[NEW WAVE] Roxy Epoxy is more than 2,100 miles away from her home in Portland, but you can still tell when she’s really excited about something. “We kind of did it ass backwards,” she says giggling over the phone from Austin, Texas, stop No. 7 on the month-long tour she and her new group, the Rebound, are playing. “I guess I just figured it would be better to play Portland when we had some songs under our belt.”

This isn’t Epoxy’s first tour outside Oregon, but it’s her first time at South by Southwest and one of a handful of shows since the demise of the Epoxies, the iconic “robot garage band” she fronted for seven years until it broke up in 2007. Part Karen O and part Siouxsie Sioux, the 35-year-old Epoxy (birth name Meredith DeLoca) led her band from Seattle punk label Dirtnap to opening huge U.K. tours for the Aquabats and Against Me! in the span of three years. The Epoxies earned a cult following with their two records, Epoxies and Stop The Future, but it was their wild live show—often featuring a primal Epoxy jumping around the stage like a Goth Catwoman covered in duct tape—that caught everyone off guard.

“The Epoxies has this reputation as this bouncy, really poppy act, but the songs I started writing became a bit darker, more intricate,” says Epoxy. “A lot of the other guys in the band weren’t in tune with the sounds I wanted to make. We wanted to maintain a friendship, but it was just getting frustrating.”

Armed with songs written over the past five years and plenty of bitterness over the breakup, Epoxy decided to keep her stage name but draft a new lineup last year. The result is Bandaids on Bullet Holes, 12 songs of buzzing New Wave-y pop and dark rock that seem like a logical extension of the Epoxies’ synth-punk sound.

Recorded in October with the help of her boyfriend and guitarist Drat, Band-Aids runs from the squealing keyboard riffs and overdriven guitars of “New Way” to the infectious “I Know I Know,” a potential modern-rock radio hit whose caterwauling lead guitar line apes the Helio Sequence’s “Keep Your Eyes Ahead.” It’s a logical progression, but one that still needed a persona to make it work.

“I’m not a very good musician instrument-wise,” Epoxy says. “I can get songs in my head, but I can’t get them out. That’s what Roxy’s for.”