With a demented Gothic Lolita look and a spastic goth punk sound, Austin’s One-Eyed Doll is just as much a performance art act as a punk rock band. Fronted by the adorably disturbed Kimberly Freeman, who performs in babydoll dresses and smudged eye makeup (and often pulls a “special boy” on stage to momentarily be part of the act), and anchored by Jason Sewell (better known simply as Junior), this Texas duo has caught the eyes and ears of anime conventioneers, heavy metal headbangers and punk rockers across the country. After opening for Otep last year and having recently concluded its tour with a revamped Orgy, One-Eyed Doll is now on the road with theatrical Japanese punk band Peelander-Z, which seems like a perfect match considering both bands’ love of costumes and rock ‘n’ roll. Having just started this tour last week, Freeman and Junior take a moment to talk to Wrestling with Pop Culture about their upcoming album Dirty, the differences between playing anime conventions and dive bars, and recording with former WWE Women’s Champion Lita.

I first saw you three years ago at Dragon*Con and have since seen you headline smaller club shows and open for bigger metal acts. Each time I’ve seen you, your show and presentation have been a little bit different. How do you decide what you’re going to do for each show and tour?

Photo by Sydney Frames

Freeman: It just sort of happens when it happens. We don’t really plan for any particular kind of show. It’s just different because of whatever my mood is, usually. This crowd tends to like the silly stuff and the sing-alongs and things like that, so I think we’re probably going to be able to pull out a lot more of the slapstick on this tour, which is awesome. Of course the Peelander-Z crowd is into clowning around and stuff, so that’s cool. We’ve definitely, this past year, played to some more serious audiences. But probably the most lighthearted audience was the Orgy tour and this one. That’s always fun for me to just kind of let go and not worry about it too much.

Before the Orgy tour you toured with Otep and other heavier bands. I can see how that might work, but how would you say these drastically different audiences have reacted?

Freeman: We cross over into different genres, so we can kind of tour with whoever and usually do pretty well. We can always win a crowd over, but the real serious metal crowds make you prove it before they’ll let you into their comfort zone. We usually only have 30 minutes, 20 on some tours, so it’s a real challenge to figure out the balance of what an audience is going to react to. We usually just feel it out on the spot, but the past couple of tours have been getting a lot easier. It could be just us getting used to being this opening band on these bigger tours. The more aggressive the entire show is, the more resistant people are in general to everyone. And the more rock ‘n’ roll or punk [the show is], the more open they’ve been.

I know back in the day Orgy was a lot more techno industrial rock. But they’re doing their comeback, which I’m real excited for, and they’re a lot more straight-up rock now. It’s really cool. They’re all actually playing their instruments, they’re not doing backing tracks, Jay [Gordon]’s actually singing his songs. There’s a keyboard on stage, but that’s the only hint of ’90s industrial techno. It’s really rocking, guitar driven, heavy drums and cool stuff. That crowd had a lot more girls in it, too, because they’re kind of a hearth throb-y sort of band.

Is that why those audiences were fun?

Freeman: I think that was part of it. I love playing to a lot of girls. I love having a lot of girls in the audience. They were just so chill. I think there were just no expectations because nobody knew what to expect from Orgy, so they had an open mind. That was just a really great tour for us. I really enjoyed it. This one has been really fun so far. It’s hard to tell the first couple of days what it’s going to be like, but I think it’s going to be so fun. The Peelander-Z crew is just a blast  and they’re silly and they costume and do skits and the crowd loves to sing along and get into it. Their crowd already knows what they’re going to do. They’re totally stoked about it. It’s really exciting for them. I love seeing people turn into children. And it’s real punk, you know. It’s a punk, pirate-y, easy going crowd.

Like One-Eyed Doll, Peelander-Z is known for playing Dragon*Con and anime conventions. How do those shows compare to playing rock clubs?

Photo by Chad Elder

Freeman: Oh man, it’s such a different world. I’m sure those guys would tell you the same thing. The conventions are their own little mini-universes. Everybody’s in costumes and they’re not exactly a rocker crowd that would go to the dive bar. They’d probably never set foot into a scary punk bar. It’s a really all-ages-friendly, innocent, fun place and it’s a real safe environment. We usually have a stage crew and pretty nice stage and lights and they take care of us and put us into a hotel room. But this kind of tour is a lot more Road Warrior-style. It’s a lot of small bars and intimate settings where you can fit maybe 50 people into the room and the stage is a planks of wood in the corner. They’re willing to pay you in beer, so it’s a totally different world. You’ve got the safe convention world where you have a built in audience of up to several thousand, then you have these dive bars that are dirty, smelly, dark and fun.

