Death of a Cheerleader,  Brooklyn-based four-piece led by the powerhouse Mia Berrin, Pom Pom Squad, release their first record, ‘Death Of a Cheerleader’, on City Slang in June 2021

A sonic collage of deeply personal odes to self-identity, raucous lashings against society’s BS, and snapshots of messy, complicated and fraying love affairs, ‘Death Of a Cheerleader’ was produced by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties and co-produced by Berrin herself.  It’s a record that plays out like an exorcism in front of your bathroom mirror — confronting the dark we’ve had planted within us and then ripping it out, all while watching every second of it. It’s vulnerable yet triumphant, deliciously irreverent & inviting yet sneering in the faces of those that had once tried to define her.

When Pom Pom Squad’s Mia Berrin was 21 years old, she fell in love. Sure, she’d been in love before, but this time, something was different: “It just felt like a switch had flipped inside my head,” she says. “I realized I had been living a life that was not my own, watching myself from the outside.” As a kid who bounced from town to town growing up, and as a person of color in predominantly white spaces, Berrin had become accustomed to maintaining a constant awareness of how others perceived her—a “split-brain mentality” that she adopted as a necessary means of survival. But now, tumbling through her first queer romance—and her first queer heartbreak—some of that self-separateness began to mend: “Suddenly,” she says, “I was in a body that was mine.”

Enter Pom Pom Squad. Berrin first played under the moniker in 2015 after moving to New York to study acting at NYU—though she soon transferred to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music—and it was at those early gigs that she linked up with Shelby Keller (drums), Mari Alé Figeman (bass), and Alex Mercuri (guitar). The group cut their teeth playing packed Brooklyn apartments, but they quickly graduated to packed Brooklyn venues alongside artists like Soccer Mommy, Adult Mom, and Pronoun.