Interviews: Emmalia and Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor of Bonnie Trash talk their new album 'Mourning You'

In 2013 twin sisters Emmalia Bortolon-Vettor and Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor formed Bonnie Trash and the Guelph-based duo has been putting out beautifully crafted, horror-infused heavy music ever since. Their knack for sonic and lyrical storytelling shines bright on everything they’ve released from their debut EP Ezzelini’s Dead to their first album Malocchio to their EP My Love Remains The Same, which found the duo welcoming long-time collaborators Dana Bellamy and Emma Howarth-Withers into the band. Now Bonnie Trash are getting ready to release their second album, Mourning You, which contains some of their most expansive and haunting songs to date.

Mourning You is not simply an album that you listen to, it is an album that you feel deep within your soul. Through deeply textured arrangements and heartfelt lyrics, the nine tracks embody all of the complex emotions that come with grief including the intense pain of loss, the sharp sting of regret, and the beauty of love and remembrance. Mourning You will be out everywhere on February 28 via Hand Drawn Dracula and you can pre-order it right here. Bonnie Trash will be playing St. Anne’s Parish as part of Wavelength Festival in Toronto on February 27 and will be playing shows around Ontario in the spring.
Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with guitarist Emmalia and vocalist and lyricist Sarafina to talk about the album, expanding the band to a four-piece, musical and visual storytelling, their work with GGRC+, and so much more. Read the interview below!

This interview between Em Moore, Emmalia Bortolon-Vettor, and Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor took place on February 17, 2025 via Zoom. This is a transcription of their conversation and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mourning You will be your first full-length album and your second release with Dana Bellamy on drums and Emma Howarth-Withers on bass. What went into your decision to expand to a four-piece?

Emmalia: We wanted to expand because we needed more people to make the sound. [laughs] Sara was drumming on an octapad and singing at the same time. I was trying to split my signal into a bass amp and a guitar amp and trying to play both lines at the same time and loop it. It didn’t fill the sound the way we wanted to. We were putting in a lot of work for a sound that wasn’t our intended outcome. It feels really awesome to have our friends say, “Hey, how about we step in?” It’s just so much easier and a lot more fun as a result. And it sounds much more expansive.
Sarafina: I think what happened was a natural evolution. For the first couple of releases - Ezzelini’s Dead and Malocchio - Bonnie Trash was very much a project led by my sister and I. It still is. For those early recordings, everything you hear was performed by us. As Emma said, it evolved and we really wanted to hone in on a heavier rock sound. In order for us to live up to that dream, we had to involve other musicians and it just so happens that these other musicians are wonderful friends of ours.
Dana Bellamy played with my sister and I when we were teenagers in our rock band called Red Rosary, so we’ve all known each other for a very long time. Dana knows Emma and I not just in terms of people - we know each other so well! - but also in the way that Emma plays guitar and the way I like to compose. It was just such a natural fit with Dana. She’s just an absolutely brilliant person. Emma Howarth-Withers came to be such a lovely friend. Emma’s a wonderful bass player and just an all-around badass human. We really lucked out with having these incredible people join our band and support us musically in what we want to do. I think having that unwavering support is a beautiful thing.
Emmalia: Yeah, it really is special.
Sarafina: Emmalia and I have such a strong vision when it comes to composition and to have that support from our bandmates being like, "This sounds awesome! How can we support you?” It’s great. It’s very special.

You recorded the album at Wychwood Sound with Josh Korody who you worked with on Malocchio and My Love Remains The Same. You also co-produced the album with him. What was the recording process like?

