UCLA Radio’s Rising Artist Spotlight aims to highlight upcoming artists who have demonstrated unique creativity and talent through their music. Through interviews and features, we delve into their journey, influences, and aspirations, giving listeners a glimpse into the future of music.
In their upcoming debut album, Bite Down, alternative/indie band Ribbon Skirt is delving into darker tones and visions than their last project. In this interview, UCLA Radio dives into the band’s past projects, their debut album, and the rabbit imagery it entails.
This interview, conducted on March 26th 2025, has been edited for clarity and brevity purposes
Interviewed by Chloe Gonzales
Chloe Gonzales: Tell us about yourself!
Tashiina Buswa: We’re Ribbon Skirt, a post-punk alternative indie band from Montreal. There are four of us: Billy is from the UK, I’m from Ontario, and the others are from Montreal and Ontario as well. We like to make music that people can respond and relate to. In some way, a lot of our music speaks to my experience as an indigenous person living in this world.
Billy Riley: Tashiina and I have been playing together for around six years in different projects and this is the latest iteration of it. We spent the last year working on the record [Bite Down] coming out in two weeks.
Chloe: Very excited to talk about the record! I wanted to point out first that you guys recently performed at SXSW in Texas. How was that experience? Did it change anything about your dynamic as a band? Did you get a chance to play any new material?
Tashiina: It was kind of a crazy week, because we played nine shows in five days and we’ve never done that before. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. It was a cool personal challenge to do at the same time to see how many shows you could play. We had some three show days as well, which was insane, but SXSW is what you make of it. It can be this sort of corporate thing, but if you look for the right people, you will find them there and make your own experience.
Billy: Definitely agree with you on making our experience. This year, we managed to get off the beaten path a little bit and play a house show and really got to know people from there, these amazing bands. It’s really kind of a wild week, a whirlwind, but it was super fun. We love being in Austin, it’s a nice break from the cold weather up here as well.
Chloe: Nine shows in five days sounds crazy! Did any of the musicians there inspire you? Like, what is it like being in a space saturated with other rising artists? Does it feel like nervousness or excitement?
Billy: I find it really inspiring, honestly. It was nice to discover music that I wouldn’t necessarily discover, because I feel like algorithms and stuff are just so narrow that you don’t always hear stuff as it comes out. I feel like I discovered some of the great bands that were doing really cool stuff that I probably wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
Tashiina: It’s just cool to share spaces with bands and I feel like people are often, 99% of the time, super supportive and encouraging and gracious. We made so many new friends. And so many of these bands where you’re like “They’re a big deal!” and we’re playing with them and they’re usually so down to Earth. At the end of the day, we’re all just trying to do the exact same thing.
Chloe: That’s great to hear that you guys had a great time! More to you though, you’ll be releasing your first full length album, Bite Down, on April 11th. Congratulations, first of all! You guys talked a little about this in a previous interview, but how did you approach this album differently from your previous projects?
Tashiina: Sonically, it’s taken a turn. I’d say it’s a bit heavier than what we used to play. A departure for it, a little bit darker even and a bit more serious. I feel like we’re still growing and evolving as a band and I feel like it’s a step towards what we want to eventually sound like.
Billy: I think in the previous projects we worked on and my other projects, it’s always been you go to the studio for like two days and just have it all figured out. You play it live a couple of times and you really capture that feeling. But this time, we went into the studio with some of the songs pretty bare bones and we really build them out there. So I feel like a lot of the sound comes from that experimentation in the studio, which has pushed us, or me at least in a way — I never really worked like that before and it was super interesting to do that for this record. And I think it really paid off.
Chloe: And you guys said that you’ve been working on it for about a year?
Billy: Around nine months. But we would do a week here, a week there, but an overall span of probably nine months.
Chloe: Did you guys have a stopping point? Was it like, “Oh, this feels about done”? Or a moment where you were like it’s finished, this is the last song?
Billy: Yeah, it felt like a pretty natural ending point. In our last week we booked maybe ten or seven days in a row and we’re just like, “We need to finish this. This is it, we got a deadline.”
