each other on Instagram.
What’s the song that takes you back to something that is so specific that when you close your eyes, you can smell smells, you can feel feelings.
GRACE: I know what my answer is immediately. There is this duo of sisters, Aly and AJ. I was of the age at that time where they were extremely cool older girls to me. I was obsessed with their second album, both albums, but their second album a lot. There’s a song on that album called “Closure.” I think it’s the third or fourth song, and if I listen to that song now, to this day, I can feel myself in the back of a car in Utah with my parents in the front seat. There’s a big cooler next to me because we were on a camping trip. I have my little iPod Nano with my pink wired headphones, sitting there in the middle seat with my eyes closed, all the windows open, listening to that song. That was one of the only albums I had on that iPod for that trip. I had like three albums on there that I just listened to over and over again for three weeks. And that song specifically just brings me back to that exact, specific moment when I hear it.
JADE: I remember this one night when I was a little kid. I was having a sleepover, and my sister was also having a sleepover, so my parents were gone. My sister was watching me, my parents were probably gonna be out late. For some reason, we were listening to the radio, and I just remember me and my friend Mariah got on the coffee table and my sister was like, “I’m gonna play this song, but it has a bad word in it, but you can say it, because mom and dad aren’t home.” The song was “Hella Good” by No Doubt. Me and my friend were singing and dancing on the coffee table, and we also listened to The Offspring, “Pretty Fly for a White Guy,” just songs that my parents would have been like, “What is this?” I remember feeling so free, no parents, screaming at the top of our lungs. We had this stereo with a five-disc changer, they must have been burned CDs my sister had. I remember: no parents, no rules, we’re saying “hella” tonight.