Emmalia: It was awesome. If you ever get a chance to work with Josh in any capacity, do it! He is excellent at deeply listening and listening with the intention of not only wanting to support how you’re sonically envisioning something but also from a collaborative standpoint. It’s really exciting when you go to somebody and you say, “Hey, I need my guitars to sound like screaming banshees” and they say, “That’s awesome! Let’s have a good time and do this”. Maybe it won’t sound like a screaming banshee with our initial setup so we’ll be like, “How do we do this?” Then when we do figure out that sound it’s really magical. It’s really nice to be able to have that collaborative approach with somebody who knows a lot and wants to play, essentially. It’s really fun.
Sarafina: We love to play in the studio and experiment. The most important thing is being able to have fun with the recording process. I know that sounds cheesy, but music is supposed to be fun! When you find a co-producer and an engineer who also wants to do that and problem-solve, it’s great. We can bring ideas and demos to Josh like, “Hey, here’s our song. This is what we want it to sound like, can you help us get it to that level of production?” And he’ll say, “Yeah, let’s do this!” It’s very much a creative collaboration where he really brings out what we’re hearing sonically and tonally. He brings that alive.
What’s really great about working with him is not just the sense of humour, it’s bringing this really, really great environment to the recording process; not just of being positive, but working through things to ensure that the music is sounding how we’re envisioning it in our minds. In terms of the recording process, Emma and I will record demos and we’ll bring a fully realized song - or a sort of realized song - into the studio and work through them with Josh.
Back in 2019-2020 Emma and I actually recorded an entire record of Malocchio and we scrapped it because we didn’t feel like it was the sound we wanted to encapsulate - which is totally fine, these things happen. It was still an awesome recording. When the pandemic hit we really were like, “Oh my gosh, I think just the two of us can really work together”. We wrote an Ontario Arts Council Grant for recording and reached out to Josh Korody. When we got the grant we were absolutely thrilled that we were able to make a record with Josh in studio. We had been so in awe of his projects like Beliefs in the 2010s, so it was a dream to connect with him and start working together.
Emmalia: There’s always one song we bring to Josh where I’m like, “I don’t know what to do with this, this is going weird!” [laughs] He’s like, “I think I kinda hear that! What if we try this?” It’s fun to have that trust.
Sarafina: This is very much co-producing because Emma and I have such a strong vision of how we want things to sound. It’s really great to have a co-producer and to have that discerning feedback like, “You know what? I think we can change things here” or “I think this chord can go here”. To have that critical eye is really, really awesome. It’s such a delicate balance to be able to do that but also to support and uplift the musician and their songwriting at the same time.

Emma, you mentioned that there’s always that one song that’s tougher to crack. Which one was that on this album?

Emmalia: For this, it was “Your Love Is My Revenge”. It was one of the last songs we’d written. Sara had started with the bassline and I finally figured out how I wanted to place my guitars, but when we were playing it and recording it Sara’s vocals felt really high in register. Part of this was because I started playing on a baritone guitar. We were trying to find these pockets where Sara’s voice felt supported because we were in a completely different tuning. [laughs] It was a bit of a wrestle. It sounded too clean or it wasn’t supporting Sara’s vocal register and we were all kinda stumped.
Then I went back home one evening and thought, “Ok, maybe we’re playing in the wrong tuning”. So we changed the tuning and brought it back to a similar tuning that we usually play in - we usually play in C#. As a result, that changed what I had originally written. It was a lot of figuring out where we were going and how we were going to shape it. That song took the most amount of time for us to really feel solid about it, but I think it came out pretty good. I’m satisfied with it! I’m looking forward to how we play it live. We’ve been working on that one.
Sarafina: That song’s special too as it’s just Emma and I on that song on the record. Emma’s playing all the guitars and the bassline. I’m a drummer and played drums on some of our past releases like Malocchio and on the cover of “Red Right Hand” on My Love Remains The Same. I also played drums on “Your Love Is My Revenge”. It’s really special to have some songs where it’s just my sister and I on the recording and I really appreciate our bandmates respecting that. I’m very happy with how this song came out.
It’s also probably the most emotional song on the record when it comes to grief and thinking about the loved ones that you’ve lost. It really touches home. It’s a very hard song to play live. Every single time we’re playing it and I’m singing, I actually start to tear up and get very emotional. I haven’t had that in the past with playing songs live. That’s the one song on the record that we were like, “How do we do this?” and it’s become one of my favourite songs off the record.
Emmalia: We’ve never written a ballad before and here we are! [laughs]
Sarafina: We called it the ballad, it was so funny! We were like, “This is our ballad!” and Josh was like, “What do you mean this is a ballad?” and I was like, “Yeah, it’s a ballad!”
Emmalia: It’s about love.
Sarafina: It’s a heavy song both emotionally and instrumentally. Josh was playing this song on the speakers for our label guy, James - who’s awesome -, and he was like, “James, this is their ballad!” We were like, “We don’t know what else to call it! We think it’s a ballad”. [laughs]

It’s how a ballad should be done.

Emmalia: Exactly.
Sarafina: Those are strong words, I’m gonna take that. Thank you. [laughs]

On the album you present all of the complexities of grief like the pain and the beauty and the love. What’s helped you balance those emotions?

