Vivian Girls: Katy Goodman, Ali Koehler, Cassie Ramone. Photos courtesy of Ali Koehler.

Mixed with overcast guitar thrash and three-part harmonies, the whine of a speeding subway car sounds very cool. That much was clear after dark in Brooklyn on Independence Day of 2009. Vivian Girls were playing an abandoned lot beneath the buzzing JMZ line against a backdrop of graffitied brick and fireworks, one of the final acts at a two-day festival from the young local labels Captured Tracks and Woodsist. The lineup was scrawled on a slab of cardboard: rustic pop rippers Woods; a full-band take on Kurt Vile’s outsider folk; West Coast psych-rockers Thee Oh Sees; unassuming Jersey pop chillers Real Estate; a charcoal band that had practiced but once, Dum Dum Girls. The bar was set up on a table that looked like it had been plucked from the trash. This was the shambolic epitome of the bicoastal late-aughts noise pop scene. And, as I recall, it was scorchingly hot. 

Perhaps tellingly of that flash-in-the-pan indie pop era, when bloggers were all hungry for the next MP3 that would put them ahead of the curve, many of the festival's other billed groups would subsequently fail to scratch the subterranean cultural consciousness. But across three LPs—2008's Vivian Girls, 2009's Everything Goes Wrong, and 2011's Share the Joy—Vivian Girls helped to architect a scrappy Spectorian sound and spirit for this tiny musical world; with their richly harmonized love-punk, they fused the 1960s aesthetic of girl groups with fast-loud Ramones rock and the doomy Portland punk of Wipers and Dead Moon.  

As many of their early peers have spent the past few years seeking grander reaches of ambition—Kurt Vile cracked the Billboard Top 50, Dum Dum Girls played "Letterman" in January—Vivian Girls remained almost completely inactive. Singer-guitarist Cassie Ramone played with her other band, the Babies, and recently tracked a solo album of dreamy folk-tinged psychedelia inspired by Elliott Smith and the Carpenters; bassist Katy Goodman focused on her solo project, La Sera; and drummer Ali Koehler began fronting a punk band, Upset, with ex-Hole drummer Patty Schemel. Now, following their final two shows in Brooklyn last weekend, Vivian Girls are broken up for good, fulfilling a collective desire to close one chapter and open the door to new ones as the ink of their story is drying. And while it's up for debate whether Vivian Girls were the most aesthetically exemplary band of the 00s noise-pop boom, it is without question that they were its most divisive. 

"Is it self-important to play final shows?" Ali Koehler asks in an empty green room at Brooklyn's Music Hall of Williamsburg, where her band Upset are playing a showcase for their small New Jersey label, Don Giovanni. "We said fuck it though," she concludes, with confidence. "This is fun."

In the past year, Koehler's own music has revisited her and Goodman's shared roots in the inclusive Jersey punk scene, where they met in 2004 while attending Rutgers University. "The first time I met Katy, she was wearing a pink hoodie with a Minor Threat patch on it," Koehler recalls. "She was so goofy, sitting on the couch with a paper-plate mask in front of her face." Koehler was reading American Hardcore at the time, and the two bonded over Bad Brains, riot grrrl, and secret high-school affinities for Taking Back Sunday-style emo. Goodman and Koehler began their own surf-y punk groups, like Four-Way Milkshake and the Pot and the Kettle, covering Julie Ruin's "The Punk Singer" and Descendents' "I'm  Not a Loser", and even playing a couple of basement shows with ex-Bratmobile singer Allison Wolfe.

Cassie Ramone, born Cassie Grzymkowski, was a sophomore at Ridgewood High School when she met Goodman, a senior, in the parking lot at a Weezer concert—both were fans of their hometown music scene, which included the guys who would form Real Estate and Titus Andronicus. Ramone played music with a high school band called Upholstery ("Beat Happening meets B-52s") before moving to Brooklyn, where she studied at Pratt and attended every show listed on DIY promoter Todd P's website. 

