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The air inside the Cambridge Room at the House of Blues in Cleveland hums like a live wire, heavy with a buzz you can almost taste. This isn’t the big, cathedral-like main hall; it’s a pocket-sized furnace with a roof low enough that the band’s sweat and the crowd’s breath will inevitably swap DNA. This is punk rock’s preferred greenhouse, a place meant for bodies to collide, not for eyes to sit back and spectate. The sold-out crowd—veteran “Fight Club” lifers and the freshly bitten stragglers pulled in by a roaring word-of-mouth leans in like the stage is a campfire, the heat from their bodies a small, restless galaxy orbiting the band’s tiny sun.
When the house lights tank, the noise that detonates is bigger than the room. Coco Kinnon, guitar-slinging Dan Fuson, and bass-wizard Austin Luther, with their hired drummer, slide onstage like a match struck in a dark room. There is no countdown, no polite intro; the first howl is the hyperactive opening chord of “You Look Like a Drunk Phoebe Bridgers.” The move is surgical. That cheeky, half-absurd title is their most infamous grenade, and anyone mistaking it for a simple burn will quickly learn the fire is much prettier and much uglier than a simple diss.
The band has made its story clear: this song is a direct hit on a toxic, gaslighting manager who once shadowed a friend. Leaning into the opening chord, they turn the mic into a shield and a banner, carving the truth into the air. No one will mistake the message again; what could read as a cheap headline erupts into a weaponized anthem of survival.
Kinnon is a live wire, a comet on the risers, and the room can feel the spark. She prowls like a tiger, the set list barely keeping pace with her, and the rage of the track becomes her living skin. When she howls the first breath, the crowd roars it back, one chorus of furious, can’t-take-it-anymore. “Go ahead, I let you take the first punch, / ‘Cause honey I know you ain’t got much,” isn’t a dare; it’s a tattoo of inner strength. Fuson’s guitar cuts the air with blades of fire; Luther’s bass is the vampire heartbeat that drums the floor into a shaking life. The first shoulders bump, the first sneakers scrape; the mosh pit stirs like a beast waking. This electric give-and-take between band and room lights the whole review and the feed and the campfire, a fact every vlog and story has carried.
The wave swells higher, and it won’t ease.
They roar into “I Think You Should Leave,” a title that nods at that cult Netflix show like an inside joke, showing they know the memes and still know how to stick a pop hook into a blast of distortion. Right after, “R U FAMOUS” explodes, the perfect stage for Kinnon to spit his smart, cutting fire. The track is a high-velocity roast of the fame-worship circus, loaded with barbed wit and a self-mocking charm that lifts it above simple shout-along anger. Live, the three of them are a fireworks display of motion and laughs, slamming into each other with playful shoulder bumps that look like a choreographed brawl. You can feel the chemistry burning; they play like a family of delinquent attic ghosts who just discovered reverb and the joy of waking up the whole neighborhood.
A wild wave of noise blasts from the stage in Cleveland, and you can trace it back to a tiny room in the basement of a Boston dive bar. Winona Fighter isn’t simply a Nashville band; they are a living rebellion dropped into the middle of a city that didn’t ask for one. Their existence is a master class in how to grow a scene from the ground up, how to take the raw, dented spirit of the Northeast and jam it into the shiny new bottles of the South.
The band’s driving force and lead singer, Chloe “Coco” Kinnon, grew up in Greater Boston, swimming in the city’s punk tide since elementary school. Before she picked up the mic and strapped on a guitar, she was a furious drummer, smashing skins in fiends like Lost Thoughts and Left Hand Blue. When she relocated to Nashville to chase a music-business degree at Belmont, the leap felt like a culture shock. This was the capital of country and pop, yet every street corner seemed to whistle the same commercial hooks. Coco stood on the sidewalk and realized the city “had no punk or alternative scene at the time.”
With the Boston sound suddenly on the other side of the country, she had two choices: squeeze herself into the country mold or let loose and invent the mold herself. Seconds after the crossroads, she picked the second road, vowing to “rev up whatever was breathing here” and drag the sweat-drenched garage of the old hometown along in her duffel. She didn’t want to link up with an existing tribe of plaid shirts and mohawks; she set out to pour the concrete.
The batch of Winona Fighter was mixed over crackling phone lines and broken trash cans. One Craigslist post and a late-night coffee in a dive on the East Side set a chain in motion.
