Snarls's Glitter Emo Will Help You Laugh Through The Pain

By Bob Marshall


In just a couple of short months, Columbus, Ohio-based musical group Snarls have experienced a sudden rise from college-town curiosity to one of the most talked-about new bands in the nation. So whenever 20-year-old singer/guitarist Chlo White and 22-year-old guitarist Mick Martinez attempt to explain the quantity of attention their band’s brand of self-proclaimed “glitter emo alt-rock” is getting, White says with a laugh, “Honestly, we kinda just be shittin’ out songs.”


She’s not kidding. Martinez estimates that of the 10 songs that make up the quartet’s debut album Burst, out March 6 on Take This to Heart Records, at least eight of those came within “the first six months or so that we were a band.” Their knack for songwriting comes through in the effortless breeze of “Walk in the Woods,” the album’s first single that means off the band’s penchant for dreamy emotional hooks and vocal harmonies. However it’s around the 2:50 mark, any time White’s voice jumps an octave to belt one final chorus over a wall of distortion, that the song goes from “pretty good” to “oh... Wow.”


Snarls started at Columbus’s Arts & College Preparatory Academy high school, as soon as White met right now 20-year-old singer/bassist Riley Hall on their beginning day, “solely because we were wearing the same pair of Vans.” “I was like, ‘Please sit with me, your shoes are cool,’” White says. At the advice of a teacher, White met recent graduate Martinez any time the latter came back to run a songwriting workshop, and the pair hit it off. Coincidentally, Martinez and Hall’s parents were already companions, and the two had known each other literally their whole lives. “I met Mick and Riley separately and attempted to re-introduce them,” White says. Immediately after cycling through drummers, the order added Martinez’s younger brother Max beyond the kit.


Burst follows a 2018 self-titled EP; of these five songs, only the plaintive track “Twenty” made the jump to the full-length album. “We didn’t have a solidified sound upon finishing the EP,” White says. “But [‘Twenty’] was certainly the direction we wanted to go in, emo and twinkly, more so than the other [songs].” The tune resonated with them the most because of its shifting dynamics and its lyrical honesty, becoming a template for what the musical group wanted to be. “I’m young, and I don’t know what’s going on. That’s what that song is about,” she mentioned, adding that the confusion of adjusting from adolescence to adulthood is a theme that runs while in the album. “You’re figuring it out because you’ve never done it before.”





While it could come as a surprise for those outdoor of the Midwest, White and Martinez are adamant that Columbus might be one of the most creative and inspiring places for young artists in the U.S. Residence to over 60,000 Ohio State University students, Columbus has surpassed Cleveland and Cincinnati to be Ohio’s largest city, and it’s still growing fast. “I feel like the city is very young, at least the areas we’re hanging out in,” Martinez says. “There’s a lot of very young creative people doing all sorts of things, not just music. There’s a large visual arts scene. There’s a ton of photographers, we have a good dance community. There’s a lot of creativity happening here now. It’s very cool.”


Unlike the bands that made the Midwest a bastion of indie-leaning emo in the mid-to-late ‘90s (think The Get Up Kids, American Football, and The Promise Ring), Snarls and their Columbus alt-rock peers proudly wear the emo label like a badge of honor. While the musical group says they were initially inspired by U.K. Indie rockers Wolf Alice, they came to embrace their emo tendencies as time went on. White name-checks artists that she listened to in early high school like The Ready Set and The Wanted, saying that nevertheless she came from a musical household, “I feel like the music my parents played for me as a child has zero influence on me right now. My parents fancied The Dixie Chicks and Counting Crows and Keith Urban. It wasn’t my jam.”


Nevertheless, White and Hall’s dual vocal harmonies, which set the musical group apart from most in the Columbus emo scene, wouldn’t sound out of place on a Dixie Chicks album. Take Burst standout “Marbles,” which features White singing soft solo verses and Hall joining in for the heavier parts and the chorus — a page right out of the Natalie Maines and Co. Playbook.


“I think that song really captures my coping mechanism, which is making fun of my own pain,”  White says of “Marbles.” In the song, she lyrically adapts the persona of a heartbroken homebody who walks unshowered to her local Walgreens to purchase a caffeinated beverage before finally expressing that, “Sugar messes with me / However not as bad any time once you leave.”


“If I’m very emotionally stressed I’m like, ‘Haha, I’m dying,’” she mentioned. “I felt like that was a good way to go about it, because there’s tons of self-deprecating songs, nevertheless they’re not funny. And then you actually cry.” She laughs, then finishes: “That one, you could self-deprecate and dance around.”


While Snarls might not be wholly committed to Wolf Alice any longer, Martinez still calls the possibility to one day open for them “a dream.” “That’s the goal,” agrees White, even if it can would be “ages” away. “If they pick to prepare the worst mistake of letting us open for them, I could be so happy.” Judging by how rapidly things are happening for Snarls already — they’re hitting the road with Citizen and Glitterer for a Midwest and East Coast tour beginning later this month — “ages” might be here before they know it.