Tashiina: Like the last hour, we were like, “No, we are finishing this today.” I felt bad; our poor producer, Monty, we were pressuring him to hurry things along.
Billy: Definitely gave ourselves a pretty hard deadline, and I think that’s just useful sometimes.
Tashiina: Yeah, deadlines and forcing yourself to finish at a certain day or time. We’re not the kind of people that drag things out. We’re not perfectionists. I think it’s more freeing to be that way than the opposite because, yeah, can get bogged down in that stuff pretty fast.
Chloe: I was also wondering about the inspiration behind the album cover. It’s very striking, I believe it’s a deer? And Heather Lynn brought this vision to life for you, how did that come about?
Tashiina: It’s actually a rabbit! Thematically, there’s a running theme of rabbits and chasing rabbits or rabbits jumping through traps and stuff throughout the lyrics and whole album. So we kind of thought it could be a cool cover. And we were going to photograph a rabbit but it ended up being this whole thing. And so Heather swooped in at the end of the day and designed the cover and bought the photo off the internet but yeah the red eye is pretty stark. And I think that speaks to the rest of the record, which is also pretty stark at points and like there’s nothing left to be interpreted. It’s right there in front of you, staring you in the face.
Billy: I agree with all of that. Yeah, Heather did a great job.
Chloe: It’s very interesting knowing now that it’s a rabbit. And now that we’re talking about it, I think it was your music video “Cellophane” that had a lot of that rabbit imagery in it too. Rabbits represent innocence, curiosity, so it makes the album cover feel different. I find that interesting.
Tashiina: It’s cool that you take that away from that, because I feel like that’s what we’re going for as well, because it is obviously a symbol of innocence and purity but also we wanted to show a darker edge to it.
Billy: I think it’s interesting, both in the “Cellophane” video and the cover, both of them were like, “Oh hey, there’s a lot of rabbit imagery. Why don’t we use a rabbit?” Sasha was the first person to mention that and I feel like it takes someone else to notice something for you to be like, “Oh yeah.”
Chloe: What was your initial vision when you first set up to make this record, and how did that vision evolve during the process?
Billy: Our initial vision was to make something that wasn’t so much a straight rock record. We really wanted to experiment in the studio, and I think we achieved that. I think there’s definitely, for me, a progression from some of the songs which we wrote a year or two before the record versus some of the songs that we wrote at the end. I think it’s a nice transition into a new sound that we’re kind of doing, and the new songs are definitely more in that direction. I feel like we did a good job of achieving what we set out to do, which was to make an interesting, not straight up record, which we were doing in the past. I would use a lot more synthetic instruments, like drum machines and synths. My vision was just really going with bare bone songs and building it out and letting the song find itself with the help of the producer, rather than going on like a predetermined path.
Tashiina: I think that the whole journey was that we didn’t necessarily have a solidified vision for how we wanted the end product to be. We kind of went into the studio with bare bones, ideas of a song, and we would conceptualize them while we were recording them. It led us to this cool place where we didn’t really know what it was going to look like at the end and now we’ve come to a place that we’re really happy about.
Chloe: I think for it not being straight rock you guys definitely achieved that, at least in the singles! Are you guys nervous at all because it’s coming out in two weeks? Especially given the reception of your singles, how is it to finally get it out there?
Billy: Definitely excited. We finished the record in August last year and it’s out in April, which is actually in music terms a quick turnaround. Some of the songs we wrote two, three years ago feel quite old to us, but we have to keep reminding ourselves that no one else has heard it. I’m super excited and ready to move on to the next thing.
Tashiina: I’m most excited for the fact that everything will be out and relieved to get it out and over it, but also to have a catalog of work out there. I think people don’t take bands as seriously if they don’t have a full record out at least. That’s my impression of things. So I feel like for me, that’s going to be cool, too, to be like, “Okay, go listen to our record.” And yeah, it’s not an EP or some singles, it’s a full record.
