Fox Face will play its final show Saturday at Bay View Bash

After more than a decade of shows, albums, and even more shows, blistering Milwaukee femme-led garage-punk band Fox Face is calling it quits. The band’s 6 p.m. show on the WMSE stage at Saturday’s Bay View Bash will be its last.

Bassist Mary Joy made the announcement on social media Thursday morning, saying:

I can’t put into the words the impact this band has had on my life, on my humanity. We have travelled across the country and around the world together. We have put out a 7-inch, plus two amazing full lengths on Dirtnap Records, something my 15-year-old self could never have imagined. We have eaten so many cheese curds, made blender drinks in so many hotels, played so many incredible shows with so many amazing bands, and in the process, forged many friendships.

Joy elaborated on the reason for the band breakup during an on-air interview with WMSE:

It was late February [2020], a week before things really started getting weird. We had just finished recording what became End Of Man. We got all the tracks and then the world shut down. The record went into mixing but we didn’t know what was going to happen with it. The intention, we hoped, was that it would come out on Dirt Nap as our second record, but with COVID we had no idea. We were just in this limbo. It finally came out in January of 2021.

I think I’ve really come to appreciate the momentum cycles of being in a band. You write songs, you record them, you play shows, you promote your record, and then you kind of start over again. COVID just interrupted the momentum so many times. We would start writing a new song, I would get COVID, and then we’d miss practice for two weeks. Then somebody else would get COVID, so there’s two more weeks. And then, “Oh, freak ice storm!” And then it’s been six weeks since we practiced with this new song, and nobody remembers how to play it. And then we would start learning it again. And then a show would get canceled. And it was just this continual cycle of never being able to get this momentum going.

That’s structural band level stuff, but I think individually, too, over the last several years of just being in your house and having a changed life, it changes people, and it changes priorities and it changes what you want to do. I’ve been playing music in punk bands since I was 16. And when you set that aside, it creates space for other things, other things that you didn’t know you were maybe into. […] There’s certainly an element of self-reflection and changing directions as humans. We’ve accomplished so much in the time that we had together, and I think we’re all leaving this knowing that we’ve accomplished everything that we set out to do with this band.

Fox Face first formed in 2011. The band—Joy on bass, Lindsay DeGroot on guitar and vocals, Lydia Washechek on guitar, and Christopher Capelle on drums—released two full-length records on Dirt Nap Records: the excellent Spoil + Destroy in 2017 and the also-excellent End Of Man in 2021.

“Now it’s ‘End Of BAND'” Joy joked on WMSE. See that band for the final time this Saturday.