FEATURE:
Spotlight
this duo are blowing up right now. After releasing their debut album, MAN BITES DOG, earlier in the year, femtanyl are getting a lot of praise and buzz. They consist of Noelle Stockwood (also known as Noelle Mansbridge) who is the lead singer, songwriter, and producer who founded the project as a solo act in May 2023, and Juno Callender, their incredible multi-instrumentalist and producer who joined the band in August 2025 after initially performing as their live drummer. The superb femtanyl make phenomenal music. They are a mighty force to be reckoned with. I am going to start out with an intervbiew from Metal Magazine that was published around the release of their debut album in February. As they note in their heard, “Whether you’re head banging, punching, or desperately flailing on the dance floor, there is no one right dance move for this Canadian-American duo, just so long as you’re shedding your outer shell and revealing your most unashamed self. Noelle Stockwood and Juno Callender transformed from strangers into bandmates and then into best friends through the genre-bending group, Femtanyl. After releasing their debut album, Man Bites Dog, earlier this month, the pair are now embarking on a US tour, ending with a festival appearance at Primavera Sound in Barcelona”. This is a duo that you really do need to check out:
“Are you guys based in Seattle full-time or split between Toronto and Seattle?
Noelle: We were originally split, but around eight months ago, I moved up to Seattle so we could work on the album full-time together.
That was around the time when Femtanyl transitioned from a solo artist to you two being a duo, right?
Juno: Yeah, but we also worked remotely for a while before that. We sent a lot of project files back and forth between Seattle and Toronto, but that wasn’t necessarily ideal. We still got a lot of work done, but the difference between how efficiently we worked together after Noelle moved up here was night and day.
The album was written and recorded virtually between Toronto and Seattle. What were the most challenging, and also rewarding, parts of that experience? I’m sure it must’ve created an interesting creative dynamic.
Noelle: We fell into this weird time sync where I’d wake up and Juno would have sent me a file that she had been working on, and then I would be like, yo, this is awesome. Then I’d work on it for the entire day and then she would wake up and work on it until like 5:00 a.m. We were never really awake at the same time except for maybe two hours.
Juno: We had a weird, regimented sleep schedule like Noelle was talking about. I would always wake up to something that she had sent me with a very long explanation of what she did. I would take that and work on it, and she would go to bed and then I would basically do the same thing and send it back to her right before she woke up. It was fun every day waking up and listening to what had changed, but then on the other hand, it doesn’t hold a candle efficacy-wise to working together in the same room at the same time on the same thing.
You’ve said that being a trans woman, or transfem, comes with a high level of experimentation with yourself and also through interests like music. How is that journey of self discovery represented in your music?
Noelle: When I first started transitioning, music was the only place I could feel that aspect of myself. I could augment my vocals and talk about it openly. It again became my outlet because I wasn’t on any hormones and just sitting in my room thinking, this sucks, dude. I feel good that there is a type of music for trans people that’s just about being an idiot and being unfiltered and messy and rough around the edges. There’s a lot of pressure on trans people to be very manicured and, with this music and space, it’s nice that we can all get in a room and just be really loud and sweaty and a bit embarrassing.
Juno: Music and art were so important for feeling like my identity was creatively accepted and made me feel so comfortable in expressing and exploring it. In a situation where we’re already held to such a monstrously high standard as trans people, it’s nice to have music that is focused on the trans experience and uplifting the community. With Femtanyl, we do that, but we also go in an alternate direction where we're trying to portray it as close to the human experience as possible.
I’m sure there is. With your upcoming tour, is the space that you create in each venue different, or does it have more of a common community that feels like it’s removed from space and time?
Noelle: In terms of our fan base, it’s decently uniform across a lot of places. You get a little bit of variation per city, some show cultures are a bit different. But our fans typically show up and go crazy and have a great time. Our fan base is a bit younger than a lot of our contemporaries, so their first experiences with this kind of music are at our shows and it’s very fun to see them fall in love with that environment like I did at a young age.
