Soundscaper Strawberry Hospital Reclaims an Outcast Genre and Herself

Just Keep Swimming: Strawberry Hospital at Austin Aqua-Dome (Photo by Jana Birchum)

Totally hypothetical survey: Suppose you ask every musician in Texas what age they were when sonic aspirations first occurred to them. As a theoretical average, if 9 years old is a bull's-eye, Neptune Gomez had the misfortune of growing up outside the dartboard. Twenty-four today, the current Niederwald, Texas, resident still harbors shell shock from elementary school, when her dead-­serious attempts to recruit preteen bandmates came up emptier than the rural Texas sky overhead.

"My own lacking abilities notwithstanding, it was impossible to find anybody else in my tiny local sphere who was even willing to commit to the project's ambitions," she says. "I needed to fulfill my vision, even then."

Gomez still hasn't found those bandmates, but a solo setup suits her exacting auteurism far better anyway – even if it means juggling two midi controllers, a keytar/guitar combo, and her own coo-to-shriek vocals when she headlines Chess Club this Friday – the biggest stage in her career so far as Strawberry Hospital. If you're squinting at that name, wondering how bill-topping came to a musician heretofore unknown to Austin's prime venues, think bigger.

On Rate Your Music (RYM to insiders), the internet's foremost music nerd community, Strawberry Hospital stands as one of the most popular locally associated artists of all time. Ratings and comments for the project's four albums easily outpace contemporary Austin breakouts, like Dayglow or Black Pumas. Despite a determinedly sparse social media presence, Gomez receives weekly messages from fans anyway, crediting her music with helping them through tough times and begging for more. (Strawberry Hospital's half-decade discography, a perfectionist anomaly among self-releasing artists, averages 11½ exactingly produced minutes every two years.)

She also lays claim to the surest indicator of burgeoning influence any musician can: cover versions by other artists. Gomez says fan support keeps her moving through "moments of desperation," but when the producer declares she's "actualized her youthful dreams," she's not talking about creative recognition. No, that statement is intended 100% literally.

"If I were to go back and give 9-year-old me the tools to create music, Strawberry Hospital would sound exactly the same as it does now," she says. "Maybe it's Peter Pan syndrome – always feeling the way I did then. Only my knowledge changes."

A seamless merger of fight-starting metalcore riffs with bubbly, euphoric EDM textures, Strawberry Hospital's headsprung soundscapes truly are animated by a spirit of guileless innocence. The music unites opposing extremes with the world-embracing inclination of a wide-eared child – someone blessedly ignorant of the multidecade stigma that long ago separated "happy music" and "sad music" into clashing cultural camps. In Gomez's world, brutal blast beats morph imperceptibly into Dance Dance Revolution-style synth pad thumps, and sickly sweet Auto-Tune melodies provide backing harmonics for piercing black metal howls.

"Utterly incongruous passions can, if rendered huge enough, carry the same message," the artist explains. "That may be my guiding musical conviction. I push the boundaries of what can be put together, digital against analog, joy against grief."

Unlike her instrumental acumen and production mastery, Gomez's creative philosophy wasn't developed in isolation. Strawberry Hospital possibly wouldn't even exist without a formative listening encounter with Björk, whose amorphous cultural presence and predilection for polarized timbres provide crucial inspiration. Still, there's another, far more conspicuous influence to discuss.

If you were breathing the heavy music atmosphere circa 2007 MySpace, it's likely Strawberry Hospital's music awakens some dormant, perhaps repressed, memories. Perhaps you're picturing a gaggle of Hot Topic-garbed scene kids, crouched close to the ground like crabs, nodding their slanty-banged heads in unison to a throbbing techno metal breakdown.

What you're remembering is trancecore – a late-Aughts movement briefly popularized by a clutch of bands like Asking Alexandria and I See Stars. Uniting sugary pop fans and "trve kvlt" metalheads in cries of "trend chasers!" trancecore might be the most widely maligned genre of the millennium. But for Gomez, Attack! Attack!'s "Stick Stickly" is childhood, and her music approaches its sound with unprecedented sincerity.

Detached from the commercialized pop structures that once opened it to dismissal, trancecore's signature sonic collision reveals its message: the sound of coming into your true self at the exact moment warring feelings rip the old you apart, a cleansing fire of unmanageable emotion.

"You can interpret it as a throwback – new generations do tend to reclaim the despised music of their youth," Gomez explains. "But for me, trancecore has always been relevant, always capturing my reality."

The singer identifies as bigender, equal parts male and female, and she's been publicly trans since turning 15. In a deeper sense, the understanding goes back far earlier, as Gomez credits the communities of her upbringing with "othering" her before she did. Despite moving every couple years alongside her family, the artist's androgynous comportment – perfectly at ease bounding from her family's blue-collar labor to more "girly proclivities" – rendered her an outcast across Austin's satellite network of evangelized towns.

But as foundational as Gomez's gender is to her music, she'd rather it not be heard entirely through a trans-minded lens. Outlining each project's laser-focused conceptual intent, her elegantly written Bandcamp descriptions make it clear Straw­berry Hospital explores themes beyond identity: "endearment, mortality, overcoming trauma, unmentionable sentiment." Still, there's no denying that Strawberry Hospital's reclamation of an outcast genre to conjure emotional dysphoria touches a special nerve with LGBTQIA+ fans.

Reviewing 2018's Grave Chimera, RYM user GenevieveGilliam writes that the sophomore masterpiece "[describes] the experience of modern trans identity, where we have to make do with what little we have, afraid that any expression of ourselves will be labeled a joke or ironic."

The album was very nearly Strawberry Hospital's swan song. Made as she fled a household "in denial" about her identity (Gomez and her parents have since reconciled), Grave Chimera equates the sudden end of her childhood with the assumable end of her life. Determined to capture her downward spiral on record, the homeless musician spent $600 on a guitar with only $700 in the bank – "crafting a final dispatch before [she'd] even found an audience."

Thankfully, by the time the album surged Strawberry Hospital to popularity two years later, Gomez could greet her fandom as a blessing rather than salvation. Grave Chimera had already reached the one listener who needed it; the cathartic creation fatefully brought its creator back to shore.

Equally diaristic in its conception, 2020 follow-up Phantasmaphilia captures that happier place right from the cover art: Naked in a bathtub, clutching an unseen other, Gomez revealed herself to be both safely on hormones and in an intimate relationship. Then, an ominous epitaph came carved onto the project's fourth release, January's Data.viscera.

"Strawberry Hospital: 2016-2022."

Right away, fans went into panic mode. Indeed, Gomez says tremors about "being in the public eye" briefly convinced her to retire the project. But after some summer reflection – simmering in the happiest, most stable era of her life so far – she realized those jittery feelings were something else: self-assurance. A newfound "confidence in direction and intent" impels her to pursue Strawberry Hospital harder than ever.

"These albums are my memoirs; I could never stop Strawberry Hospital," Gomez says, maintaining the promise to her 9-year-old self. "I would have to stop feeling things, and right now, I'm kinda feeling great."

Strawberry Hospital tours through Austin, Denton, and Tulsa with Illinois cybergrinders Blind Equation. The local Chess Club kickoff this Friday, Nov. 11, adds Amygdala, ghosthouse, and Blockbleeder.