An interview with Melpomene

Melpomene is a two-piece instrumental "emotional post death" band from Minneapolis (more on that genre description below) currently made up of guitarist Xochi and drummer Lynn. Since I heard their debut album A Body Is A Suggestion late last year, I've been looking for an opportunity to see the band live. The band's music is intricate and technical, and though it is fully instrumental, is a reflection of the members' identities as young queer women. Last week, Melpomene released a new EP, New Queer Cinema, which is inspired by the queer-themed independent film movement of the 1990s. I wanted to learn more about the band's history and inspirations, so I spoke with Xochi and Lynn last week before a live performance at the Seward Cafe in south Minneapolis.

While Lynn was present, Xochi answered all of the questions below. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Tell me a little bit about the history of the band. How long have you been playing together? 

Yeah, so the band has existed since, like about late 2019 in some form or another. It was originally called Mayonnaise, and it was kind of like the side joke band because my other band wasn't working out. Then slowly that became like, the main thing as we had more and more fun with it and we were like, “Okay, we have to like change the name from Mayonnaise to something else” Then we had a band name in the middle that nobody remembers, and then we became Melpomene. We played our first show in February or January of 2020, and then immediately we went into hibernation because, you know, COVID and stuff. We didn't really start playing much until probably like 2022 or something like that, but technically we've been around since like 2019. Lynn joined the band about a year and a half ago. 

How would you describe your music?

I feel like almost like other people are better at describing than me, but broadly, progressive metal.  In some ways the first album is me figuring out how to write metal music. When I listen from track to track, I can be like, “Oh, here's a song where I was trying to learn how to write doom riffs." Here's the song where I was trying to learn how to do more mathcore-adjacent stuff or something like that. I feel like I can almost see what I was thinking. The stuff that we're writing now for our second album is closer to dissonant death metal. My friend Ella coined the term “emotional post death,” because we have the post metal thing going on, where we have the long instrumental sections and softer sections like our forebears like ISIS, who've done it forever. But a lot of that stuff is closer to doom metal than it is death metal in the pacing. Since our fast parts are faster, we chose to say "post death" to make it clear that we do play blast beats, you know?

You’ve also got some jazz influence.

Yeah, definitely. I played in jazz band in high school and I’ve definitely been a big fan of jazz and jazz fusion for a long time. On our new EP, New Queer Cinema, the whole back half is just like a jazz fusion song basically and just trading solos between me and another guitar player here in the cities.

What are he origins of the New Queer Cinema EP?

I've been having trouble knowing how to describe it, because it's like 10 minutes long and it's technically only one song so it could be a single, but I think of it as an EP. The lineage of it is that it’s essentially borne out of a song for the first album that I decided didn't quite make the cut and didn't make sense narratively. That was like 15 minutes long, and I  took the smaller chunks that I liked out of it and just got rid of a shitload of it. It was like, “Well, this beginning is cool and this ending bit is cool and everything else in between kind of needs to go.” Then I kind of stitched it together.

The project is called New Queer Cinema. The inspiration was obviously the New Queer Cinema film movement. When I was younger, I watched all these New Queer Cinema movies of a previous generation that were movies about queer people moving to cities and discovering themselves. And I had a similar story, coming from a small town and moving to the Twin Cities. I was no longer watching from a distance. I now am part of a queer community in a city, and I get to be active. I get to put out my own personal version of these films that inspired me. So I took the pieces of the unfinished songs, and sort of started stitching together with the idea of like this is the interstitial thing between the last album, which was written in a smaller town that was more aspirational, like trying to be what I am now.

The second album will be sort of like the arrival, our biography of queer people who live in the city. So I sort of took music from eras that I felt like were a similar to the film movement. I tried to take stuff from the 90s. I would say that the metal parts sound a bit like, you know, like Symbolic-era Death or something. The jazz fusion elements maybe go back a bit farther than the 90s to the jazz fusion from the 70s and stuff. Not that there wasn't jazz fusion in the 90s, but I don't think it really sounds like a Pat Metheny song per se. So yeah, it sort of was conceived as the piece in between the two albums, like our transitory period.

Can you talk a little bit about some of these movies, for those who aren't familiar with the New Queer Cinema movement? What are some of these films, especially the ones that are particularly relevant to both of you? 

Sure. They’re movies from the 90s, and they're from a wave of queer people who were given access to equipment that they weren't in the past, or like maybe studio budgets and stuff that they weren't in the past. A lot of it does still come down to like gay men as opposed to lesbian movies or trans movies or something, because, you know, the sort of intersectional things that go into discrimination.

