Pick up some Skyline Chili, make a few friendship bracelets and grab your buds as Midwest Friends Fest is returning to the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area for its sophomore year. Midwest Friends Fest is once again taking over the Southgate House Revival in Newport, KY.
The 2-day festival with multiple stages and amazing national and local acts like Signals Midwest, Cinema Stare, The 1984 Draft and Tooth Lures A Fang will take place from 30 & 31 May with tickets available here.
Wisconsin’s Kat And The Hurricane joined TGEFM to chat a bit about this year’s festival for this installment of our MWFF interview series. Check it out below and we’ll see you at the bonfire in the woods!
Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! What should our readers know about Kat and the Hurricane; your history, your mission, your sound?
Benjamin: We try to capture what we’re about succinctly with our tagline “every genre, every gender.” More specifically, we’re a trio of queer non-binary millennials who make nostalgic 2000s-sounding pop/rock for queers, weirdos, emos, theater geeks, and misfits who like catchy pop music and cathartic anthems!
You are gearing up for Midwest Friends Fest in the coming months, what does the festival circuit mean to artists like yourselves?
Benjamin: Festivals are HUGE for indie artists. They offer a way to be on new stages in front of new audiences that wouldn’t necessarily go to a ticketed show for a band they’ve never heard of. At a festival, you can discover so many new artists at once, which is fantastic for the festival attendee and for the artists! We’ve made so many new friends by playing festivals just like Midwest Friends Fest. Plus, it’s a great opportunity to network with other bands and artists. I can’t tell you how many local shows I’ve wanted to go to but couldn’t because we had our own show. At a festival, you get all of these bands in the same location on the same day so they can finally hear each other play. It’s a win-win-win in my book.
What does Kat and the Hurricane have planned for us beyond MWFF?
Alex: We just announced the Therapy Tour, which will take us back to some of our favorite places on the East coast and some new cities we haven’t played yet. For part of that tour, we’re sharing 6 dates with our pals in Biitchseat (Cleveland, OH), which we’re SO stoked for. We’ve never done a longer co-headlining tour leg before and couldn’t imagine a better set of shows with a better group of folks. MWFF is the last weekend of our tour, but once we get back home, we have a very busy summer planned. As a queer and trans band, Pride month is very important to us and we specifically try to spend as much time with our Wisconsin community as possible, so expect lots of pride festival appearances all over Wisconsin and the midwest. We’ve also got some surprises we’ve been cooking up, so…
What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?
Alex: Most memorable by far is our time in the studio for the Got It Out record and touring. Our longest tour so far was in fall 2023 and we spent about three weeks straight together. Being stuck in a van completely slap happy from exhaustion with your bandmates – best friends and honestly kind of like marriage partners? – is such a unique and special thing that I’ve always wanted to experience and, honestly, it was way more intimate and fun than I expected. We get along so well and have such a strong camaraderie that it turned this bucket list thing (going on a big national tour) into some of the fondest memories I have in KatH. As far as unexpected, we put out our pop punk religious trauma crashout song, Caffeine & Alcohol, in April 2024, long before we announced our record, and it ended up absolutely blowing up. We had taken it on the road before and, just from the way the audience reacted to this song, we knew it was going to be popular and resonate a lot, but we had no idea it would blow up on streaming – it’s now over 200k streams just on Spotify alone and, while I could absolutely go off on how predatory Spotify is and how these metrics could never tell the full picture of a song’s impact on people, it’s still completely mind blowing. Weirdest? One time, a friend of ours found us before a show and gifted us a plastic underwear model (named Henry) that they ‘acquired’ from Wal-Mart – if that isn’t community, I don’t know what is.
Regarding live sets, what are you most excited to bring to the Midwest Friends Fest audience? What do you want the attendees to say about your set when they tell their friends about you?
Benjamin: We’ve always been pretty intentionally genre-fluid, especially with the new album. We try not to limit where our inspiration comes from, so our sound has little pieces of all kinds of rock, pop, synth, pop punk, indie folk, even some musical theatre and hip-hop influences. With our live set, we first and foremost want to have fun. That starts by making sure that we’re having fun on stage, which 95% of the time translates to everyone in the room having fun along with us. We want people to walk away feeling like they got something off their chest and – even if just for an hour – got to be in a space where they could truly be themselves, uninhibited.
