Melissa Auf der Maur Unearths ’90s Demos for New Album, ‘Bass Womb Room’

Melissa Auf der Maur’s first album in 16 years is a deliberate step away from the clean, major-label sound she once navigated. Bass Womb Room: My ’90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings, out September 4 via Envision, gathers unreleased living-room demos from the 1990s and pairs them with eight new interludes built partly from old field recordings she captured by placing a handycam on her amp during tours with Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins. The result is a 15-track document of private resistance to the era’s commercial machinery.

The former Hole bassist frames the collection as a counterweight to the pressure she and her peers felt to produce radio-friendly hits. “These songs are the sound of my internal experimentation and a way of keeping the Montreal art girl alive inside,” Auf der Maur said in a statement. The album appears on digital and cassette, and a teaser of the new composition “Skip a Beat” is streaming now.

The project extends beyond audio. A photo exhibition of the same name opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario on September 2, with a 240-page photobook following on September 8. Auf der Maur, who released the memoir Even the Good Girls Will Cry in March, describes the bass as “the mother of all instruments,” a role the title Bass Womb Room explicitly embraces. Her last solo album, Out of Our Minds, appeared in 2010.