by Benji Heywood (@benjiheywood)
Mulva is Providence, RI’s latest entry in the city’s ever-expanding canon of heavy DIY music. Being in a DIY band in 2024 is both easier and harder than ever. On one hand, the internet has made connecting with other like-minded fans and artists more straightforward. At the same time, the material conditions of modern life have made it increasingly difficult for DIY bands to tour. Plus, the number of songs competing for attention—over 60,000 of them are uploaded to Spotify every single day—means it’s nearly impossible for DIY bands to get their music heard.
But ask Christina Puerto, Mulva’s singer and principal songwriter, and she’ll tell you there’s still power in the DIY ethos. Mulva’s debut album Bitter Form, just released via Sad Cactus, is testament to that power, a bombastic work of emotional resonance that’s just as likely to appeal to fans of Botch as Chelsea Wolfe.
On RI’s first sunny day in four months, Post-Trash spoke with Puerto about her unlikely musical journey and the people who helped her along the way. It’s a story of friendship and how believing in yourself can make all the difference, two qualities that keep DIY music as vibrant today as it’s ever been.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
credit: Philip Columbo
Post-Trash: You’ve been a mainstay in indie music for a while now as a member of Bethlehem Steel and Kal Marks. You’ve been on albums and played shows all over the US. Yet Bitter Form is your first album of songs written by you, correct?
Christina Puerto: Well, that’s not exactly true. However, there was a 15-year gap between when I started to play guitar and finally sharing anything I wrote.
PT: That would explain why I couldn't really find any old bands of yours!
CP: I had a band in high school with my sister and some friends, then in college I was in a band called Mutual Friends, but we weren’t super committed. It took me a long time to feel compelled to share anything I’d written. I had to overcome being self-conscious about sharing something so vulnerable.
PT: So, for 15 years, you’re writing songs in secret?
CP: Honestly, my early songs were terrible. I didn’t start taking songwriting seriously as a craft until I was about 24.
PT: What happened at 24?
CP: A lot. I was going to school for environmental science and while I was in a Ph. D. program, I started experiencing a real sense of futility. It was like, I’m putting in all this effort and literally no one gives a shit that we’re going to die or something catastrophic is going to happen. Plus, my advisor was super toxic. So, I quit.
PT: Did you leaving the graduate program coincide with you starting to take songwriting seriously?
CP: Definitely. I was living in Troy in a super cheap apartment—it was like $250 a month or something crazy like that—and all my musical equipment was set up. I was supposed to be researching but I just couldn’t. That’s when I started writing. Later, I moved from Troy to New York and joined a band with my friend from high school called Dread. He’d written an album of pretty good songs all about the Sopranos. He wanted me to play drums. It was my first experience in the DIY world and we had no idea what we were doing. But it made me realize that I could start my own thing, which I did with a band called Giants.
PT: What happened with Giants?
CP: We were just never on the same page as a band. We tried recording a couple times but it never really worked out. Most of that was due to my lack of confidence. We’d start something but then I wouldn’t feel like it was worth finishing. I began feeling like I was forcing people to do things which made it no fun.
PT: That’s when you joined Bethlehem Steel. What was that experience like for you?
CP: It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I’m so grateful for that experience.
PT: What did joining Bethlehem Steel teach you about being in bands?
CP: The most important thing that I took away was friendship. I made two of my best friends in the world, Becca and Pat, and we basically traveled the country, played music and I had the best time of my life. And I really believe in the music we made. Hopefully we’ll make more in the future.
PT: How does Mulva start?
CP: I moved in with Carl in 2020 in the height of lockdown, we had kind of an unspoken boundary of not playing music together because it can get complicated quickly. But then Kal Marks was having some personnel issues—being in a DIY band is really fucking hard. It’s a crazy thing to do in the best of times, but this was during the pandemic. He’d been talking about wanting a second guitarist, and then I think eventually, one day I said, what if I just do it? And he's like, Are you sure? Like, yeah, I don't have anything going on right now. I just want to play music. I miss doing it. Let me try to help you make this next record.
