MTV Iggy, January 10, 2012

If you came for the severed pig’s head, you’re too late.

Ditto, possibly, for the blood-stained butcher’s apron — though Teri Gender Bender, the leader and frontwoman of the punk-inspired band Le Butcherettes, has not yet removed that trademark prop from her performance wardrobe. She may still, when she feels so moved, urinate onstage. Certainly, her rants and random pronouncements in Spanish and English and her daredevil dives into the crowd seem destined to carry on.

But by her own reckoning, a transformation is afoot for Teri Gender Bender, née Teresa Suarez. At 22, her music has (dare we say) matured and her creative personality fleshed out, having absorbed more than a little upheaval in the five hectic years since 2007, when she launched Le Butcherettes as a pissed-off teenager who was reading Simone de Beauvoir and feeling trapped by the stereotypical expectations placed on a young woman in Guadalajara, Mexico.

Along the way she’s overseen four total overhauls of the band’s line-up; released a brash, angry 2009 EP, Kiss & Kill; made the big move from Guadalajara to Los Angeles; and put out a stunning 2011 album, the still-raw but more melodic Sin Sin Sin, produced by the protean Omar Rodríguez-López, of The Mars Volta, At The Drive In, and countless other ventures.

EXCERPTED. READ THE WHOLE STORY AT MTVIGGY.COM