In a music industry that habitually prizes smooth surfaces over raw purpose, Sarah Herrera always strode out of step—and magnificently so. For years, her voice, both literally and metaphorically, has torn through the din with jagged honesty, searing satire, and an unvarnished disdain for the mechanisms that trade on creativity. With outfits like Pancreatic Cancer and The Tommy Lasorda Experience, and a body of work that shifts from gut-busting humor to profound anguish (often within the same song), Herrera has long been a turbulent yet indispensable presence in the underground punk landscape.

But now, the iconoclast makes her exit. After yanking her entire discography from all paid streaming services in a defiant act of principled rebellion—a move that effectively torched her own career—Sarah has determined this will be her final interview. This isn’t the conclusion of an album cycle or a touring break. This is the ultimate end.

In her own forthright words, Sarah Herrera guides us through the repercussions, the driving philosophy behind her drastic choices, the prosaic realities of her dead-end day job, and the artistic legacy of a career that encompassed everything from critiques of global power to the simple act of swimming, and even the liberation of screaming obscenities at slow old ladies at toll booths. True to character, she pulls no punches and offers no quarter, especially to herself.

This isn’t a celebratory send-off. There’s no calculated comeback. No glossy rebrand. This is just Sarah Herrera, raw and real to the bitter end. And that, unequivocally, is exactly how it should be.

Welcome Sarah! Some people are saying you made a bold statement when you pulled all your music down off of Spotify last month. Some say it was the most punk rock move ever.  And some are saying all you did was tank your own career. What would you say?

I suppose it was a bold statement. And I guess it was a punk rock move, I don’t know about the most punk rock move ever, you’d have to dig up G. G. Allin and ask him, but it’s up there. And yes, I 100% tanked my own career. My label (Insurrectionary Records NYC) called me a few hours later, I held the phone away from my ear and let them yell for a while, I just said “uh-huh” every 30 seconds or so, but the upshot is that both my band and myself as a solo artist were dropped. As in immediately. Do not pass go, do not collect $200, when you hear from us next, it will be coming from our lawyers by certified mail. I’ll never get it, junkies broke the locks on the mailboxes in my building a long time ago looking for AARP discounts or something. Whatever. Sue me, you can have my crappy microwave. If I see someone in a suit and tie through the peephole of my door, I’m going out the window like I usually do – I’m on the second floor, so it’s only a 15-20 foot drop to the ground. Happens a lot, maybe I should get a rope ladder. My knees are starting to hurt, although that may be from something else.

What was the thinking behind it?

When I was a kid, if I heard a band I liked and couldn’t illegally download them on a torrent site, I went out a bought a CD at my local record store – I think they were like 11 or 12 bucks. And the artist I guess gets a dollar or two. Now, people put on Spotify or Apple Music or whatever. Let’s say 10,000 people happen to dig the same album I’m listening to. Or maybe 100,000. And that band gets a check. For a penny. Maybe two.

I’ve spoken (probably ad nauseam) about the problems I have with late-stage capitalism as a predatory economic system. And everyone says yeah, yeah, it sucks, but what can you do about it? Well, I can do what I did, I guess. That was my thinking. Nothing more than a symbolic gesture, a small ripple in the ocean, but I felt it had to be done.

The NYC punk scene is a tight-knit community; we’re all friends except for a few dicks here and there. So let’s say you have an unsigned band going into a studio, paying an engineer, possibly a producer, paying for studio time, travel time, paying for a distribution service, working for months to perfect an album. They’re out of pocket for thousands of dollars, and then people stream it for free. Don’t get me wrong, stream away, I’m all for art as a public good. Me personally, my bands and I never monetized on any streaming services, getting a check for 40 bucks would have been an insult, I would have felt like more of a whore than this industry already makes you feel like. But how sustainable is all of this for that hypothetical band? It’s not. Eventually the only thing out there is going to be bad rappers mumbling into a cell phone over some rhythmic banging that their dishwasher is making and clicking “upload”. That’s probably not a CD I’m going to run out and buy.

Walk us through a typical day for Sarah Herrera.

Sure. Alarm clock goes off at 6:30 AM. I ignore it. One the seventh try I drag myself out of bed, head pounding, feeling like crap. Four cups of coffee, handful of uppers, a quick joint or two, and then hop on the subway. Some guy stares at my tits. I give him the finger. I get to work. I’m a small-time punk musician, I’m not going to be playing the Super Bowl halftime show anytime soon, so I have to work a hump job like everyone else. They give me exactly 32 hours a week so they don’t have to give me health insurance. I grab some coagulated sludge out of the coffee pot and sit down at my desk to text my friends. Phone rings.

