Quarters Rock ‘n Roll Palace hosted a rambunctiously fun night of live music on Thursday with an all-local bill featuring Florida Brothers Band, The Women and WWE Energies. The show celebrated a re-release of The Women’s album “Glitter”, now remastered with additional touches and new artwork.

WWE Energies consists of vocalist-guitarist Max Hey and keyboardist Caroline Dillon. The duo’s style incorporates elements of punk, power pop and electronica; Hey describes it as “a less masculine Andrew W.K.” with lyrics that are simple, repetitive and self-deprecating. Formed in the last year, WWE Energies played their first show last August at a park outside Madison. Dillon was unfortunately sick Thursday so Hey performed solo.

The project began out of Hey’s desire to take a different approach from previous bands of his. “I’ve written a lot of songs on guitar before, but over time I found that the songs I wrote had more to them than I was able to play with just guitar. I started writing music in software and that’s been the last two and a half bands I’ve had; they had more people and with more instruments. WWE Energies embraces the stripped-down parts rather than hiding them, whereas with the other bands we kind of covered it up with more members.”

Dillon joined WWE Energies upon saying yes when Hey asked them to play. “I’m excited to develop our own sound, play more shows and record stuff,” Dillon says. “Max writes the songs and I learn keyboard parts to what he’s already written.”

“Caroline was in a previous band called Moonchyld and I knew that it was kind of a similar instrumental setup to this,” Hey adds. “I figured that they’d have knowledge that I don’t have about making a project like this work.”

WWE Energies are taking time to play shows and get comfortable with their direction. “We want to make sure we can put on a really cool show that sounds really good before we put out an album or anything,” Hey shares. “We’re really just having fun and going with the flow.”

Catch them next at Cactus Club on April 2nd!

The Women comprises vocalist-guitarist Graeme McDonald and drummer J.B. Burke. They describe themselves as garage metal with notes of noise rock, punk and grunge as well. The project began around 2009-2010 while McDonald was living in Kansas. “I wrote the first batch of songs out there and then I brought them up here,” he recalls. “I went through a few different drummers before settling on J.B. and then we put out “Glitter” in 2017.”

As part of the “Glitter” re-release, The Women played many songs off the record in addition to some new ones for Thursday’s set. Their latest release is the single “Glass” from February 2022.

“We wrote that one during COVID, and the lyrics are just about losing my mind,” McDonald says about “Glass”. “I bought that Omnichord with my COVID money. J.B. and I just came up with the track one day and really liked it. The fun part was when we figured out how to isolate a light bulb shattering.”

“We put cardboard and Styrofoam around it,” Burke jumps in. “There was no way to sound check it; it was the only light bulb to break that we had (laughs). We kind of got that idea from “Get Behind Me Satan” by The White Stripes, where there’s shit that just drops and breaks on the album.”

The Women are putting out a 12″ of new material in May. “We recorded it back in like 2018 and just sat on it for a while,” McDonald explains.

Burke adds about the release, “It was the first project I did when I got my first 16-track recorder. We had a lot of fun with that because for each song there were like six guitar tracks and we had space echo going through the whole thing. There’s a vibrato on Graeme’s voice for the first song too. I’m really excited; since I was like 13 I’ve always wanted to get records made. It’s about time.”

The Women play Last Rites on April 18th and Promises on June 8th.