Among music snob circles, teenage girls are a common punching bag.

Musicians with largely young, female audiences are relentlessly mocked. The tween fangirl is a common caricature of vapid music listeners. Overly sentimental love songs are often dismissed as trying to hit the 13-19 female demo.

But if teenage girls are so lame, how can the teen sisters in Circus Trees rock so hard?

I first came upon Circus Trees at last year’s Post. Fest. And even buried in a lineup stacked with Holy Fawn, Spotlights, SOM, Driving Slow Motion, The End of the Ocean, and O’Brother, I took special note of them.

I heard them before I saw them, and I my first impression was that their brand of doomy guitars and folksy voice reminded me a lot of female shredders like Emma Ruth Rundle and Chelsea Wolfe. Truth be told, the comparison struck me as a little derivative at first.

But then I looked and saw three young girls at the center of the wall of sound.

The bassist couldn’t have been older than fourteen. The drummer, might pass for nineteen in the right light. The singer/guitarist looked to be somewhere between fifteen and seventeen.

And yet here the McCarthy sisters were, out-rocking a number of the all-male, twenty-to-thirty-somethings on the lineup.

And so come this past Bandcamp Friday, I purchased Sekura, their four-track 2019 EP that captures their prodigy to wax  in a way that is both punishingly heavy and emotively tender (though truth be told, I was hoping there was a physical option for their most recent LP, Delusions, which is staggering).

Sure, it would be easy to be cynical. You could look at the lyrics and wave them off as the “Deep” ramblings of a teenage girl who doesn’t know the first thing about life. But come on—The Beatles wrote way cheesier stuff than this. You could write them off saying that they’re just ripping off other artists. But even if they are, they’re ripping off the right stuff. 

And all of that would completely dismiss the fact that, once again, these are teenage girls. The very fact that anyone would try to hold them to the standards of any established artists is completely unfair. Not to mention, how many teenage boys (or older!) start bands that rip off the same three Green Day songs?

The fact of the matter is that Circus Trees isn’t just at the beginning of their career as a band. They’re at the beginning of their career as musicians, period. And I know that if you were to look at the songs I was writing at the same period of life, they wouldn’t measure up to this by any stretch.

But if this is what the kids are up to these days, I think we’re all gonna be alright.