Meanwhile, I was planning to do a whole record myself of the songs I’d been writing. I started playing drums all the time. I became obsessed. But it was too hard to keep everything straight. I have so much respect for people who can do a whole album by themselves. My friend Adam, who was Carl’s roommate before we moved in together, told me offhandedly that he was looking to work on a project and I was like, great, cuz I need someone to drum on my project!
PT: Mulva was initially a two piece?
CP: There was never a very solid plan. I wanted it to be really low stakes. I know you’re supposed to approach things with hope but that’s not really how I operate (laughs). But, yeah, no, it wasn’t really working as a two piece. And Carl was talking about how he wanted to join a band where he just played guitar. Then I thought Pat from Bethlehem Steel might want to join and I asked and he did, even though it was long distance for him to come up to Boston from New York!
PT: There’s obviously some crossover between your bands. Kal Marks recorded My Name Is Hell with Seth Manchester at Machines with Magnets, right? And he’s the same producer who recorded Mulva’s album. What was recording Bitter Form like?
CP: First, I’ll say that Seth actually has a very reasonable day rate. So that’s important to know. Second, he works insanely fast. It's honestly mind-blowing. You'll be saying something about what you want and won’t even be done with a sentence and he'll already have it figured out ready to go. I knew that if we were well prepared, if we could get everything within a couple takes, we could actually make Bitter Form in three days.
PT: Three days? That’s impressive.
CP: It ended up being even crazier than that! Unfortunately, Seth started getting sick on the first day, and because the boys had taken time off work, we ended up having to get the drums and bass for all 10 songs in just one day before Seth got too sick. It was wild. A week and a half later, Seth found some time and squeezed us in to do vocals and guitars and that was a lot more fun. The first day was a frenzy.
PT: From an outside perspective, Mulva and Bitter Form feel like the culmination of everything from the last 20 years, from the moment you started playing guitar to now, with so many twists and turns along the way. It’s almost like it was fated to happen. So, I’m curious, do you believe in fate? Because on the album there’s references to “seers” and “tellers.” Do you feel like your life has been predestined?
CP: Those references all come from a thought I’d been having when I was writing many of these songs. As a kid and a young adult, I was so scared of fortune tellers. Like, I couldn’t handle it. I realized the fear was coming from dishonesty with myself, a long history of not listening to my gut.
PT: What was your gut telling you that you were ignoring?
CP: It had a lot to do with my past relationship and the life choices I’d made. I’d told myself what the right thing was to do with my life and it had left me at a real low point. I was in a marriage that I wasn’t sure about and never had been. I was working this corporate job I didn’t love. And it was eating away at me. So, quitting my job to join Bethlehem Steel and finally ending that relationship—things that had been so scary for me to do for so long—it made me feel like I wasn’t scared of anything anymore. Like, what’s the worst that could happen?
PT: You said that you were someone who likes to keep your expectations low, but at the same time, after you made this pivotal decision, all these really good things happen for you.
CP: 100%. It was super liberating.
PT: There’s a line in the song “Pray for Brains” that goes “waking up is not just a march towards the grave.” After all you’ve experienced, in your work, in your life, what makes you hopeful to wake up every day?
CP: Definitely making music. It’s easy to get down about it because at this point in time, it is flat out impossible to sustain your life making music financially. My hope for myself and other DIY musicians is to make choices on where you live, how you live, that set you up to have a little bit of time every day to be able to work on music. I wish that we lived in a world where artists could be fairly compensated for their time and labor, but right now that’s not our reality. I also can’t say enough how important it is to build friendships with people who are like-minded and who want to keep pouring their time and hearts into music too... All the bands and projects that I've been a part of are held together by the people who are working on them together, loving each other and wanting to help each other’s songs become real. Friends believing in one another’s music is what keeps this happening.
Bitter Form is out now via Sad Cactus.