Kinnon first met Dan Fuson—the lead axe-slinger—when the two of them answered a Craigslist ad for a band that was never meant to last. Their chemistry was instant, and when the ill-fated group started to crash, Kinnon pulled a fast one and brought Dan into the new project she was hatching. The first couple of years were all work and little glory. They took every show that landed in their inbox, even when the gig was a cowboy bar full of two-steppers and the next show was a college town dive. The cramped DIY tours and the out-of-place sets sharpened their grit and turned the stage into a home.
The last missing piece rolled in when Austin Luther tapped the bass. Kinnon was in Los Angeles when her sister made the introduction, and Austin, a Minnesota kid who’d spent years at Berklee, already carried the weight of a full resume. He’d played for big pop tours—Sabrina Carpenter, Rachel Platten—yet his real magic showed up when he started stacking harmonies and beats with Kinnon. The writing sessions turned into band practice, and soon enough it felt ridiculous to think of them any other way.
The band laughs that one day Luther showed up for rehearsal with a suitcase and a guitar and just stayed for every song after. With Kinnon’s punk fire, Fuson’s classic rock wizardry, and Luther’s pop production magic, they create a sound that’s at once ear-splitting and radio-ready, ferocious and humming with melody, like a firefly trapped in a killer bee.
Their music is a patchwork quilt of where they all grew up. Kinnon’s dad blasted 90s grunge—Foo Fighters on repeat, especially Dave Grohl crossing the stage from sticks to mic—along with Pearl Jam, Audioslave, and absolutely every Dead Kennedys and NOFX song he could find, plus sing-alongs to Britney and Winehouse. Fuson, who was born in the shadow of the Grand Ole Opry, hears the crack of 70s and 80s guitars and feels the punch of attitude; he’ll stop and talk for an hour about Dave Navarro’s smeared eyeliner and giant solos in Jane’s Addiction and how that’s the real sound he chases.
Luther’s Berklee training combines with his love for early 2000s rock and alternative music to give the group its spark. This mix—what he calls a “melting pot”—keeps their sound alive and refuses to settle into any one box. The result is a punk that invites everyone in and softens corners that usually push listeners away.
Austin Luther shot the name “Winona Fighter” into the air one night, figuring the phrase balanced femininity and masculinity just right, mirroring the band’s pull. Kinnon, hearing it for the first time, shrugged it off, but a few days later the name kept creeping back, and she saw it glowing. She loves Winona Ryder’s roles, yet for her the phrase’s deeper magic is its mix of gentle strength and punk bite. That’s the space they want to carve—powerful, open, and bursting with raw feeling, all in the heart of modern rock.
Their debut, My Apologies to the Chef, is never just a tracklist. It’s a letter pressed onto vinyl, a battle cry for stitches and cranky amps, a diary that shows the scraped knees and loud breaths. The whole project stands the DIY code on its head, admitting mess, craving loud catharsis, and insisting that everyone’s voice is welcome in the din.
The album title and the “Yes, Chef” tour name together tell a sly and clever story about how the band sees the music business. Imagine a fancy kitchen where everything has to run exactly on time and everyone has a rank. In that kitchen, the band are the bold line cooks who toss the menu and fry the rules. This album is the wonderful, chaotic dish they’ve cooked up, and the title is a cheeky, almost mock-humble nod to the “chef”—the playlist-makers and label bosses—saying, “Sorry, we know we’ve burned the sauce, but taste the fire.”
In a world of shiny, triple-processed rock records, Winona Fighter decided to peel everything back. The new album was tracked and half-built by Luther and Kinnon inside their own garage, a little cave they kept between the lawnmower and a stack of cardboard boxes. No, they weren’t broke; they just believe the music should feel real. Luther shrugs and says, “A pro mic doesn’t save a weak song—the song has to be strong first.” So they got crafty like they were in a van: the guitar amps huddled in the closet like a guarded secret, the whole drum set swerving into the living room for a new roomier hit, a tiny $50 mic on the snare next to a fancy old one, just because. Doing it “DIY, raw, and on our terms” gave the record a raw jolt, like you caught the band in the moment before the last encore, high and loud and breathing the same air.
Inside the hot Cambridge Room, the band keeps hammering out the last songs of their first album, serving every note with the same wild heat they first used to write them. The show feels like a how-to clinic on turning the volume of your spirit way up and the volume of your heart same way; it sweeps the crowd from fists-up rage to wild punchy laughs to soft, real honesty and back to a practically sneering courage.