Sarafina: It’s tough. It’s universal subject matter; everybody goes through grief and everybody has lost a loved one. They are songs that just naturally poured out. I was talking to one of my friends the other day and she said, “You know, I’d love to hear some more uplifting songs from you” and I said, “That will come, that will happen”. Sometimes you don’t want to suppress what’s happening naturally from a songwriting perspective or a storytelling perspective. I don’t want to diminish that or squash that.
Conceptually, the record is about grief and losing a loved one as well as the beauty of grief and how it evokes those memories and remembrances of those you loved. It’s very much playing with the horror genre. Emma and I are both horror fans and at times visuals come to me before lyrics or music; like cinematic visuals of a concept or a story come before the song itself. I think what’s beautiful about horror is that it’s not afraid to talk about death. It’s not afraid to confront subject matter that can be difficult to talk about, so using that genre was just a natural way to convey and write some of these songs.
I think it’s tough too because our previous record, Malocchio, was very much a way to preserve and archive our Nonna Maria and all of her scary and supernatural stories. Unfortunately, she passed before that record came out, and this record, Mourning You, is experiencing her loss. It’s only natural that an album like this would be written by us. It’s very much like we’re closing a chapter with this record. With some of our music videos - and one that’s coming out the day our record comes out - we use imagery of a door or a burning door. It’s a portal to a realm of this haunting that has perhaps followed us or that follows people. We can be followed by past occurrences and grief and loss. I feel like this album is sort of burning that door down like, death sat in your door and we’re just gonna burn it down. It feels almost like a reclamation of power in the face of grief.
“Veil of Greed” is very much the way that we are consumed by grief. I turned it on its head where it’s this creature or vampire or something taking from you but at the same time, you’re allowing yourself to be consumed because, maybe, just letting it feed is a way to start to face grief head-on. Sometimes that can really, really help in the long run to overcome grief.

Your video for “Hellmouth” has the door in it and it continues the storyline from your video for “Have You Seen Her” like when the cloaked figure says, “Give me a ticket”. What made you want to continue that storyline? What’s the story behind the connection of these videos?

Emmalia: I think it was a combination of creativity and deadlines, to be honest. [laughs] We’ve been pumping out a lot of videos which is really exciting but it’s also something where you’re like, “Oh my god, how do we tell a new story?” Then I realized that this story wasn’t done yet. Being able to play with video creation, especially in the snow - we have a lot of it now as we all know [laughs] - was something where we realized that there was a passage of time. Of course there was, we made “Have You Seen Her” in 2021 in the summertime in the same backyard. For this one, time has significantly passed and yet it still resonates. It was looking at being able to do this full circle of, “Oh no, this is the time frame in which the door opens”. We played with alternate timelines which has been a fun narrative way of working.
From a storytelling standpoint Sara and I both love the movie The Thing so we were sitting here going, “Hmmmm, with our budget constraints and having the ability to use this space in the backyard, how do we embrace the winter and tell a story that way?” Winter is also a time of isolation and mourning, so I think it really fit in that sense as well as being able to give that story an extra timeline where it can expand and bring “give me a ticket” full circle. The fact is that portal opens at any point, at any time; right place, wrong time, and stuff like that.
Sarafina: I love directing and I love making videos. As I stated earlier, for me most of the time a visual comes before music or lyrics so it’s very natural from my artistic perspective to make videos. Video is a beautiful way to convey the visuals of a record or a song. With “Have You Seen Her”, the door opens and these two characters confront this haunting and it becomes part of them. Now, bringing the door back in “Hellmouth” with found footage, we’re seeing this haunting in little bits. We actually recreated the album cover scene within that video to sort of tie everything together.
In our video for “Poison Kiss” - which will come out when the record comes out on February 28 - Emma and I confront the door and we burn it down. We have another burning door scene. I know we’ve done it before but if it works, why not do it again? Also, the imagery to me is beautiful where it’s bookending these concepts and these albums from beginning to end. As I said, this burning door kind of ends this chapter or concept for us. It’s like reclaiming that power in the face of grief and in the face of what I think is the malocchio or the evil eye or Evil in itself. It’s very much facing this haunting or this thing that has been maybe following us. I won’t go down my supernatural road, but I very much believe in that. I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I think there’s a lot more to our world than what we just see here.

The setup for the album cover, like you mentioned Sara, ends the “Hellmouth” video. How did the idea for the album artwork come about?