Chloe: You two also just released a new single, “Earth Eater,” which just has an amazing music video accompanying it, depicting your great grandmother meeting your twin uncles as adults for the first time because of the ‘60s separation. I also really enjoyed the lyrics, it feels like they’re biting down or chomping, which may be me trying to make connections to the album name, but I enjoyed that. How does it feel to share a vulnerable piece of yourself for the music video?
Tashiina: It’s scary, but I think in music, generally, you’re constantly being vulnerable, and especially as a writer, too. I always assume that people don’t read my lyrics or know what they are, so I feel like I had this safety net. And I think that’s the nice thing about being a smaller band, you don’t necessarily feel like you have people judging that side of you or trying to decipher that part of you, which maybe is a curse of a bigger band. So right now, I feel pretty at ease, although I’d say yesterday [when “Earth Eater” music video was released] was a bit like– because I also edited the video and handled all the footage and just going through that and reflecting on how crazy that reunion must have been for my mom and her brothers and everything and the rest of my family. It’s wild to just think about and see it on the screen too, happening in front of you. So yeah, it was a lot, and after yesterday, I felt emotionally drained and needed to recover.
Chloe: I can’t imagine. It made me emotional a little bit so I can’t imagine how it makes you feel. That’s your history. That’s insane.
Tashiina: Yeah, it is quite insane. I do feel a degree of separation sometimes where I view it as work and am like, “Okay, I need to do this. This has to be done.” So then, I’m able to go into this place of emotional separation. But then when I sit back and look at it after a release, I’m like, “Oh my God.”
Billy: I think it’s also an important story that you forget, like when we live in Canada, most people know about it to some extent. But then I was texting people back home, giving backstory about the video, and everyone was surprised and had no idea. That story is so important to be told because not everyone knows.
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Chloe: You mentioned in another interview that you’re drawn to artists that are constantly evolving, which I find interesting. Especially even switching project names and such, I find very interesting as artists step into new eras and such. But have you ever wanted to step back to past ideas that you’ve had, or do you ever feel like you’re abandoning different sounds?
Tashiina: I don’t know. When we first started out, it was totally different. It was like singer-songwriter, Angel Olsen, and everything felt more simple. But I think it was just that it comes with the nature of the beginning of something where there’s no other expectation or pressure, we were just having fun. Still sometimes it’s like that feeling more than anything, that feeling of just like our fun thing. Not that it’s not fun now, but it’s a definite, a full on project for us now.
Billy: Sometimes, I’m hard headed about moving on. I remember we played our last Love Language [previous project] show last summer and we were like, “Okay, this is it. We’re done.” There were some friends in the crowd that disagreed and had a connection to these songs, to which I was like, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t move on.” But at the same time, it’s our art and we want to make stuff that reflects us now, rather than two to three years ago. Sometimes, I feel bad about losing stuff, but I like to keep it fresh.
Tashiina: And I always think of my favorite bands, like I love the band Wednesday. For example, I remember they were doing an “ask me anything” on Reddit and someone in the comments was like, “When are you gonna play this song? Please play it at your next show! It’s my favorite song.” And like for the band, it wasn’t even an option for them. They just were like, “Huh, no, next question.” I sort of see that as a comfort.
Chloe: I know what you mean, we’re always evolving.
Tashiina: I think I still do miss elements of those early sounds and early days.
Chloe: For sure. You said some of these songs off the new record are two, three years old, technically. Do you guys feel like you’re going to get tired of those sooner than the other ones?
Billy: Honestly, it’s kind of weird I haven’t gotten tired of them yet.
Tashiina: Me, too. I think that’s because all the songs are more cohesive, and they just make sense with the sound we’re trying to go for now. Like, I love playing all the songs live, and I think that’s a good sign though.
Billy: Like the lifespan of the other songs were so much shorter.
Tashiina: I think we’re also getting better at writing songs that we know we won’t get – especially for me, with vocals and stuff. I’m not punishing myself anymore with really hard-to-sing parts.
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Chloe: Here at UCLA Radio, everyone who has a show has a DJ name accompanying them. What would your DJ names be?
Tashiina: DJ Bangers!
Billy: DJ Mash!
Listen to Ribbon Skirt here!
And listen to our Rising Artist Spotlight playlist!
