We gathered in a small room at Treehouse Records in Belmont Cragin late one April night. Out of the people in that room — me and the four members of Laliberté — I was the only one wearing earplugs. Despite being a drummer myself, I worried for the sake of their unprotected ears as the bass drum pulsed through my chest — and even more so once the amps turned on, sending a wave of vibration through my body that caused the hairs on my arms to stand straight up.
It was clear that five people were pushing the room’s max capacity, as there was barely any space for me to set down my backpack between all the cables, amps and instruments, let alone stand without getting in the way. I wound up in the corner, perched on the edge of a leather couch, using cardboard boxes of another band’s merchandise as an armrest. This was apparently the very room Laliberté had played in together for the first time.
Laliberté has been a band for about a year — “a year as of Friday,” Sunny Betz, vocalist and rhythm guitarist, told me, marking the band’s official conception as the moment bassist Shaye Rosengarden uttered these three words: “You wanna jam?”
They put out their debut EP first position in August 2025, a riotous five-song trip that grabs you by the jugular and only lets you catch your breath within moments of carefully crafted interlude. This was before Samara Savine had solidified their place as the band’s permanent drummer. What started as a last minute sub-in for a few gigs in December ultimately led to a serendipitous, meant-to-be moment for the entire band. “At first it was kind of last minute, helping a friend out, and then they stole my heart,” Savine said.
At the time of our interview, Laliberté was preparing to record their first full-length album during the summer. Over the course of three days in the studio this past June, the band managed to track and record nine total songs following a week of nonstop rehearsals. If you do the math, that’s three songs per day.
Catharsis was a word used frequently when I talked to the members of Laliberté. When watching them perform, it’s not hard to imagine why that would be.
Whether you’re seeing them live from a Chicago basement or in a grainy Instagram video taken by an audience member, the raw, reckless energy is palpable. You’ll find your eyes glued to the smudged black stars painted on Betz’s cheeks as they scream and writhe around the floor, the soles of their feet visible due to their ripped red tights and long-abandoned Mary-Jane shoes.
“Getting on a stage is like an opportunity to really create an experience for everyone who’s watching it and also to step into another world yourself,” Betz explained. “That’s like the beauty of art.”
“[It’s] just like an all-encompassing kind of release,” said Rosengarden. Guitarist Matthew Hocutt echoed this sentiment, explaining that while he isn’t always comfortable sharing his thoughts and ideas to people — “especially when they want it, you know?” — he is able to let his guitar do the speaking. “I’m happy to do it through music,” he said.
And, boy, if instruments do in fact talk, then Laliberté sure knows how to make them wail.
After playing a set at the Empty Bottle in April, the band had left the stage and immediately needed to have their gear repaired. According to Rosengarden, despite having an overall good show, a broken bass string and some guitar issues transpired into them throwing their instruments down and Savine piercing her snare with their drum stick. “Last night we broke all our gear on stage,” Rosengarden messaged me the next day. “[S]onic death.”
It’s not surprising that ‘90s grunge band Hole was brought up when discussing musical influences. Courtney Love, infamous for her tattered ball gowns and smeared makeup perhaps as much as she is for her punchy lyrics and grating vocals, was a prominent figure (alongside riot grrrl pioneers Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and Allison Wolfe of Bratmobile) in paving the way for women to exist unapologetically within heavily male-dominated rock scenes.
Betz listed Love and the kinderwhore aesthetic as one inspiration for their stage outfit, which, in addition to the red tights and star makeup, includes a dainty white blouse, pigtails, and most notably, a bulletproof vest. “I like to think it’s a reflection of the expectations for gender,” they explained. “I’m trying to play with how people view attraction. It feels sometimes like a prank that I’m playing on [the audience].”
While the concept behind Betz’s outfit emanates the ethos of subversive femininity attributed to kinderwhore and the riot grrrl feminist punk movement, the idea and execution of the final product was creatively developed through a process of their own calculated experimentation. “It’s kind of been my evolving interrogation of [the] idea of how femininity can be a trap, but it can be a tool, too.”
For Savine, wearing red — specifically their red scarf — is one way she chooses to express herself on stage. “It’s sort of like a symbol of rebellion, in a way,” they said.
Similar to Betz’s stage outfit, Savine’s red scarf is present at every show. However, its function goes beyond mere fashion accessory purposes; throughout certain points of Laliberté’s set, Savine’s scarf becomes a prop. At one of their shows, I watched them leave their spot behind the drum kit and wave and drag the garment around like a matador cape, draping it across her arms and over her face. The show turned into something of an avant-garde performance piece as Savine weaved amongst the crowd, carrying herself like an otherworldly entity while the rest of the band played a discordant interlude. “I think more drummers should be communicating emotions through movement, and that movement doesn’t have to be just the way they’re hitting the drums,” Savine explained.
While Savine finds the freedom to subvert the expectations of a typical drummer through their performance, they’re also figuring out how to do so with the way they play. “I think with being trans and figuring out who I am in terms of the way that I present, it’s kind of [like], ‘Let me sort of get more comfortable playing like myself as a drummer,’” they said. “I think I find myself wanting to play in a way that is new because I’m living in a way that’s new.”
It seems that, beyond catharsis, breaking free from conventions is both a tenet as well as an actualization for Laliberté. Their devotion to artistic expression and challenging the status quo is clearly at the core of the band, which is evident in their esoteric visual and sonic aesthetics, raucous live performances and fearless determination to be authentically themselves even — or perhaps especially — in the face of adversity.
“It can be so draining to constantly be striving for this perfect thing that is just unattainable at the end of the day and also feels like a life-or-death thing to achieve,” Betz said, relating to the experience both in terms of society’s expectations for women and trans people, as well as being in addiction recovery. “I write about suffering a lot … a lot of our lyrics are about addiction, and there’s a lot of isolation and loneliness.”
They spoke about the pressure they put on themself to be perfect during recovery, but that hearing people be honest about their experiences and mistakes helped them feel less alone. They hope their lyrics can do the same thing for others, regardless of who they are or what they struggle with. “I think as a trans person, the pain and suffering in it is unique in a way, but suffering in general isn’t unique. It’s something that a hell of a lot of people experience of all walks of life.”
I had asked Laliberté what the band meant to them and what they each wanted the band to mean to others — a pretty heavy-handed question. However, their answers seemed to boil down to something pretty simple: that, after it’s all said and done, Laliberté are just a group of friends playing music and looking to find freedom in all the noise.
“I’d love for this project to be a way to free ourselves from expectations placed upon us that are just unattainable and a way to, at least for me, free myself from the idea that I have to be anything but what I am,” Betz said. “I hope that it can be that way for all of us in this band, too. It’s very liberating to be in a band that’s literally called freedom in French. It’s kind of a permission to do whatever the f—k we want.”
Header Image by Claire Macke
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