Vivian Girls began in 2007 within the lofted rooms of a Greenpoint punk house called the Orphanage. It was there that founding drummer Frankie Rose asked Ramone to start a band. Early on, Ramone felt the foundation of Vivian Girls was oddly framed: "People would talk about us with Crystal Stilts and the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who are awesome, but I always thought of us as a punk band." They rejected comparisons to 1980s British jangle pop; their raw ear-bleeding approach and dark atmosphere made even the radical C86 bands sound sort of fey in comparison. And while Vivian Girls were hardly the first band to fuse girl group aesthetics with rock—see Blondie, the Go-Gos, Cyndi Lauper's Blue Angel—their rocketfire love songs had grit and abandon. Their sonic formula is hard to decode completely, but it was Rose who introduced the band to a Holy Grail reverb pedal before leaving in mid-2008, tempering out their punk sound with walls of sound and those crucial high-harmonies. ("I'm trying not to give Frankie too much credit," Captured Tracks owner Mike Sniper tells me, "but she deserves it.") Learning to project backing vocals over gratingly loud guitars and shitty monitors, Goodman says Vivian Girls became "like harmony bootcamp."

Vivian Girls and Kim Gordon

Sniper was working at Williamsburg's Academy Records in 2008 when the Vivian Girls' debut 7" was haphazardly released unto the world (fellow Jersey punk Matt Molnar pressed it for his tiny label Plays With Dolls, but was overwhelmed when it sold out in three weeks). Sniper was struck by the single's immediacy and tangibility, and played it to death, ultimately signing Vivian Girls to garage rock outpost In the Red, where he was doing A&R. "It seemed out of nowhere," Sniper says, describing the crazed mad-dash response on message boards like Terminal Boredom, where people were raving and hating with equal fervor. "I thought I'd be able to talk to Cassie about all these garage-rock bands that I assumed she liked," he continues. "But she was like, 'What the fuck are you talking about? I like the Ramones.'"

There was a sea-change in the New York DIY scene, too—within a few months, the prevailing aesthetic shifted from Black Dice-style noise to reverb-drenched pop. Nationally, indie rock had grown polished and complex (think Joanna Newsom or Animal Collective) while over in the garage-punk scene, abrasiveness reigned with artists like Jay Reatard, Black Lips, and Ty Segall. "People were hungry for something more straightforward again, something more melodic and feminine," Sniper says, "but Vivian Girls' sound still had teeth to it."

Kip Berman, frontman for the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, looked up to Vivian Girls as his own C86-worshipping band started up soon after. He was enamored by their ability to balance DIY accessibility with a sense of being untouchable. "Vivian Girls caused the closest thing to 'mania' for an underground band that I can remember," Berman says. A tiny Vampire Weekend gig he caught at Manhattan's Cake Shop in 2007 offered contrast: "They were great! But with Vivian Girls, you had this sense that if you didn't get that hand-screen-printed 'Wild Eyes' 7", you would never have a chance to get one again."

With hesitancy, Berman notes that it was "still pretty rare" to see a female band operating within the borough's male-dominated scene. "This shouldn't have been a big deal at all in 2007, but how many people in the bands or audience were women?" he says. "Certainly not the 52% that occupy the world." It seemed to Berman that, for better or worse, people simply cared about Vivian Girls more than other groups. "No band was polarizing in the same way."

Amateurism, poor production values, simplistic songwriting—all central components of the classic indie era, not to mention almost every DIY punk band that has ever existed—were at the core of Vivian Girls' divisiveness. "Going into a fancy studio to make a record was just never a part of our plan," Goodman says. They were not careerist, and Ramone was befuddled by critics who stigmatized their artistic decision to maintain the unadorned quality of their music; all three Vivian Girls cite Woods' 2007 home-recorded, Sebadoh-like At Rear House LP as the crown jewel of this era.

In contrast, Pains of Being Pure at Heart recorded their huge-sounding 2011 album Belong with established producers Flood and Alan Moulder. Berman says he remains curious as to what a hi-fidelity Vivian Girls LP would be like—if they "distilled their essence" and grew their "heroic amateurism," like Black Lips or Deerhunter. "It would be fun to pair the immediateness of their songwriting with the kind of production that would get their T-shirt in Hot Topic and blow some minds at the Warped Tour," Berman suggests. Instead, Vivian Girls chose to keep with lo-fi as it slipped out of vogue once again.

