Nashville’s Winona Fighter still doesn’t take themselves too seriously

Winona Fighter. // Photo Courtesy of Lindsey Byrnes

After several years of releasing singles, Nashville punks Winona Fighter dropped their debut LP, My Apologies to the Chef, via Rise Records on Valentine’s Day. It’s 14 tracks of breakneck, poppy, punk rock, with song titles like “You Look Like a Drunk Phoebe Bridgers” and “I’M IN THE MARKET TO PLEASE NO ONE” giving a clear indication of the fun you’re about to have before you’ve even pushed play.

The band is currently out on tour in support of the new record, and ahead of its kickoff, we spoke with frontwoman and multi-instrumentalist Coco Kinnon about the new record before their Friday show at Uptown.

The Pitch: Your tour kickoff is at an Emo Nite in Atlanta. The emo tag—Some folks embrace it and some folks are like, “I don’t know.” Where do you fall in that realm, because I feel like you’re definitely adjacent?

Coco Kinnon: Yeah, I’ll never diss someone for this being their thing but I think what loses me is when the whole brand is “Y2K emo,” and it’s like, “No, it’s 2025, let’s get with the times,” so I think we’ll never pander to nostalgia and being this nostalgic early 2000s emo thing. But I definitely can hear in some of our songs why people who do love emo music resonate with it.

I mean, we just did a tour last year with Bayside who, I wouldn’t call them emo but like, fucking Finch and Armor for Sleep? Those are the most emo dudes out there, so I can see the correlation. But, for me, it’s just when it gets a little too “low rise jeans and flip phones”—That’s what loses me.

You have been putting out music for several years now, but this is your first full-length album. What made you want to wait on it?

Just a little background: I started this project like 2016, 2017. Basically, we were just playing live all the time, never releasing anything, and we were going by my nickname, which is Coco. Eventually, it got to the point where we were playing all these shows and growing this fan base and it was like, “Oh shit, maybe we should release something and maybe we should put an actual band name to the project.”

So we released the Father Figure EP and this crazy thing happened—and I do attribute it to so many years of DIY touring, playing shows, and growing a fan base that way—that EP blew up in the industry, somehow. I still, to this day, don’t know how. And so, for two years, it was basically us getting our footing of, like, “Okay, now we have an agent, and we’re playing these massive shows, and now we have management, and they’re guiding us in the right direction, and do we release an album now, or do we get some funding for it?”

Because I think, all day long, people can be like, “Signing to a label is not DIY and it’s signing your life away,” but for us, it’s just like, “Let’s get someone on board who’s gonna elevate us and give us the resources we need to get to the next level.” It was just a lot of figuring it out for the past two years since we had released Father Figure, and now we know we’re exactly where we want to be, we’ve got the team behind us, we are feeling good, let’s finally put out this album of our best work from the past two years, and finally give the people what they’ve been asking for.

You have all of this infrastructure behind you. You have all of these folks backing you. You’re on Rise, which is not a small label and has some very notable names on that roster, but your bassist is still the one producing and recording you, which I think is just absolutely fantastic. For all of this growth, you’re still like, “But we know what works and we’re going to do that.” Is that an accurate summation?

Yeah. I mean, our garage is right there, [points] and that’s where we recorded the whole album. Yeah, it’s very cool. Like you said, Rise is not a little deal—It’s a big deal. But they were like, “You guys know what you’re doing, and we have a lot of trust in you, so let us know when the record is done, and we’ll go from there.” The only people who touched the record were me, Austin [Luther], who’s bass player and producer, and Dan [Fuson], our guitarist until we sent it off to mastering.

It was so important to us to—at least for our debut—keep it as DIY as we did our debut EP because that’s to the core. We’ve always done it ourselves and, yeah, maybe the next record we’ll want to work with someone else as a producer, but we were like, “If we’re gonna close this chapter, let’s close it how we know best,” which is just getting in the studio, the three of us, and fucking grinding it out.

What were the challenges for you in taking three songs from that Father Figure EP and rerecording them for My Apologies to the Chef? Did you find that, over the course of the last couple of years since that EP has come out, there have been things changed that you want to fix, is part of it, “We love these songs, and we want them to get to an even bigger audience,” or a combination of multiple things?

It was a combination of both those things. Those three songs, we want them to have a fighting chance. Releasing them independently, they did, I would say, decent for a small baby band, but we love those songs, and they’re fan favorites, so we’re like, “Okay, let’s just show them to the masses and fuckin’ see if people actually like them.

That whole EP was recorded in our guest bedroom at our old house, and so the drums were recorded live but we had to put triggers on them and we didn’t have the best situation for mixing. So someone else mixed it and we were like, “If we’re gonna put these songs on the album, they need to be at the level of the songs that we had just recorded.”

The drums need to be a hundred percent real. It needs to be mixed by Austin. He has just this gritty vibe to his mixing. That’s kind of what instigated the re-recording and then putting them on the record. People love them, and so, like I said, it’s kind of our best work from the past two years, so let’s give these songs a shot, I guess.

The song that’s really grabbed me off of the album is “R U FAMOUS.” I love the fact that it comes right at the halfway point of the record because it feels like it’s “Have you been paying attention to what I’m saying? Let me reiterate.” When you’re putting this whole album together, are you trying to make sure the album, not necessarily tells a story, but gets folks to a point? I feel like your lyricism is very much a touchstone and focus for Winona Fighter.

It’s funny because I was listening to the test press the other day and it’s our song “Swimmer’s Ear.” It’s this long, almost a minute guitar ringing out at the end, and you’re like, “Okay, that’s the end of side one.” No, then “R U FAMOUS” comes on, so it’s definitely like, “Oh, shit, we’re back in it.”

You’re always going to be reengaged—and not that “Swimmer’s Ear” isn’t an engaging song, but it’s considered the ballad of the album, which, it’s not even a ballad, but just making sure that wherever we feel a song is a more calm point, making sure we get people back in. We do the same with our live set and I think that’s really where it comes from: We write songs to play live.

We’re like, “If we were playing a show right now, what would we want to hear?” It’s the same with the track list. It’s like, “If this were a show, would it be engaging enough?”

How important are visuals for Winona Fighter? You’ve put out so many videos. Are you trying to get a little bit of that live energy captured on video when you make visuals for your songs?

Yeah, the only thing that’s been a constant with our videos is “What’s the live factor gonna be?” and “How do we really make this song come through the screen?” Otherwise, we’re just kind of fucking around. We are so serious about what we do, we love this career, and we’re so fortunate, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We want to get that across in our music videos, ’cause we’re all kind of, I wouldn’t say camera shy, but we’re not, “Hey, put a camera in front of me. Let me do my thing.”

We’re not photo shoot people. We’re not like that at all. Getting to do these fun, energetic music videos as if it were a show really gets the best product out of us and, personally, I don’t really care what the storyline is as long as we’re having fun and having some laughs along the way.

Winona Fighter plays Encore at Uptown Theater on Friday, March 7. Details on that show here.