We’ve all got a few, what is your biggest regret? A gig you turned down, advice you didn’t take, what one thing do you wish you handled differently as a musician?
Alex: I can’t say we have experienced anything we regret. If anything, there have been a lot of things we’ve learned about being in the music biz along the way that I wish we knew sooner. Like asking for what you want, like a support tour or for someone to cover your music, even if you think it’s a long shot. It’s always worth asking and the worst thing that can happen isn’t even that they say “no” – it’s that they don’t open your email.
The punk, ska and indie scenes have almost always been at the forefront of inclusion and diversity within the music scenes. The flipside of course is that the gatekeeping in the scene is also very prevalent? Why do you think the genre brings in such a welcoming community and is so happy to let everyone in and also seems to shut the doors so quickly behind themselves?
Kat: It’s because these scenes are built on belonging—for the outsiders, the unheard, the misfits—so there’s a deep instinct to protect that space. The welcome is real, but so is the fear of it being diluted or taken over. Unfortunately, that protection can turn into gatekeeping, especially from folks (often men) who tie their identity to being the “experts.” The challenge is staying open without losing the heart of what made the scene inclusive in the first place.
This festival is all about friendships and music. What do you value most in friendships amongst yourself and your stagemates?
Benjamin: The three of us have been playing together since 2019 and the level of unspoken musical compatibility among us has been amazing. We’ve learned how each other thinks and plays; it just clicks. That’s also what’s happened with our friendships, I think. We all have our various strengths and weaknesses and have learned to compensate for one another in a way that’s really rooted in compassion and care. It comes in handy when we’re on the road too. I can recognize the difference on Kat or Alex’s face between regular travel tiredness and I-need-a-few-minutes-alone-in-the-van-right-this-second tiredness. Having musical compatibility and that level of friendship is what makes this so much fun.
I’ve got to be honest, I wasn’t very familiar with Kat and the Hurricane before you joined the MWFF roster. Now that I’ve listened, I’m fairly obsessed with the Got It Out record. Tell me a little bit about the record? What was going on at the time that helped kickstart the songwriting process?
Kat: Got It Out is the most collaborative project from Kat and the Hurricane yet. When I started KATH in 2015, it was just me doing solo shows and writing on my own. Almost a decade later, I have both Alex and Benjamin to lean on in the creative realm and it truly shines through in the arrangement and lyrics throughout the album. For example, “Caffeine & Alcohol” is a Benjamin original. I love that Benjamin brushed it off and let us “Kathify” it. Clearly it’s an amazing song at almost 225k streams across multiple streaming platforms.
Then there’s “Smoke”, a song that I wrote the chord progression for but is an Alex and Benjamin lyrical masterpiece that is collectively a favorite amongst us to play.
Others include “Costume”, a song that I wrote half of and rushed to finish it– but only after asking our dear friend K.I.L.O aka Skit’Lz to lay down her absolutely on-point bars.
I love talking about each of the tracks individually because they all have their unique story of how they came to be, how we recorded them, etc.
There wasn’t just one thing that kickstarted the songwriting process because this is such an eclectic grouping of songs that all came from different places and times. “Caffeine & Alcohol” is a song that Benjamin had written years prior to meeting Alex or I. “Therapy”, “What Is It All For?”, “Smoke” and “Sweet Thrill” are all songs that came about during early pandemic times because we had nothing but time to sit and write. “Swimming II” is a song I wrote in 2013 about a long distance relationship I had with a boy in 8th grade. This album is a bit all over the place when you break it down in that sense, but not knowing the back story, it flows together perfectly and presents a whole other narrative. One of catharsis.
The world has been going through some shit over the last few days, weeks, hell, decade. What impact, if any, have the cultural and political landscapes of the last few years had on your music or the live scene in general?
Kat: For one, it’s resilience. It’s the fact that I decided to keep writing, that the band chose to keep creating despite the circumstances of living through a global pandemic and a transformative political climate. We lost bands, community members and beloved music venues and yet the Madison music scene persists. Our world has been through it. It’s like we’ve all been living in a pressure cooker of cultural tension, political chaos, and personal reckoning, and that energy can’t help but seep into the music. It’s been a mix of catharsis (or Katharsis, as we like to spell it) and confrontation. The music has gotten more raw, more intentional. There’s less space for fluff—people want something real, something that speaks to where we are right now.
