Charly Bliss Quit Their Day Jobs — Now Their Powerful New Album Finds Them Primed To Break Out

By Emma Madden


The joy that left somewhere between your fifth birthday party and puberty never escaped Charly Bliss’s Eva Hendricks. A super extrovert or “total hambone,” as she describes herself, Hendricks is exactly the person you picture any time while you listen to Charly Bliss’s strain of invigorating, hot-blooded power pop. Place on Earth into an encouraging family member in a little arts town, she spent most of her out-of-school hours performing musical theater before she ever picked up a guitar. “I would watch the movie Josie and the Pussycats and imagine myself being in that band,” she says. Her face is mostly mouth whenever she speaks, spread in a constant grin like she’s delivering life-altering news. “I was obsessed with Michelle Branch and the Dixie Chicks, and I was routinely attempting to convince each person that we had to begin a musical group, although none of us knew how to play instruments.”


While Hendricks had seen ladies represented in pop music, she never quite saw herself in them. “Pop stars are almost like aliens,” she says. “They’re not us. In the perfect way ever.” It wasn’t up until she saw Jenny Lewis fronting Rilo Kiley that it occurred to her that she may would make her pussycat pipe dream a reality. Meeting Spencer Fox, a former child actor who voiced The Incredibles’ Dash Parr, was the final push. With Fox’s encouragement, Hendricks started writing songs, and finally picked up the guitar.


Charly Bliss formed after, with Fox on lead guitar, Hendricks’s brother Sam on drums, and childhood friend Dan Shure on bass. Their debut album, Guppy, landed in 2017, following a few painstaking years attempting to find their sound. They went through multiple costume changes — garage-rock musical group, acoustic Starbucks-core outfit — before landing on the resilient pop, and achingly nostalgic rock that, heading into the upcoming release of their second album, Young Enough, right now defines Charly Bliss.


Hendricks was still working in a coffee shop — her “favorite job ever, with the exception of this one” — any time her band’s first album came out. “Once that tour for Guppy began, I just felt so bad for my coworkers. I kept calling out for months at a time. I was gonna begin to lose companions over how often I was having to leave.” The musical group was in Las Vegas as soon as Hendricks obtained the text message from her mother telling her: “You cannot keep doing this. You must be all in.”


The musical group abandoned their jobs and started pursuing Charly Bliss full time two weeks into that tour. Right now, as they’re preparing for Young Enough, without day jobs to fall back on, the stakes have never been higher. While Guppy gave the musical group the possibility to pursue music full time, Young Enough is the sort of album that could give the musical group its big break — more fans, bigger venues, an answer on a gameshow. Hendricks is feeling ambitious. “I think all four of us are.” Not ashamed to have high hopes, the musical group are wanting to push Charly Bliss as far as it will go. “Michelle [Zauner] from Japanese Breakfast habitually jokes that we’re both super try-hard bands,” Hendricks laughs.


Like Guppy, Young Enough is sorely sentimental nevertheless never mawkish. Its highs are earned — “Do you remember walking barefoot against the dark?” Hendricks screams in one such instance. It’s the sort of rush that makes your belly lurch — like you’re cycling down a tall hill, or about to fall in love.


Hendricks is made of those moments. “Part of it is I have no chill, I’m a super intense person,” she says. “I remember back in high school, I’d become obsessed with one individual, and felt like I was madly in love with them. I’d drive around in my vehicle and cry about them, and I remember thinking: No one has ever felt this much, no one understands what this seems like.” That teenage feeling — the one which isolates you in your intensity, as though the entire world’s going down on a sinking ship — has extended into Hendricks’s adult life and Charly Bliss’s latest album.


“If I had to think of one word that completely encompasses all the lyrical themes of this album, and the method of making it, it could be ‘growth,’” she says.


She call the album’s title track its “lyrical centerpiece,” for that reason. On “Young Enough,” Hendricks refers back to the palmy days of her first love in cinematic detail. “Do you remember walking barefoot against me?” She screams once more, while coming to the grown-up conclusion that despite all of it, it’s better to love well than it is to love hard.


“I think of it as a song that’s about growing up and growing out of purchasing into the idea that the hardest relationships are the most meaningful,” she says. “Obviously, it was a relationship that would never work for so several reasons, yet in comparison to these other experiences that came right after, of being with someone who was actually really sinister, and being with someone who was abusive, I’m grateful that that relationship was my blueprint and not something so much darker.”


In conversation, Hendricks still pauses before she shares that she’s been abused and sexually assaulted. She describes the months leading up to the release of “Chatroom,” a song in which she discusses both, as “brutal.”


“It’s something that I’ve been wrestling with for a long time,” she says. “I don’t think that I could have gotten to a place where I might have admitted it to myself, or admitted it to and the world wide web, if it hadn’t have been for other women.”


Hendricks believes that visibility can change the world, just as it’s changed her, whether it was seeing Jenny Lewis in a musical group, or seeing girls tell their stories as piece of the #MeToo movement.


“If I felt like I really couldn’t make it out the other end of this, then I hope that I would’ve made that choice to wait up until the time felt right,” she says. “I feel really lucky that I have a therapist that I really love.”


As Guppy’s standout song “Ruby” proved, Hendricks’s greatest love songs are to her therapist. Still working with Ruby today, the language of therapy occasionally leaks into Hendricks’s songwriting. “I’m someone who’s very open and I feel like I connect with little effort with people, and some days that indicates I give a ton of myself, and that’s landed me in some sad situations,” she says. Young Enough is full of lessons learned in hindsight — the significance of setting boundaries; knowing that it’s impossible to truly save someone else; growing old enough to favor stability over intensity.


And, for an artist who has struggled to connect to pop music and the removed nature of stardom, that vulnerability had a perhaps unlikely inspiration: Lorde’s chronicling of brutal breakup on 2017’s Melodrama.


“It felt to me like the most trustworthy expression of what going through [a breakup] feels like, and that’s like therapy,” she says. “When you could articulate those feelings, you immediately feel like someone gets you, and if other people get this music, then they get you, and if this person who wrote this music can get through, then something as lonely as a breakup doesn’t feel as lonely anymore. In a way, it makes the world bigger for you. That’s my main go to thing about how art works.”


Young Enough is out 5/10 by way of the Barsuk/Lucky Number.