Me: “Yeah?”

Client: “Hey Sarah, the point of sale system is acting up, we can’t process credit cards”

Me: “Did you turn it off and back on?”

Client: “Multiple times”

Me: “What does it say in the manual? Hint: page 4”

Client: silence

Me: “Jim, did you read the manual?”

Client: “Well … “

Me: “Dude. Read the fucking manual”

Client: “Sarah, there’s no need ….”

*click*

Repeat 25 times a day. Very exciting stuff.

I go home. Maybe we get together to rehearse, or maybe we have a show that night. We get in the van, drive out to Brooklyn or Queens or wherever. Someone cuts me off on the BQE. I swerve and half my beer goes all over on my crotch. I roll down the window and yell profanity. My bandmates laugh at me. We lug in our equipment and play the show. I’ll hang out at the merch table afterwards, talk to people, take a few selfies. Our CD’s are priced at cost, which is $8. That’s right, I’ll pay you $8 to take one of our CD’s, haha.

The venue owner stares at my chest while counting out grimy twenties that smell like a Bulgarian’s armpit. We go out for drinks, and it’s always kind of a contest, and eventually I pass out. They wake me up by yelling into my ear that the bar is on fire, or that the NYPD is here with a warrant. I drive us home (it’s me by virtue of the fact that Jimmy is not a very good drunk driver, and Miguel can’t even get the keys into the ignition when he’s that loopy). 4 AM and I fall asleep on the couch watching Breaking Bad or scrolling through porn sites or something.

That’s it. The Sarah Herrera Show, available on Hulu or some second-rate streaming service. Held over for a record-breaking 25th year. Yippee. Anyone want to trade lives, I’ll listen to any offer. No insurance salesmen.

What would you say has been the major theme of your work?

It really runs the gamut. For starters, I wrote and released 5 songs about pool, to the point where the label had to sit me down and tell me knock it off, no more. I love pool, maybe more than music. 9-ball only, don’t waste my time with 8-ball, nobody plays that shit anymore in my pool hall other than guys out with their dates on a Saturday night and groups of drunken Armenian guys wearing too much cologne, hitting the ball three times harder than necessary and missing the pocket by 8 inches. I did I think 4 songs about my love for drunk driving, and they started to get annoyed, so I wrote the song “It’s Time To Get Serious About Drunk Driving” and told them it was an anti-drunk driving song – it was actually basically an instruction manual set to music, you know, about staying out of the suburbs where the cops have nothing else to do, finding a spot on the door to wedge your elbow against in case you’ve got a cruiser behind you, keeping your high beams off and your window defogged, you know, the basic rules you’re supposed to follow when you first learn to drive. And the title is somewhat accurate, if you’re going to drive drunk, you should be serious about it. Amateurs just give people like me a bad name. I actually got away with that song, that was on our 2024 album “We’re Just Ferocious, We Want Your Heart, We Want To Eat Your Children and Stomp on Their Testicles”.

Those are songs I wrote, because those are my two hobbies – pool and drunk driving, and you have to write what you know, right? First rule of being a lyricist. But a lot of my songs are for the little guy, the guy getting screwed over by a system that I don’t believe in. Both “Support The Troops … Except …” and “Eat Your Sacred Cows” call out imperialism, and “My First Trip To A Whorehouse Didn’t Go So Well” sounds like a goofy song, but it’s a statement about the exploitative conditions that systematic income inequality forces upon marginalized people. We never got to release it, but “I Support Trans Rights Because I’m Not An Idiot” was going to be on our next album.

Ranging from the serious to the more silly, I wrote songs about Rerun from What’s Happening!, about how much I hate Jay Leno, about punching people in the crotch, and about an actual incident where I screamed profanity at some old lady who took like 5 minutes to pay her 40 cents at a toll booth on the Daniel Boone Parkway in Kentucky. We put out “We Stole Some Lyrics But Not Enough To Get Caught (Parts 1 and 2”). I wrote a song about traveling back in time to meet Ponch and Jon from ChiPs. I wrote a song that was basically a fill in the blank template for old people to complain on nextdoor.com. I wrote the song titled “I Know They’re Not Felt They’re Silk I Felt Silk And I Felt Felt I Felt More Silk Than I Felt Felt”, from the album “There May Have Been Others” and the label just looked at me and shook their head. The song Drunk In The Studio (There May Have Been Others)”, which was a Pancreatic Cancer tune off of “Yelling Freebird! At Funerals”, was one single phrase sung about 25 times in a row with varied cadences and intonations.