The New Zealand-born Fiona Campbell, a long-time participant in the Brooklyn DIY scene, admired Vivian Girls since their first shows and became the band's third drummer in 2010. (She left in 2011 and now co-runs the Portland label M'Lady's.) "Their lack of self-consciousness sounded very New York to me," Campbell says, noting how their being an all-female band both distinguished them and shaped their narrative in disappointing ways, including fabricated "beefs" with other women-led projects. "If people could have gotten the fuck off square-one, maybe the scrutiny would have been worth it," Campbell says. "The amount of sexual, violent threats this band got will never be truly known or understood by anyone else. It would have been too much for some people."

And Berman is also quick to defend Vivian Girls against the deep misogyny directed their way by anonymous internet commenters and male critics at the heart of the hype-machine storm. "The hatred they endured was undoubtedly a result of the fact that they started a band with guitars and didn't have testicles," he says. "The unrelenting chauvinist vitriol levied at this band made me realize that there is nothing better about indie culture compared to mainstream culture. No one has taken more shit in the last five years than Cassie. Not Best Coast, not Lana Del Rey. Maybe Kanye." 

Feminist punk icon Kathleen Hanna echoed this in a 2013 interview, saying that reading BrooklynVegan comments about Vivian Girls made her want to cry. Hanna's own Vivian Girls fandom was rooted in how the trio governed their own work. "Most 50s 'girl groups' were singers who were put together by male producers," Hanna writes in an email. "Vivian Girls built on the rich sonic legacy of these groups, but were in control, playing and writing their own music—a move that looked to the future without shunning the amazing work of women in the past who had less options." Tobi Vail, who pioneered riot grrrl with Hanna as the drummer of Bikini Kill, played the first Vivian Girls show with her band, the Old Haunts, in 2007, and reviewed Vivian Girls in her zine Jigsaw. "When people write songs about their lives and don't polish it up to sound perfect, there is authenticity in it that we experience in our everyday lives, but is increasingly rare in popular culture," Vail's review read. "They are giving us something we need: an artifact that encourages us to tell our stories, to make our own records, to document our own lives."

January 22, 2014, was an emotional roller-coaster of a morning for Melissa Brooks, the 19-year-old front-girl for the Aquadolls—an L.A. band who released their debut through Burger Records last year. "I woke up and saw that Vivian Girls were breaking up and immediately ran to my record player and started crying and freaking out," she recalls. Brooks took to Twitter to report her feelings and write that Vivian Girls inspired her to start Aquadolls (who ended up opening Vivian Girls' last L.A. show on February 14, news of which meant more excited shrieking and tears).

It's this kind of potentially life-altering influence that gives Vivian Girls' music a purpose and necessity that trumps momentary concerns of authenticity and off-key singing and the cyclical nature of hype. Take, for example, the recent successes of Massachusetts band Potty Mouth, who opened for Vivian Girls' final show yesterday at Brooklyn's Baby's All Right. Twenty-four-year-old guitarist Phoebe Buckley Harris felt "encouraged" listening to Vivian Girls in college and called it a dream to play with them. Bassist Ally Einbinder grew up in a male-dominated punk universe, watching her guy friends record and tour with ease; around the time she heard Vivian Girls in 2008, the idea of playing music began to feel within reach. 

Brooks, especially, speaks rapturously about first hearing the Vivian Girls song "Tell the World" on Sirius XMU in 2010, subsequently scouring YouTube for every performance and interview she could find. At 15, Vivian Girls' music helped whisk her away from pre-teen years spent shopping at Hot Topic and listening to screamo bands. Brooks was also inspired by Cassie Ramone to buy her first guitar, a Danelectro, which she learned to play by jamming along with Vivian Girls. "They had this powerful force about them," she says. "It completely changed me."