A year on, now 28 years old, Shapiro is announcing Perfect Version, her debut solo album, out via Hardly Art on June 14. It embraces more of the lugubrious melodies and nebulous vulnerability that made Chastity Belt’s 2017 LP I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone so compelling, but it’s more frighteningly introspective than any of her band’s three albums to date. The garage rock overtones are gone; songs like “Pussy Weed Beer” are a distant memory.

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Perfect Version the sound of a songwriter questioning her every move, fretting about the past and present, and wondering how to navigate the future. On “Natural,” the record’s opening song (premiering below), she interrogates things that most lead singers and performers wouldn’t dare to entertain. “How can somebody be so blindly confident? / I wanna know that trick / How can you love yourself so damn much? / It isn’t natural,” she sings before openly considering a change of course: “I’d like to learn a skill, something useful / Then I’ll support myself and I will buy a house / I’ll live alone in it, somewhere out in the woods / And I’ll feel new again, I’ll be my own best friend.”

Shapiro says that Chastity Belt have a new album on the way. They spent January recording the record in Los Angeles, and they were down there again earlier this month to mix it. They’ll tour again soon as well, and she’s ready for it. “I'm in a much better place than I was a year ago,” she says.

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When exactly did you decide that you wanted to make a solo record?



It didn't really like feel like a decision. I started recording stuff in my apartment just for fun. I wanted to learn how to use Ableton, and at the time, Chasity Belt wasn't doing that much. Our bassist moved to Los Angeles. I liked some of what I had done, and so I sent it over to Jason [Baxter] at Hardly Art, and he suggested that I put out a solo album. I ended up going into my friend's studio and recording the four songs that I'd already demoed. And then I was planning on just doing that for the rest of the album, but I started demoing more songs, and then I became attached to the demos. And I felt like, "What, these sounds good enough to me. Why don't I just hold onto these and just put these on the album?" I feel like it could have turned out a little more professional if I'd done it with someone else, but to me, it was like there's something special about writing the songs while you're recording them. I wouldn't really be able to do that if I did it in a studio because that would just be paying for way too much studio time.It allowed me to be more creative.

You were going through a difficult phase at the beginning of last year. How do you think this differs lyrically from the work you've done with Chastity Belt?



I feel like Chastity Belt's lyrics are all pretty sad too. The type of music that we make fits that vibe, but it was a particularly hard year, especially towards the second half of the songs that I wrote. Recently I was actually talking about this with Gretchen [Grimm] from Chasity Belt. We got really high and we watched a bunch of our old music videos, because we hadn't really watched them since they came out. It was crazy. It reminded us of like what state of mind we were in when those songs came out, and when we were making these videos.

It did feel like with our last album we got caught in this weird thing where we weren't really making decisions anymore. We were doing things because we felt like we had to, and it became really un-fun. We realized this on a tour last year. I was having some health problems at the time, too. I had to get a surgery to get half of my thyroid removed because they thought I had thyroid cancer. I didn't have thyroid cancer, but they couldn't figure that out until they took out my thyroid.