Sarafina: That’s a really great question. I think it really came about thinking about this presence or this haunting; this element that’s in Malocchio and that’s naturally in Mourning You. The space where we shot the cover is the same space where we’ve shot a lot of our music videos, including “Have You Seen Her”, so it was a natural setting for us. I think the character on the album cover is this haunting presence but it’s eerie because they’re smiling too. I’ve been ruminating about the burning chair. It’s very much burning away the past but also confronting death as well. That’s how I think of the album cover. We both probably have different interpretations. [laughs]
Emmalia: We put things together and then we make our own meanings, which is fun. That’s part of creativity. I interpreted the seat as an invitation of, “I’ve been waiting for you. Come and sign up. Have your seat”. This is what happens when you get your ticket and you sit, you go somewhere else. That’s what you get when you go through the portal, you sign up. The smiling, the delight, is about getting one more sign-up. That’s how I always saw it, as the registration into the beyond.
Sarafina: I like that! That’s really exactly what it is. It’s beautiful to say it that way, Emma. Shoutout to our friend Steph Yates, who also goes by Cots, she is Haunting / Death at the Doorstep. She plays that character on the album cover. We had a lot of fun shooting that one.

Steph Yates is also in your video for “Haunt Me (What Have You Become)” with a bunch of other Guelph musicians. How did that video come about?

Sarafina: That idea came really quickly because we had this last-minute opportunity to do another video for one of our songs off the album.
Emmalia: We were in the car picking up our records. [laughs]
Sarafina: We literally set up a shoot in like an hour or something. We shot it in 2 or 3 hours last Thursday, uploaded all the footage on the Friday, and then on the Saturday I spent 14 hours straight editing with my friend. It was so fun though. I love this stuff so much, I could do this every day. Then we handed it in on the Sunday and the label and press put it out.
I just really love my friends and am so lucky to have so many talented, incredible people here in Guelph. It’s really amazing. I had this idea of having my friends in the video lip-synching to some of the lines. I’m really happy with how it came out. Shoutout to Ed Video! We used gear from Ed Video in order to produce this.
Evan Gordon - my friend and collaborator with lighting design and effects on some of our other videos - was amazing and did all of the colouring for the video. Evan used an analogue video synth to create these unique colours. It’s not just a flat-coloured background, he really dialed in all these tones. I’m a Dario Argento, John Carpenter, and David Lynch fan and for the beginning and end of the video, I really wanted to bring in some sort of horror elements. The red and black colouring is very much a nod to Dario Argento’s Suspiria. I’m quite happy with how the beginning and end of that song came about. You could shoot this on whatever you want, like your webcam or your phone, but we got really lucky to use such an incredible camera that it picked up all this detail that you wouldn’t necessarily get with other cameras or lenses.
It was very much a last-minute video but it’s probably one of my favourites. I’m so grateful and happy with everybody’s performances. Everyone did such an incredible job. There’s many musicians featured too like Steph, our friend Aimee Copping who also goes by Transstar, Winter and David of World Eaters, my friend Brock from Habit, my friend Lexi, and of course, Dana Bellamy and Emma Howarth-Withers are in it as well. There are lots of Guelph musicians and talented, brilliant friends in it. They all killed it.
Emmalia: It was really awesome for us to be able to have friends show up so quickly to make something happen. [laughs] We wouldn’t have been able to do it without them.
Sarafina: It was a really fun time, it was beautiful. Thank you to everyone who was a part of it. It was a lot of fun. We had a great time. [laughs] I love making art with my friends. One thing David Lynch - rest in peace - said that really resonated with me was, “I don’t really go out much but I like to work”. He liked to make his art and I’m very much in line with that too. I really love making art with my friends whether it’s playing music or shooting a video. It gives not only me, selfishly, great joy but seeing other people have a lot of fun and get together and make something is really, really special. It takes a team!

The videos for “Hellmouth” and “Veil of Greed” both have found footage elements in them. What drew you to found footage in particular? Was there a movie that you were inspired by for these videos?

