Cover Story: Winona Fighter is turning Summer School into a basement show

In a time where conversations about live music are currently plagued by an influx in unsold tickets (A.K.A. blue dot fever) and inaccessibility, Winona Fighter is bringing the old-school spirit of punk-rock basement shows back to the spotlight. The Nashville trio’s boisterous debut album My Apologies To The Chef pieces together the essence of punk ideologies that the mainstream alternative scene has been missing in recent years. The explosive record dishes out raw, in-your-face commentary on personal struggles and political outrage with a cutthroat, refreshing edge. 

Serving as their label debut with Rise Records, the album sheds the overly polished facade of modern rock in favor of the chaotic authenticity rooted in DIY culture. “We’ve always stuck to our guns and we’ve never wavered,” frontwoman and multi-instrumentalist Coco Kinnon tells Melodic Magazine. “We’ve always been this way. Now we’re signed to a label and in management and have an agent so I think it’s easy to then start to waver, but we’ve done it exactly our way this whole time.” 

Winona Fighter’s commitment to their integrity has been the key ingredient to their rapidly growing success. In the blink of an eye, a project recorded almost entirely in the garage of Kinnon and bassist and producer Austin Luther took on a life of its own. “It’s very emotional,” she says. “Every night, we all look at each other and we’re like, ‘What the fuck?’ like, ‘What is going on?’” 

The trio’s love letter to punk-rock became the catalyst for their sudden breakthrough, introducing Winona Fighter as a band with enough guts and grit to rekindle the genre’s spark for new ears worldwide. “How do you soak it all in? It’s tough,” Kinnon says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to be like, ‘Oh, yeah, this is where we’re supposed to be.’ I think I’ll always be like, ‘I just can’t wait to keep working hard and seeing if this thing works out for us.’”

Over the last year, the trio has gained over 114 million monthly Spotify listeners, embarked on their first large-scale headlining tour across North America and Europe, and appeared at major festivals including Vans Warped Tour, Slam Dunk, and Welcome To Rockville. “The thing about us is [that] we don’t stop,” she says. “We’re so hungry for this and we love getting to do this, but mostly for us, we love playing live so much.” 

At their core, Winona Fighter thrives on running rampant in front of massive crowds in new cities every night. The trio is eager to bring their raw, compelling live energy back to the Warped Tour stage in Long Beach, Mexico City, and Orlando this year. “I think that the crowd [at Warped Tour Orlando] was one of the most hungry of festivals that we’ve played recently, which is really exciting,” guitarist Dan Fuson says. “I think just having another year for people to get back in the swing of being at Warped Tour every summer is going to only increase that.”  

“It’s really cool to feel like we’re meshing with the community so well because it is such a legendary thing,” Kinnon adds. “Vans Warped Tour posted about us [recently] and someone commented, ‘When I think of Vans Warped Tour, I think of a band like this.’” 

The success of My Apologies To the Chef has given the band an even bigger platform to advocate for sociopolitical issues that matter most to them, which is an undertaking that’s been integral to their identity since the beginning. “We are extremely inclusive. We want to build bridges instead of cutting people off at the knees,” Kinnon says. “I’ve always said, at our shows, you have the frat boys and then you have the alt girls and everything in between..

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