Jon Blistein
Contact Jon Blistein by Email View all posts by Jon Blistein July 20, 2026
Melissa Auf Der Maur Melissa Auf Der Maur* Alt-rock stalwart Melissa Auf Der Maur, who played with Hole and the Smashing Pumpkins, is prepping a new project, Bass Womb Room, that will feature her first new music in over 15 years.
The album — titled Bass Womb Room: My ‘90s 4-Track Demos x Field Recordings — is set to feature a mix of old and new music. It will include several previously unreleased four-track demos, which Auf der Maur wrote and recorded during the Nineties, as well as eight new “interlude” compositions created for an upcoming photography exhibit/installation.
Auf der Maur recorded the old demos during the Nineties in her Los Angeles living room on a Tascam 4-track machine, using primarily acoustic guitar and layered vocals, but also bass, keyboard, and field recordings of quotidian sounds like a leaking faucet or camera shutter. She further fleshed out the demos with “four-track tricks,” like flipping the cassette backwards and pitch shifting. As for lyrics, Auf der Maur sometimes laid her vocals down with stream-of-consciousness improvisations, or sometimes she read straight from her daily diary.
“I wrote these songs in the context of rising pressure from the major label-driven music industry on myself and my peers to make glossy hit songs to dominate radio airwaves,” Auf der Maur said in a statement. “These songs are the sound of my internal experimentation and a way of keeping the Montreal art girl alive inside. These sounds are the quiet and private side of the girl who joined the big American major label rock band.”