Some of the movies that like really inspired me we put into the liner notes of the vinyl for the album, and we  listed six movies that are foundational movies for me. One of them is called Y tu mamá también, which is by Alfonso Cuarón. That movie is about a trio of people, an older woman and two young men who are discovering a lot of things about themselves. It is definitely like a political movie about Mexico, but it's also about them discovering their own sexuality and whether they might be gay or bi or whatever. When I was younger, like pre-transition, it was definitely nice as Guatemalan and Mexican person to watch a movie with people who look like me and are also experiencing the similar things as I am.

There are also movies like the Greg Araki movies that we have listed. I think the one we have in the list is Nowhere. His “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy is the most indicative of my own personal taste and things that influenced me. It balances wistful sorts of emotions and battles with things like depression and loss of other people in the community, but it also has transgressive elements about drugs and sex. I feel like those movies exemplify the balance between the metal aspects that we do that are these heavier, more abrasive things, and also the psychedelic and post metal stuff that are the slower bits that are more maybe contemplative. 

I understand that you have an event coming up where you’re performing live before a movie from the New Queer Cinema movement. 

Yes, on November 27th at The Heights Theater. We got reached out to after we announced the record by a film series in town called Queer Cut that screens like a monthly movie that relates to queerness. If not directly, it relates to the person who assembles the series’ identity with their own queerness. So they've done The Fly, they've actually done Doom Generation, which is a Greg Araki movie, and you know, The Matrix, stuff like that. They asked us what movie we wanted to present, and we ended up being able to get Happy Together by Wong Kar-wai.

A lot of the movies in the New Queer Cinema movement are American, but there are a couple films in the movement that are more global. Happy Together is a movie about a gay couple who are on vacation, in I believe Buenos Aires, and it's interesting to see aspects of my own story reflected in people from a place that I've never been to living in another place, seeing how universal some of these things can be. It's a really beautiful and wistful movie in some ways. But we're really excited to be able to screen a movie that inspired this thing, play the EP before the screening of the movie and talk about it a little bit. When I was assembling this thing, I was like, it'd be kind of fun to do something like that. But I don't know if any movie theater would, you know, let us play some blast beats before the film goes on. But lo and behold!

Not long ago you opened for Conan here in Minneapolis. How did that come about?

I saw that they were playing in town, and I was like, you know, let’s try a Hail Mary, email the venue and see what happens. Within the first hour the show was announced I was already in their email inbox. And we ended up getting it! It was really cool because Conan is a band I’ve been listening to since I was a teenager. It was definitely a cool moment to play a packed show for those guys and to meet them. The bass player ending up getting one of our shirts before they left. It was definitely a cool experience!

For a lot of people in the audience, it was probably their first introduction to your band. What was the response like? 

It was really, really good! We had our highest merch sales out of any show we’ve played in the last year and a half. The number of people that came to talk to us was great, too. I think I was the last person standing there at the merch booth at the end of the night. And in some ways, I was like “This is going to be a caveman band.” We’re more cerebral, we’re playing long, intricate songs with, you know, somewhat heady concepts, as opposed to this band that's playing, you know, riffs at 60 bpm that are about, like, hitting a guy in the head with a hammer. And so I was like, “We'll see how well we actually end up doing for the crowd.” But it ended up being a phenomenal show and yeah, it's one of my favorite ones that we've done yet. 

Great, that’s awesome. Yeah, I feel like the metal crowd has become much more accepting of the queer community over the last year and more open-minded in general. Do you feel the same?

Yeah, especially here in town. We've had a great reception so far.

Speaking of merch, you’ve got some pretty unique merch at the show tonight. 

We've got a T-shirt, a crop top, a thong, and rolling papers and the crop top. Are all like sort of bootlegs of film posters from the New Queer Cinema movement. The rolling papers are based off of the film poster for the movie Happy Together. The thong is based off of a movie called Bound, which is the movie before The Matrix by the Wachowskis, which is a formative lesbians with guns. sort of thing. Lesbians who do crime. The T-shirt is based off of the Doom Generation. Those were fun to make. I had to, you know, take these film posters apart, and learn some new things graphic-design wise. 

And, of course, we’ve got the New Queer Cinema EP. On the b side is a song that we played at a benefit show in February 2026 for our neighbors who were affected by the ICE raids. It’s a song called “Injustice At Every Turn,” and we thought it somewhat prescient to put that song on the record. That live version is not going to go on any streaming services. So it'll just be only the people who got the record who get to hear the live recording. The song will eventually be on our second album, but who knows when that will be?

So completists need to get it. 

Yeah, yeah, that was kind of the idea. 

Any final thoughts to share on New Queer Cinema?

It’s really our transitional piece. By the time that Lynn joined the band we'd already recorded the first album, but it wasn't quite out yet. So she learned the material from that record, and then this project New Queer Cinema was partly written when she joined, and then she added some of her own sauce to it. So it's interstitial in that it was kind of written both before and after Lynn. The second album will be the first thing that the two of us put together completely ourselves, so that will be exciting.