By the time Lily Gist picks up a guitar, there is already a lifetime of music inside her. A lifelong cellist, she describes melodies learned from composers such as Bach, Elgar, Bloch, Bartók, Schumann and Grieg as something that freely rattles around in her mind before finding its way into her guitar playing. That classical sensitivity to tension, release, timbre and emotional weight has found an unexpected home in the raw, restless world of Brooklyn punk. Lily is a visual artist as well as a musician. Her work has explored the ways people measure and understand experience, including questions of social bias, self-perception and the blind spots that shape how we see one another. Her artistic life has moved between visual art, technology and music, with earlier work and professional experience connecting her to institutions and creative communities in New York. Then there is Frida Kill, the Brooklyn feminist punk quartet she shares with Maria Lina, Jeanette D. Moses and Gaby Canales. The band's music is deliberately unruly, drawing from post-punk, garage rock, noise and riot grrrl, but beneath the distortion is something deeply human: four women with different histories learning how to make space for one another. They trade instruments, share vocals and songwriting, and bring their individual experiences into a collective sound. Gist has described that process as complex, sometimes argumentative, but ultimately grounded in listening, learning and having each other's backs.
For Lily, punk is not simply an aesthetic. It can be a place where difficult experiences are allowed to become sound. On Frida Kill's 2022 EP, EP 1,, she takes the lead on "Get Over It", a song born from an encounter in which a friend misgendered a trans performer. What began as an uncomfortable question about whether she was "overreacting" eventually became a song about the impossibility of simply swallowing hurt and moving on. Another track, "Here's Hoping", confronts the cruelty she encountered while transitioning even more directly. Yet there is nothing one-dimensional about Frida Kill's anger. Their songs can move from immigration and the treatment of undocumented street vendors to gender, friendship, nightlife and the ordinary absurdities of surviving in New York. Their first recordings, the 2020 Demos and 2022's EP 1, captured a band still discovering itself, learning instruments, switching roles and finding its voice in the Brooklyn rock scene. There is a particularly striking contrast at the heart of Lily Gist's story: the precision of a cellist, the curiosity of a visual artist and the uncompromising volume of a punk guitarist. Her music does not try to smooth those worlds into something neat. Instead, it lets them collide, producing something noisy, vulnerable, thoughtful and alive. And somewhere between the classical melodies in her head and the amplified chaos of Brooklyn, Lily Gist has found a language of her own.