Emmalia: We knew we needed to start creating videos so we were like, “Ok, what do we do?” We had a shorter time frame than we did for Malocchio so we had to be a little more realistic with how we created stuff. We watched the latest V/H/S compilation. [laughs] Its focus was on a lot of found footage storytelling and we loved it. There’s some really exceptional ways to do found footage storytelling either through first person or with iPhones, so we shot on iPhones a lot more this time. We blended stuff we were shooting with a really awesome camera with stuff we were shooting with iPhones to play with those different perspectives. It was a really great creative marker for us to try to tell the story with first-person storytelling.
Sarafina: Of course, a big inspiration is The Blair Witch Project. Emma and I both love that movie. I love the Blair Witch. It’s one of my all-time favourite moves. It has incredible storytelling with found footage and was made using a camcorder. Bringing that perspective and point of view into the 2020s by using a phone camera to be able to convey a story is what we were going for. Of course, that new V/H/S too! [laughs] What they did was really, really cool and I loved the way they played with found footage and first-person perspective through a phone lens.
Emmalia: Found footage is a nod to the types of horror genres that we wanted to incorporate for Mourning You. We were very much looking into a lot of the horror that inspired us when we just got into it and Blair Witch was one of those movies. I think first-person storytelling, especially within the context of mourning and grief, is more personal because it allows you to create stories that embellish what you’re reflecting on. It enlivens those ruminations and it allows you to show what you’re seeing without a polished lens.

Were there any other horror movies that had an impact on the album?

Sarafina: I think for Mourning You, I was going back to some of my favourite horror movies, as Emma said. The Thing is huge, especially with putting out an album in the wintertime and also shooting music videos in the wintertime. We’re in Guelph, Ontario and there’s lots of snow here. Being able to play with the cold and the snow was a really cool thing we could tap into as opposed to some of the videos we made for Malocchio, which were made in the summertime. Thinking about the setting and environment being cold and thinking about some other movies that involved isolation or the cold. The Thing was a huge inspiration for some of the visual elements.
Then of course, The Exorcist in terms of a haunting or a possession or something following and bringing that into Mourning You. Being haunted by a presence, a thing. Then some kinda goofy horror movies too like 30 Days of Night which is set in the cold. Some people may think it’s terrible or great or whatever but some of the shots in the snow are beautiful and bring that coldness, that bleakness to life. When you’re out in nature in the middle of the night and it’s snowing and there’s no wind and it’s completely still and it’s quiet, it’s kinda freaky but it’s beautiful too. It’s peaceful but it can also be very scary. Those are some key ones for the visuals and the concept that I was inspired by. In terms of musical elements, John Carpenter is a massive influence.
Emmalia: I think that’s speaking from a music video standpoint of how we wanted to visually embellish our sonic meaning-making. For the album, it’s a deeply internal narrative of how Sara and I want to tell these stories and write these songs. For myself, I don’t know if I was influenced by horror film particularly from a guitar perspective. It was mostly a series of internal ruminations that I externalized by creating a lot of different textures as I thought about this and moved through the process of missing someone and what that meant and how that haunted me. But for all the music videos, definitely.
Sarafina: Emma said that so beautifully. I think what I talked about was very much the visual side of things. I think the influence of the songwriting and the concept of the record, as Emma said, was very internal. It kinda goes back to what I was saying at the beginning of the interview, these songs and stories came out naturally. They weren’t necessarily influenced by external artists or movies, it was very much like, “This is how I’m feeling right now”. Naturally, the horror genre is part of how we’re writing with supernatural and scary elements that were ingrained from an early age. It just naturally poured out and it’s very much an internal narrative.

I found the closing track “it eats shadows” one of the most haunting songs on the record. What’s the story behind it?

Emmalia: Well, it’s a bit of a childhood Canadian story with how I started to really understand deep depression. Do you remember Robert Munsch’s story The Dark? This family, specifically this child, has to trap the Dark. The way that they trap it is they lure it into a jar and they bottle it all up and then they put it on a dump truck and let it leave. To me, that was the scariest story as a kid. One of the lines is, “It’s a Dark, it eats shadows”. As a kid, it really freaked me out because I thought, “Well, it’s still there. It doesn’t leave”. Then as I grew older, I started to understand, “Oh, ‘it eats shadows’, this is definitely talking about - at least for myself - that haunting”. That deep depression that takes from you is a Dark, it eats your shadow; your shadow is narratively your soul. I guess inadvertently it’s a nod to this Robert Munsch book. [laughs]
But for myself, it’s looking at this moment that the Dark doesn’t leave. Sometimes it goes away for a moment but it’s never gone. You could bottle it up, you could put it in a million different types of containers, or throw it on a dump truck but it still returns. It doesn’t go away. I wanted to bookend it with the opening track “Grief” because I wanted to create the textures of that song to create a moment of weeping despair. Then we have these songs that bring you through all these different places but it comes back. That’s part of the process of reconciling with people who are gone. That darkness never leaves; it comes back but at least you’re able to recognize it now. In a full circle, that’s where we are. I guess thank you Robert Munsch for teaching me about depression early on. [laughs]

You have some shows coming up. Later this month you’ll be playing as part of Wavelength Festival in Toronto and in March you’ll be playing in Guelph and Kitchener. What are you looking forward to about these shows?