In the live scene, there’s more urgency, more emotion in the room. After everything—from the pandemic to protests to political upheaval—when people come together for a show now, it feels heavier, but also more sacred. Like we all know what we almost lost, and we’re not taking it for granted anymore. There’s a hunger for connection, for truth, and for community. And that’s shaping not just what we play, but how we play it—and who we play it for.
What album or band or significant singles made you go “Yeah, this is what I want to do” Not just an influence but who or what was the catalyst? On the flipside to that one… Who are some non-MWFF bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should?
Alex: I remember being in high school when Tegan and Sara’s The Con came out and I vividly remember the experience of falling in love with that record and band. Music has always been such a boys club, and the music I grew up on was stuff my dad liked – 80’s hair metal, classic 70s rock, grunge – basically a nonstop deluge of men. I was an assigned-female-at-birth queer kid and never saw myself represented in music like I did when I first listened to Tegan and Sara. I then remember making this conscious decision to put a pause on listening to music made by men. Instead, I started being more intentional about listening to music made by women, queer folks, and trans folks – and this completely changed my life. I always wanted to be a musician, but it was always this lofty ‘maybe someday’ type of thing – but for the first time, I was able to see myself in musicians such as Jenny Owen Youngs, John-Allison Weiss, Now, Now, Team Dresch, Bikini Kill, and all kinds of riot grrrl and queercore bands. From then on, I was like “yeah, I can do this,” which eventually turned into “I want to be in a band with just trans people, specifically non-binary people” later on when I was in college trying to form a band for the first time. I don’t know how I got so lucky to meet Kat and Ben and finally be in the nonbinary band of my dreams, but it all started with some awkward queer kid wasting away in Catholic school getting introduced to queer icons, Tegan and Sara.
Non-MWFF bands I’ve been listening to on repeat lately have been LINE, Oux, eraserbaby, Biitchseat, Crown Shy, Party Nails, Pretty Bitter, and Best Bear.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about this newcomer by the name of Taylor Swift. Her growing fanbase trades friendship bracelets. If you made a bracelet for MWFF, what word or phrase would you put on it?
Benjamin: A friend of ours actually made some Kat and the Hurricane friendship bracelets for us once! A lot of them just had song titles, but they also had two of our signature slogans: “sad lesbian music” and “every genre, every gender.”
Post show jam session in a large, empty field. What song are you singing around the bonfire? (Pardon my playful biases, but everything I know about the Midwest comes from shitty movies and songs by the Kinsella Bros. so I assume everyone playing here has spent some time at bonfire parties in the fields off some lonely county road)?
Kat: “Rivers and Roads” by The Head and the Heart. Historically, if we’re given the chance to play one last song, sometimes we will pull this out because all of our friends know it and we know how to nail a 4 part harmony.
Midwest Friends Fest is a smorgasbord of fantastic acts. Which bands are you most excited to see?
Alex: Leisure Hour! They’ve been tearing it up and we’ve been keeping an eye on them for forever. Also very excited to see HummusVacuum, Hussy Fit, and Mall Witch.
Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?
Benjamin: To anyone who’s read this far, we just want to say thank you for caring about indie artists and reading! It’s becoming progressively more difficult to create content online that actually reaches its intended audience, and nearly every touring musician I know – from those just starting out to major-label artists on their seventh record – is burnt out to some degree. That said, we know that the music means something and that cultivating joy and art are so so essential right now. So thank you for seeking out new artists; listening to the music, buying merch, and showing up to shows will always mean the world to us.
Bad Dad (occasionally called Ed) has been on the periphery of the punk and punk-adjacent scene for over twenty years. While many contributors to this site have musical experience and talent, Ed’s musical claim to fame comes from his time in arguably the most punk rock Blockbuster Video district in NJ where he worked alongside members of Blanks 77, Best Hit TV and Brian Fallon. He is more than just an awful father to his 2 daughters, he is also a dreadful husband, a subpar writer, a terrible dresser and has a severe deficiency in all things talent… but hey, at least he’s self-aware, amirite?
Check out the pathetic attempts at photography on his insta at https://www.instagram.com/bad_dad_photography/