Juno: The live show experience is such a sacred and important thing to being a music fan that a lot of what we try to bring to it is creating a space where it becomes impossible to focus on anything but the music and the live performance. We want everybody there to transcend into the Femtanyl space for that hour. I want people to be able to feel like they’re getting plucked from their lives and then they need to take some time to readjust back to their normal life afterwards”.
I want to come to an important interview from NME. This is a recent one. It is important, not only because it is deep and the conversation is great, open and fascinating. It is press from a major U.K. source, so it will highlight femtanyl and expand their growing fanbase here. They did a run of dates in the U.K. and Ireland last month, so I hope they come back at some point. In an interview published this month, NME spotlighted a duo whose “hellacious live show that’s landed them support slots for Danny Brown and The Prodigy, they’re hurtling to a new level”:
“Draw a Venn diagram of the gaming, breakcore and furry communities, and you’ll also find queer people smack bang in the middle. Both Mansbridge and Callender are transgender women, and many Femtanyl fans, too, are young and trans.
The lyrical themes of alienation, suicide and self-harm in Femtanyl songs have resonated with their fanbase. Today, Mansbridge assures us she’s in a “better place now”, adding that the self-destructive sentiments in her older material were, in part, a psychological exorcism. “That was stuff that I was dealing with,” she acknowledges, “but there were a lot of thoughts I was having that I really didn’t like. I wanted to explore those [thoughts] in music and imagine a worse version of my current self.
“It’s very difficult for me to get back into that headspace, or even imagine the person that I was being so upset and angry,” she adds. “I have definitely grown a lot as a person.”
Mansbridge credits music with saving her from perpetual bitterness. “At that point in my life, I had two people who were my friends, and I’d been in and out of the hospital,” she explains. “I felt very destitute and alone. When [my music] started getting traction, I was able to feel like someone that had something to offer to the world. People wanted to talk to me, and I was able to show that I wasn’t just a crash-out. I stopped isolating myself in my own bedroom, and I let myself be a person.”
emtanyl’s friendship proved instrumental to the creation of ‘Man Bites Dog’, especially given the extensive challenges they faced during the album’s production. Mansbridge was stuck in her native Canada for nine months waiting for a visa to visit Callender in Seattle, meaning the pair had to work long-distance with misaligned sleep schedules. “We were not awake at the same time except for an hour out of the day,” Mansbridge recalls.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jacqui Sharah
Callender’s own working conditions weren’t totally ideal, either. She recalls fine-tuning the particularly ferocious track ‘Helltarget’ while visiting her parents’ house in Southern California, which was in the midst of renovations. “All the doors had been taken out, and there were white sheets everywhere,” Callender recounts. “It was one of the most privacy-less, dreadful, terrible, scary environments to have headphones on for 12 hours a day, adding ever-so-tiny variations over and over and over again.”
“I thought it was gonna be that lady who came to your house while you were working and was like, ‘my dead sister’s ghost is in your basement’,” Mansbridge interjects.
But Mansbridge takes issue with Femtanyl being reduced to “trans music” by cisgender male commentators, who group them with contemporaries like 100 gecs and Jane Remover – despite their distinctly different sounds. “It can be a little frustrating, because it feels like they’ve accepted us as people, but now they’re just a bit too vocal about it,” she explains. “It’s like your uncle getting to terms with the whole thing, but he’s still awkward about it.”
Another unique challenge, Callender adds, is how the band can evolve out of their emotionally heavier material, which still means a lot to many of their fans: “There’s a pressure to remain in the same negative headspace that you were in.” Though she thinks fans don’t “necessarily, actually” want this to happen, she nonetheless theorises that “a part of them wants you to remain in a state where you’re not happy, because then they feel like they can connect to you more”.
“They should be able to look at this as a sign of: ‘Hey, this is something that you can do’,” Callender adds. “This is aspirational. You can improve, you can get better… but it’s very challenging when you’re not doing very well.”