When we released the video for “I Like Your Afro”, we asked about 80 friends and fellow musicians to go onto YouTube and leave the most horrible comments they could, I think the one that made me laugh the most was “I work at the drugstore that she goes to, OMG is she on some heavy duty stuff”. One friend, he must have had multiple accounts, just typed “JESUS CHRIST IS OUR LORD AND SAVIOR!” over and over. My sister wrote “Sarah, you’re a wonderful sister and I’ve always been very supportive of you, but it’s really sad to see what you’ve reduced yourself to. Please, the door is always open”. We took our favorite comments on that video and used them as lyrics for the song “Don’t Quit Your Day Job (Or Your Night One), also from “There May Have Been Others”. You could probably look up the lyrics online if you felt like it.

And then again, my favorite song that we ever did, “I Guess That’s What It All Came Back To, Didn’t It?” is about committing suicide by blowing yourself up with military-grade explosives. So there’s that.

What bands have you been in and performed with?

Oh God, I hope kids aren’t reading this. Ahh, kids don’t read anymore, they’re too busy playing Mario’s Smash Brothers on their phones or whatever. So, my first band was called vomitsemen. Yeah, I know. That was myself, my first boyfriend D-Train and my brother Matt on drums (he was 12 at the time). Matt’s a goofball, we actually played together in Pancreatic Cancer, but when I had a Facebook page, he would post Happy Birthday! on my timeline like twice a month, and then I’d get a whole bunch of people wishing me happy birthday, and I’d have to explain that it wasn’t my birthday, and eventually I would just type “shut up, Matt”, and then everyone starting typing “shut up, Matt”, so kind of a running joke. The rest of the bands I’ll have to do out of sequential order, because who the hell remembers. I was in RAPE! next, that I remember.

Taking It In The Ass From John Holmes was an early on, also Death From A Thousand Cunts, which is when Miguel and I met. There was Anarchy in Azerbaijan, The Fabulous Starfuckers, Exile on the Cross Bronx Expressway. These bands went nowhere, they really weren’t meant to, this was more like practice dodging beer bottles while on stage. Later on, Exploited Cocks did well, and Pancreatic Cancer did well enough for us to get signed and release an album “Yelling Freebird! At Funerals”. And then of course I was in The Tommy Lasorda Experience, which is probably the only band you know me from. Funny story, it’s been reported that the name came about from me getting drunk and going to vote and writing in Tommy Lasorda for everything from President to City Clerk. That’s actually not true, that was my roommate who did that. She told me the story, and I decided to name the band that. I am not a baseball fan, I had no idea that was a real person. Someone mentioned it a few months later, and I was like oh, crap. I went to the record label, and I was said Jackson, we have to change the name of our band, we can’t do this. He told me to go screw.

How we got signed was that the A&R guy from Insurrectionary Records NYC saw us after a show and asked me if I’d be interested in signing. I told him we’d sign a contract for 7 albums for 200 bucks. I’m not a good negotiator – we had to walk that back.

What’s next for Sarah Herrera?

I don’t want to make any grand announcements, I’m just a dopey unknown punk musician. But I’m done. This is my last interview. I’m so incredibly jaded by what I’ve been through and what I’ve seen the music industry become in my lifetime, the urge is just gone. My record contract and band are gone, I don’t have the heart to start over from scratch. My fantasy was always to be a professional pool player, but that requires 8-10 hours a day of practice for years and years, I can’t spare more than 2-3 hours a night and that’s not going to get it done, I’d never even crack top 50 in the world. I have probably 40-50 demos, some pretty close to finished, some songs with no lyrics, some lyrics with no songs, maybe I’ll do something with them someday, probably they’ll sit on my computer until it inevitably crashes and then they’re gone, along with everything else. So, what’s next for me?

“Hey Sarah, our system is down again, could you give us a hand?”

“Jim, did you read the manual?”

OFFICIAL LINKS: www.sarahherreramusic.com