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A few years ago, in the thick of the pandemic, Brooke Metropulos was looking for a name for her new music project when she found a scrap of paper she’d filled out in fourth grade: a class exercise, asking what her life goal was. Her youthful response: RODEO QUEEN.
“When I was younger, I went through a heavy horse girl phase, and I wanted riding lessons and wanted to be in the rodeo,” the Portland resident says. “I decided this is the closest I’ll ever be to being an actual rodeo queen.”
When she rearranged those two words, she knew she’d found a name for her steely new post-punk project. Queen Rodeo’s debut album, Silent Motion, releases digitally March 14, and they’ll celebrate the release March 16 at Mississippi Studios alongside Buddy Wynkoop and Telehealth.
The name Queen Rodeo immediately evokes a Western aesthetic universe of flower garlands and 10-gallon hats. Though Metropulos’ music has more to do with The Breeders than The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, her musical education came from her grandfather, who played in a country band.
“He taught me guitar when I was 16,” Metropulos says. “He taught me three chords. I took those when I started, and I’ve always played by ear.”
Growing up in tiny Hayward, Wis., Metropulos had little exposure to music beyond that played by her immediate family. She developed her songcraft and instrumental chops over time by playing along to her favorite songs.
Indie rock’s two great Kims, Sonic Youth co-founder Kim Gordon and Pixies/Breeders bassist Kim Deal, were especially inspiring early on. “They’re the coolest people on the planet, in my opinion,” she says.
On “Wavelength,” you can hear a hint of Gordon’s soft deadpan in the way Metropulos playfully repeats the refrain (“but you love me anyway”), and there’s a sense of skewed popcraft throughout the record that suggests the Pixies. Yet Metropulos isn’t just making a pastiche: “I’m not super intentional about trying to take something from that and make it my own,” she says. “It might accidentally be that way, but that’s just the music that I’d say I listen to the most.”
Like so many artists from small towns, Metropulos dreamed of expanding her horizons. “I felt very isolated,” she says. “I just knew I wanted to live in a city and put myself in a situation.”
After a disappointing stint in Milwaukee, Metropulos moved to Portland in 2015. “I liked the music that had historically been coming out of Portland and this area,” she says, particularly that of Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus, who spent much of his fruitful solo career in Portland before moving to Chicago late last year.
Metropulos started her first band, Plastic Cactus, the following year with fellow singer and guitarist Michaela Gradstein. The two struck up a formidable chemistry, producing the kind of wistful surf pop you might expect to hear at the roadhouse in Twin Peaks, all Spectorian reverb and Morriconean drama.
Though the band found a considerable local following and was named one of Willamette Week’s Best New Bands in 2019, Plastic Cactus released only one album, 2023’s What a Waste, followed immediately by Gradstein’s departure to Los Angeles and the group’s disbandment.
Queen Rodeo features the rhythm section from Plastic Cactus—Bill Willson on bass and Tyler Brown on drums, alongside new recruit Wils Glade of Shadowgraphs on guitar. Yet Metropulos says Queen Rodeo is a different project entirely.
“I think [Queen Rodeo] definitely feels more like a solo project, whereas Plastic Cactus was much more collaborative,” she says. “Michaela and I would both take turns writing songs, and we made a lot of our decisions and wrote a lot of our songs as a group.”
Leading a band has been a fulfilling and vulnerable experience for Metropulos, who admits to feeling slightly unmoored following Gradstein’s departure. Gradstein was usually the voice of the band in interviews and onstage, and Metropulos had to learn how to become both a band member and a spokeswoman for her own music; she admits to often being stuck for words in interviews and while bantering onstage.
“I feel more exposed, and I kind of have to put myself out there more,” Metropulos says. “But it is really fun to have an idea and then see it come to life organically. I think the intention of this project is to play music with friends and have fun and express myself, and it just feels like less pressure when it’s just me.”
SEE IT: Queen Rodeo plays Mississippi Studios, 3939 N Mississippi Ave., 503-288-3895, mississippistudios.com. 7 pm Sunday, March 16. $15. 21+.