And they both fit with the One-Eyed Doll aesthetic in very different ways.

Freeman: Yeah, I think so. I think Peelander-Z thrives in both environments, too. It’s funny because we just got off these more high profile tours onto this short little dive bar tour and it’s kind of refreshing. There’s usually no backstage, there’s certainly nowhere to hide, so you’re right there with everybody. That can be kind of fun. That’s kind of how we used to tour all the time. It’s been a little bit of a refreshing thing and it’s a real no-pressure kind of environment. We’re just playing shows on our way back to Texas. no big deal.

A few years ago you played with a band called the Luchagors, fronted by Amy Dumas, better know to wrestling fans as former WWE Women’s Champion Lita. As a result, she has become an outspoken supporter of One-Eyed Doll.

Freeman: Oh, yeah. Amy is a dear friend ever since we played together in Austin a few years ago. I’m as much of a fan of hers as she is of me. I think she’s great. When I saw her on stage for the first time with the Luchagors, I just totally fell in love. I was like, “I don’t know who this girl is, but we’re going to be best friends because she is awesome!” So we always hit each other up when we’re coming through town. She’s always on the road and we’re always on the road, so sometimes we cross paths. We’d love to do some more collaborating. She sang on one of my songs called “Insecure” for the Into Outer Space album. It’s my electropop dance album that’s just under the Kimberly Freeman name, even though Jason did all the instrumentation and arrangement. We still call it a solo album. I think she has a beautiful voice and she’s such a great performer. She’s been very supportive and we really plug each other whenever we can. I just love having my girl rocker friend. We recorded her parts in less than an hour and she did great.

You also have a new album coming out called Dirty. When will that be out and what else can you tell me about it?

Freeman: We’re pressing a new vinyl record. It’s being manufactured right now and as soon as we get back from this tour we’re going to have the first proof to check out. So it’s coming out really, really soon. We’re going to release it vinyl only, at least at first.

Junior: We recorded it at Sylvia Massy‘s studio in northern California called RadioStar. It’s this old art deco theater that’s filled with all this classic gear from the ’60s and ’70s that we’ve always wanted to work on. It was just the kind of environment that inspired a more classic sounding album. At the time, we had planned to record a real shiny, super-produced, radio-ready rock album, which we did. But at the same time we both were like, “Man, we want to use all this cool gear to record something more like Black Sabbath or Pink Floyd. Sylvia was so cool that she basically let us stay there and do whatever we wanted. After the first couple of weeks of recording, she realized I was also a producer and knew what I was doing with all of her gear. So she just let me do whatever I wanted after that and we were like, “Yes! We’re going to record another album.” We wanted to approach Dirty kind of the way they recorded back in the day, so we recorded most of the guitar and drums live together.

These days almost every song you hear is recorded to a metronome, so there’s a click track keeping the tempo and everybody plays to that so it’s the same tempo throughout the song. A lot of our songs, the way Kimberly writes them, the tempos gradually speed up and slow down and are really alive. We just wanted to capture that live feeling and not do it to a metronome. We played the songs together live, so they have that feel of how we do it at a show. Then, of course, we were like, “Well, crap. We’re going to have to release that on vinyl if we really want to do it right.” So we pretty much just stayed in the analog domain, but we’ll eventually put it out as a download and CD. In that sense, I think it’s a lot different from our other releases. But I think it’s also just a darker, moodier type of album. We usually have lots of ups and downs, but this one’s pretty much all downs.

You often tour with a third member known as Mister Swimmy Socks the Goldfish. Has he been involved in the recording of this new album?

Junior: He usually just tours, although he is on the Dirty album on a song called “Weed” that’s named after the town we recorded in. But he didn’t play bass, he played banjo on that song. He’s actually a really awesome banjo player.

Are you playing anything from Dirty on this tour?

Photo by Denise Borders

Junior: We’re playing a few songs, yeah. Actually, there are a couple of songs from the Monster album that we re-recorded for this album. They just have a different feel when we play them live now, so we wanted to capture the new feel of those songs. So a couple of the songs on the new album are classics that we play live all the time anyway.

Freeman:You want to be our guest [at a show]?

Absolutely. Do I have to earn that by performing in some way?

Freeman: Well if you would like to, I would consider you for a special boy. But that’s up to you. It’s volunteer only.

I guess we can talk about that at the show.

Freeman: Awesome! Make sure to grab us before the show.

For more information, go to www.oneeyeddoll.com.