The radiator in Wax Trax Records clanked like a dying animal every seventeen minutes. Mara had counted.
She'd been counting a lot of things lately—the number of times men touched the small of her back while reaching past her for records (forty-three this week), the cigarette burns in the threadbare carpet by the listening station (eighteen, arranged like a diseased constellation), the days since her last full night of sleep (twelve, maybe thirteen).
January in Portland meant rain that never quite committed, just hung in the air like something waiting to happen. Everything smelled like mildew and stale smoke and the particular sourness of a space that had been loved too hard for too long. The windows were plastered with flyers—show announcements, tour dates, zine releases, lost cat posters from three years ago. A palimpsest of scenes that had already happened or never would.
"Neon Vandal" is a raw, unflinching dive into the riot grrrl era—when punk belonged to the girls who screamed back. Mara isn't looking for trouble, but trouble finds her in the form of missing women and whispered warnings. Armed with nothing but a baseball bat and the unshakeable code of "girls to the front," she discovers that sometimes the only way to survive is to become exactly what they fear.
Nick Razer delivers a visceral love letter to the women who turned their rage into revolution.