Sarafina: Playing some new material and playing our first shows for 2025! Playing new songs, being able to connect with new and old audiences, and getting the record out there. I’m really excited to see everybody. [laughs] I’m really looking forward to it. We’re also playing in Toronto on April 25 and 26 with Change of Heart at the Sound Garage. We have some more shows lined up for the spring and summer that haven’t been announced yet.
Emmalia: We’re playing on February 27 with pHoenix Pagliacci.
Sarafina: She’s amazing!
Emmalia: That’s cool because we collaborated a while ago on her song “Humility” off her album Dichotomy. That’s a nice touch to go back in time and be able to play that too. I’m looking forward to that.
Sarafina: And we’re playing with The OBGMs that night too who are incredible.
Emmalia: Yeah, they’re so cool!
Sarafina: They are fucking awesome! March 1 is our album release show in Guelph. Emma and I also help run a camp here in Guelph called GGRC+, formerly known as Girls Rock Camp Guelph. That show is special because it is a big fundraiser in order to run our March Break camp this year. It’s a special camp and we’ve been running it for a very long time with a group of friends here in Guelph.

That’s awesome! Is there anything you’d like to talk about with your work with GGRC+?

Sarafina: I think we’ve run it for 8 or 9 years now with our friends.
Emmalia: Technically 9 years but we were on hiatus from 2020 to 2022 for pandemic reasons. [laughs] We had a dark period there. It’s really fun. It’s cool to see it in full swing again. We opened it up again in 2023 and it felt like we were restarting again. At the end of the final performance last year one of the kids came up, grabbed the microphone, and said, “I just wanna say GGRC+ rules!!” and the whole audience got really excited. It’s cool to see that it’s back and it’s still something young people have fun with.
I wish there was a camp like that that existed when we were younger. It’s just awesome seeing a bunch of kids be able to get together and write songs and do something together with a giant, supportive community audience cheering them on. You don’t even have to know an instrument. I wish every camp was like that.
Sarafina: It’s a beautiful thing to see these young people within a week learn an instrument, songwrite, form a band, and then play original songs in front of an audience at the very end. It’s amazing.
Emmalia: It’s cool! [laughs]
Sarafina: The name GGRC+ evolved from Girls Rock Camp Guelph to look towards our campers and to ensure that our non-binary, transgender, and non-conforming youth felt included. The name change was inevitable and I’m very happy about that.
Emmalia: It was very important.
Sarafina: Extremely important. It seems to be a very impactful camp because we get lots of returning campers and new people every year. Gotta protect our trans youth and our queer youth more than ever now.
Emmalia: Absolutely.
Sarafina: Emma Howarth-Withers, our bass player, is a lead admin for GGRC+ and Dana does a bunch of work for the camp too with poster creation and whatnot. We’re all deeply embedded in GGRC+.

It helps the next generation so much!

Emmalia: It’s changing now, but we want to change the shape of how music culture has existed for a long time. It’s not serving anyone. We can’t keep having cis white men gatekeepers. I’m glad it’s started to change. It would be really awesome to influence a group of youth who can see that and creatively get together to build a better future that they see themselves in. And to envision a space for people to collectively get together and create music. I want to participate in that. I’d love to be in that space.

Which part of Mourning You are you proudest of?

Sarafina: I’m most proud of my sister for making some kick-ass guitar lines - this is so cheesy but it’s true! I’m my sister’s biggest fan. I say this maybe too much, but I’m so inspired by Emma’s guitar playing and I’m just really, really happy. I think their guitar work is absolutely beautiful on the record.
I’m really proud of us for being able to create and go through the composition of an album like this. As I said, the songs just came out naturally. I don’t know if I write happy songs but these are the songs that come out naturally so I’m really happy to stay authentic to my own songwriting and not have external pressures or critique to write something that isn’t inherently authentic. I’m really happy that we created another authentic piece of storytelling.
Emmalia: I’ll shoot it back at you, Sara. [laughs] I’m proud of the creative direction and lead you took. I will admit I was feeling rather dry in the songwriting process but I knew that I had textures. So for you to be able to see that and work with it, that was really awesome. I’m proud that we were able to have a supportive band to be able to make this happen. It’s so much fun with Emma and Dana, it’s the best! It feels really good.
Sarafina: I echo that, the unwavering support from our bandmates is absolutely beautiful.