

The Prettiots: 'We’re too busy to pretend to be cool'
Hermione HobyTheir debut album, Funs Cool, is full of snarky songs about sex, death and dating. Join New York indie poppers the Prettiots on a trip to the tattoo parlour to talk about drink, ink and the power of the ukulele
It’s late afternoon on New Year’s Eve and the Wi-Fi password in this tattoo parlour is: “God is a girl.” A young woman called Tessa is firing up her ink gun, Portishead is oozing through the speakers and for 25-year-old Kay Kasparhauser and 20-year-old Lulu Prat, all is right with the world.
As the Prettiots, Kasparhauser and Prat make music redolent of the wit and sass of the Waitresses, or the lo-fi charm of the Moldy Peaches. They found a fan in Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis, who signed them to the label last spring, and their debut album, Funs Cool, is released in February.
“I think he has a soft spot for the dark pop thing,” says Kasparhauser, the band’s singer and ukulele player. “It’s very Smiths-y, music that you don’t know is about wanting to die until you listen to the lyrics.”
Like Suicide Hotline, surely one of the most winsome songs ever written about offing yourself. “On a scale of one to Plath I’m like a four,” Kasparhauser sings. “My head’s not in the oven, but I can’t get off the floor.” Lines so good, they earned a tweet from Elaine Showalter, the 75-year-old feminist intellectual and critic. Septuagenarians are not, I imagine, the band’s typical demographic.
At their show the night before, in a basement on the Bowery, New York, they’d opened to a young, drunk crowd with a cover of Miguel’s outrageously lubricious Pussy Is Mine. There was Kasparhauser – blonde, beaming, angel-faced, clutching her ukelele and lifting her face skywards to sweetly sing: “Tell me that, that pussy is mine.”
“Yeah, the second you walk on stage with a ukulele, people have an idea of what’s going to happen,” she says, laughing. “That we’re going to be twee and cute and not really know how to sing. So it’s like: ha-ha, we got you guys to think we’re cute and now we’re singing about pussy.”
The two things are not, of course, mutually exclusive.
“Exactly!” Kasparhauser yells. “That’s the whole other thing! Fuck you for thinking I can’t be adorable and love sex!” she says, swelling into oratory for some imagined hater. “Who the fuck are you to tell me that it’s not super, super cute of me to be DTF. Hahaha!”
“True,” says Prat soberly. “T-R-U.”
“You don’t like the word cute, right?” Kasparhauser says to her, but continues: “I love the word cute, I love being cute.”
“I love to be called it,” Prat offers, “because I think just my demeanour … I’m very abrasive – I play bass and I’m very tall and I have tattoos and I look very …” she trails off.
“You’re a little tough!” Kasparhauser says.
“So I don’t ever get called cute.”
“It’s also about the word ‘cute’ being misogynist, and this thing of taking it back almost. I love doing cute shit and saying cute things and being cute. So that’s my choice: I’m going to be out here, I’m going to be cute AF, and if you don’t like it, or if you think I’m dumb for being cute, then sorry, but you’re wrong and also I don’t care. Because cute’s fun.” Joking, she adds: “That’s the next album!”
When they first met Travis, Kasparhauser was too nervous to eat. Prat, however, who favours enormous, bristling gold hoops and Winehouse-worthy swaths of liquid eyeliner, was unbothered. “I ate a steak,” she shrugs. “I was like, what’s the most expensive thing on the menu …”
Now, their relationship is more familial. “Last time we had dinner, a few weeks ago,” says Prat, “we talked about … boys.”
It’s a favourite, always frankly discussed topic. No names were changed in their self-explanatory song, Boys (I Dated in High School), for which the underground film-maker Richard Kern shot a load of fidgety, shirtless youths in their bedrooms, looking self-conscious. By the end of the video, they’re all sitting on one bed, shoulders hunched, as if awaiting judgment. Which they get, essentially, through the sugar-and-snark lyrics. Here’s the unfortunate Rocky, for example: “He wouldn’t dump his girlfriend / He said she gave such good head / And since her grandpa was dead / He couldn’t dump her just yet.”
“Yup, I’m an open book,” says Kasparhauser. “I’ve spent the last two years telling everyone in the world what I think. Maybe I should shut the fuck up. But then I’m like, eh, whatever. Can’t take it back now, so may as well run with it. It’s easier than pretending I’m cool. Pretending to be cool is so exhausting. I’m too tired and busy to pretend to be cool all the time.”
“I’m too old,” agrees Prat, grimly. She’s 20.
Tessa, the young woman who is about to tattoo a crying lady on to her forearm above the words “Lo siento” (“I’m sorry”), asks her if she wants a pillow under her arm. “Nah,” says Prat, who remains astoundingly unreactive as Tessa turns on the needle and begins to work.
Kasparhauser returns with coffees: “I really want to get a tattoo of the caffeine molecule. It’s really pretty looking, and I don’t love anything as much as I love coffee.” She stirs the requested 11 sugars into Prat’s cup, tastes it, winces and passes it to her: “Oh my god. You’ll like it.”
Coffee and cigarettes are now pretty much Kasparhauser’s only vices. Growing up in Manhattan’s West Village, she partied so hard throughout her adolescence that by the age of 20 she had to stop altogether.
“I’ve never had a legal drink,” she laughs. “By the time I was Lulu’s age I’d already gotten clean.”
Prat, however, grew up in Brooklyn with just her mother, and remembers living for some time “in a one room, really small apartment with a ton of records. No TV or anything, so we’d listen to music all the time.”
Neither she nor Kasparhauser can imagine living anywhere but New York. But then, after some thought, Kasparhauser ventures: “I could live in Copenhagen …”
“COPENHAGEN!” Prat bellows approvingly, as Tessa continues to ink her skin.
What makes it so great?
“We all got laid,” Prat says flatly.
“We did, the whole band got laid.”
“On one night,” adds Prat.
“Copenhagen,” Kasparhauser concludes, “five stars.”
While she contemplates getting an image of a matchbook and the words “strike gently” on her bottom (“I love a trashy tattoo”), Prat chats about being in your 20s. “I just wish our generation had a better name. “‘Millennial’? It sounds like a type of diabetes medication.”
Kasparhauser disappears again, but just at the exact moment that Prat is saying “… social anxieties to do with staring at a glowing rectangle for 20 hours a day”, her bandmate reappears.
“Sorry,” Kasparhauser says, and laughs a big, loud “Hahaha!” before adding: “I was just getting my phone!”
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