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As a teen growing up in Northern California, Catherine Egbert played in punk bands while producing various forms of dance music under different names in the long shadow of Skrillex and the early ’10s EDM boom. Her current project, saoirse dream, synthesizes both halves of her musical pedigree into maximalist cyberpop, and though she describes it as the newest incarnation of her “forever-running solo project,” it’s become a lot less solo as of late. “It’s a lot more rewarding to play parties with other people playing with you,” says the 24-year-old musician, now based in Portland. “I realized how much I felt like I was missing, because I’d been making music that was intended to be played by myself.”
After debuting her new live band on an East Coast tour in March, Egbert will perform with the full saoirse dream lineup at McMenamins Mission Theater on June 17 alongside Michael Cera Palin, Aren’t We Amphibians, and local faves Swiss Army Wife. The band consists of Egbert on guitar and siblings Cleo McKenzie on bass and Roy McKenzie on drums.
“I think a lot of the way that I worked by myself was making up for a lack of resources,” Egbert says. “Now I know an incredible drummer and an incredible bassist who are as excited about my music as I am.”
Egbert describes her music as hyperpop, a broad term that encompasses a variety of pan-genre fusionists inspired by dance music, mainstream pop, emo, video game music, and the cutting edge of experimental electronic noise.
“I started making [dance music] when I was 12, then I set it on the back burner to be a bassist in a punk band,” she says. “And then I realized all of this shit rocked really hard, and there were other people on the internet who were combining both of those things.”
Though Egbert was happy to work in a movie theater and gig on off days, her bandmates found the Santa Cruz music scene limiting. “What happened was, the bands I was in kind of hit the ceiling,” she says. “Becoming a bigger band meant we were driving to different cities.”
After dropping out of college, Egbert moved to Portland, having heard of a bustling music scene in the city. The only problem: She made the move in March 2020.
“I signed a lease on a place, and then COVID happened,” she says. “That drove me back into the internet scene.”
Egbert got a gig working behind the counter at a local Subway (her insider tip: Don’t order the tuna) and began honing her trademark style across a series of self-released albums. “I had a lot of time, and it allowed me to make a lot of music and be constantly releasing it,” she says.
Egbert’s first album as saoirse dream, let the sky in, came out in January 2021 and featured songs written as far back as 2018. She considers this “album number zero” and prefers to think of everything*, released in September 2021, as her proper debut.
By the time she put out star★☆ in 2022, shows were beginning to come back, and she found herself with something of a local following based on the music she’d put out on the internet. Her first show as saoirse dream was an acoustic guitar set in August 2022 at the now-shuttered venue Mano Oculta a month before her “second” album came out.
“I didn’t expect to meet people there who were there for me when I finished,” she says. “One person asked me why I wasn’t playing hyperpop. I was like, oh wow—people do fuck with my music.”
Once again, the deterioration of American infrastructure after the pandemic proved to be an unexpected boon for Egbert. She worked at a Target at this time, and when it closed for COVID, the company legally had to pay her for three months she would’ve otherwise worked. The influx of time and money allowed her to completely devote her energy to the self-titled album she released earlier this year.
It’s a quantum leap in artistry and sound quality from her earlier work, and she’s the first one to admit it. “I think the self-titled was the first album I went into trying to make an album,” she says. “Before I had all these fragments of scattered half-songs. With [the self-titled] I knew what I wanted, I knew what it was. I just had to put it all together.”
SEE IT: Saoirse dream plays McMenamins Mission Theater, 1624 NW Glisan St., 503-223-4527, mcmenamins.com/mission-theater. 7 pm Tuesday, June 17. $24.25.