Then the room splits open with a blast of pure brain-on-fire mayhem. The first bar of “Sabotage” cuts through the air like a lightning bolt. This isn’t a flip-the-script cover; it’s a blood-ink brand across the flesh. The Beasties started as a sneering punk crew before warping the entire planet of rap, never once bowing to rules. “Sabotage” is the black-lung, fist-in-the-air collision of screeching guitars and snarled rhymes, a sonic riot that howls exactly what Winona Fighter is built to become. To cover it is to salute the grandparent ghosts and to crown their mission with a brass-knuckled fist of sound.
On the boards, the song melts and hardens into the only kind of truth punk knows. Fuson’s strings fold the shredding, bitten-in bass line into a screaming, blaring lead. Luther’s low end is a freight train of pure body damage, and the fill-in drummer pounds the skins like the kit owes him rent, racing each bar faster than the last. This isn’t memorized notes parading like a cheap suit; it’s a street-corner resurrection, a take-back of the song’s wild, ragged DNA.
Kinnon’s voice is the cyclone that pulls everything into its center. She skips Ad-Rock’s famous yelp and instead pours the song’s frantic dread right from the gut, the sound somewhere between a tortured animal and a bolt of lightning. She may even pick up a megaphone—she’s flashed it before—turning the urgency into a roar that bounces off the ceiling. The room detonates. The pit, a swirling galaxy the band has lit up all night by naming “pit masters” to keep it friendly and fierce, spins into a shared storm of bodies and sweat. Onstage and off, the crowd and crew fuse into one giant, howling machine. Everybody who sees it will keep that howl inside them forever.
The Landing: “DON’T WALLOW” and Tomorrow’s Highway
Once the pretty wreck of “Sabotage” settles, the band eases the letdown with the same care they used to light it. The setlist pulls the crowd to a soft, tender ache before it hurls them back to a radiant finish. They glide into “Johnny’s Dead,” the song that cracks Kinnon’s voice every time because the story is grief and the grief is hers and yours and ours.
Silence sweeps across the room, the wild, slamming bodies melting into stillness as Kinnon lifts his voice and the crowd swells to meet it, every throat roaring his every word back to him. Something deep and electric hangs in the air, raw and real, and for a breath the whole night pivots on this single, aching shine of honesty.
Then, out of the hush, the band hurls the simple, fierce creed: “DON’T WALLOW.” The song’s backstory lines up like a breadcrumb trail for everything they’ve ever done. They wrote it the afternoon they stood outside a festival gate they weren’t on the bill for, hearts banging, shoving flyers for “Johnny’s Dead” into the hands of strangers and feeling just the right amount of silly. They turned that sting into the spark for this blistering, defiant chant; discomfort becomes fuel, rejection morphs into rocket, and now, playing it as the headliners in a room that feels ready to burst, the whole arc snaps into a single, perfect, roaring answer. The grind, the nights of borrowed gear and smashed vans, every moment they could’ve quit slams into this one—an explosion of red and gold that says they will never, ever back down.
They finish with “HAMMS IN A GLASS,” a crackling, nerves-on-fire anthem born of one of those weeks that feels like it’s been run through a meat grinder. The song charges through the air like a drunk comet, the crowd latching on and screaming the hook long after the last chord snaps. The lights come up and the band is gone, but the room is still a hornet’s nest, buzzing with the furnace they just lit.
When the lights lifted over the crammed, sticky, and wild Cleveland crowd, the same feeling buzzed in every heartbeat. It’s the same pulse racing through every ticket-stub review, every late-night text, every half-baked thinkpiece, every city on the “Yes, Chef” tour: this band is circled on the map right before the rocket’s red glare. Tonight feels like the final chance to stand shoulder to shoulder, to smell the sweat and hear the speechless chords, before they lift the whole circus to the soccer stadium sky and we’re stuck watching on screens. Winona Fighter is already more than another “maybe next year” punk name; they are the vital, roaring ingredient the rock world has been begging to swallow whole. They are proof the human engine still runs on roaring gut, on late-night basement plans, on the loud and fierce bond forged when a whole room screams on the same pitch. From the city that once forgot them to the kitchen that’s theirs alone, they’ve baked a noise that is real and red and cannot be drowned.