Femtanyl certainly aren’t waiting around to move on. With Mansbridge finally relocating to Seattle to work in-person with Callender, they’re returning to the “bright” and “melodic” style of their older songs, which you can hear in their latest single ‘Magfest’. Callender adds that Mansbridge is “expanding so much as a frontwoman”, her bandmate blushing in response”.
I am going to end with a review from Pitchfork of MAN BITES DOG. It is an album that I feel has cross-genre and crossover appeal. It is a Hardcore album, I guess, but there are other sounds and influences. So it means that people who might be wary or new to the genre are not hesitant to check out a superb album:
“The production is raw but precise, a mechanical bull with adjustable shocks. “Helltarget” opens with bulbous bass pads that instruct the listener to gird their loins, before the drums crash in and Mansbridge’s vocals stagger onto the scene. The next three minutes loop cyberpunk synths while flashing between ideas: a brain-smacking rap-screamo section; a vaporwavey dream hole; a movie sample. Halfway through, everything slows down and you think it’s over—but no, like Six Flags Twisted Colossus, there’s a second drop. By the ride’s end, you’re gasping for air, a little puke stirring in the belly. Now repeat for nine more songs that are sometimes thrilling and sometimes too much—beats wound beyond the point of pleasure, mixes overwhelmed with shrapnel.
You could say the music has caught up with Mansbridge’s perennially scary lyrics, a nightmare gallery of caskets, peeled-off skin, and viscous gut-fluid. “Body the Pistol” envisions the human body as a weapon shooting out blood and bones and stomach matter. In a recent interview, Mansbridge underlined the need for trans people everywhere to make their presence known in defiance against a government trying to eliminate them. You might view femtanyl’s music through the lens of body horror, a genre many trans people appreciate for how it captures gender dysphoria and the feeling that your flesh is alien, something corrosive. But here, the body isn’t a site of discomfort so much as destruction—a flamethrower ready to ignite.
This album also sounds like two DIY scene vets trying to prove their punk bona fides. The hyper-rave hi-jinks of Machine Girl and digital hardcore OGs like Atari Teenage Riot loomed large before, but now it’s also the cybergrind screamo of Blind Equation. The warped thrum of “Video Nasty” recalls the empty-room eeriness of the Deli Girls ’ “ Officer.” Apart from “Shows You the Way to the Hiway,” a highlight that’s like femtanyl approximating pop, the atmosphere is mostly deep and dark, heavy on evil clanks and clatter. “City” shakes like a meat grinder chopping up monster limbs as layers of voices both heroic and hellish gasp for attention. “Sick of It” has the beefy synth bassline of an aughts electroclash anthem, filtered through the brain of someone obsessed with the gnarly edge of LustSickPuppy and horrorcore RPGs.
MAN BITES DOG unloads a rush of peaks: the glittery old-skool stabs of “Head Up,” the hard gore shrieks and sickly torrent of leeches and vomit on “Body the Pistol.” Mansbridge’s serrated guitar cuts through the mix like a glowing blade. But the textures also start to get too uniformly shadowy, the beats too stiff. Mansbridge’s earlier EPs were hooky yet haywire, animated by pulpy carnage like the ravenous scream ripping across “ Katamari,” or a sedate lilt caressing the feral aggression on “ Its Time.” When femtanyl try a similar trick with overlapping vocals on “Is This It,” it gets lost in the speedfreak density. The slapdash euphoria that electrified 2024’s REACTOR comes in small doses here. When femtanyl’s music first broke out, haters called it Geometry Dash brainrot (and what’s so wrong with that?), but the more apt critique was “’90s rave pastiche.” MAN BITES DOG aims to beat both allegations, and for the most part it gets there. It also feels like femtanyl are still searching for their final form”.
I am going to bring things to a close. I would urge everyone, regardless of their musical tastes, to spend some time with femtanyl. MAN BITES DOG is a tremendous debut album from a duo that we will be hearing a lot more from. The fact they are being featured by NME and being hailed as this amazing new act shows that they are connecting with people and have substance and staying power. I would love to see them in London soon as I feel femtanyl will be winning hearts and putting out incredible music…
FOR years more.
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