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Back in 2023, Jessica Boudreaux had plenty of reasons to be tired. She’d been fronting Summer Cannibals for more than a decade, with their rigorous touring regimen peaking at 200 days on the road in 2019. She’d been building out Pet Club, a recording studio behind her Milwaukie home, which she had just announced was fully operational in January. And not least of all, she’d been grappling since late 2020 with a breast cancer diagnosis and its subsequent treatment.
“In 2023, I was still technically in treatment. I had, like, a year of big treatments, and then I had two years of oral chemo,” she says. “Even though I was kind of getting back to normal, I didn’t have the energy or the stamina or the motivation in the way that I did before with the band, and I didn’t see it returning.”
It seemed her fellow Cannibals, craving some normalcy, were aligned, and the band announced their breakup on March 28 of that year.
While she continued to heal physically and emotionally, Boudreaux devoted more time to helping others with their projects as a collaborative jack-of-all-trades at Pet Club, where she leverages her skills as a songwriter, producer and engineer. She also released a solo album, The Faster I Run, last July, with a different sound—and intent—than Summer Cannibals records past. “There’s a couple songs that lean rock, but overall, I wouldn’t call it a rock record—it was therapeutic,” she explains. Many of the tracks on the album have a dreamy mellowness reminiscent of Jay Som; others skew more toward the art rock sensibilities of St. Vincent.
Perhaps the album’s sound also fit better with who Boudreaux saw herself as at this point in her life, fully adult. “I was like, I’m softer now, I’m calmer now…I go to bed at 9:30, I don’t drink, I’m kind of a homebody.”
But cancer also led to a PTSD diagnosis, and in working through it, Boudreaux redefined her relationship with anger. “I’ve always been afraid of anger…When I got sick, I kind of felt like anger was toxic, but in therapy, I realized that it’s holding on to anger, [letting it] fester and not giving it a place to go.”
And so she started writing new songs, some of them—but not all of them—angry. “There’s an underlying need for release that I feel like I was really craving and found in writing this stuff,” Boudreaux explains. “Just getting to yell sometimes is super important.”
When she showed the new material to her friend and former bandmate Devon Shirley, it was pretty obvious where they fit. “Dude, these are Summer Cannibals songs,” Boudreaux recalls him saying. “And I was like, I think they are.”
The band, including Shirley on drums and Ethan Butman on bass, publicly announced their return late last month. Their reintroduction to the stage comes Aug. 21, opening for L7 at a 40th anniversary Crystal Ballroom show. “I’d told a few bookers in town [we were reuniting]. We didn’t expect to play a show this soon because we’re literally right in the middle of recording. But when L7 asks, we will make it happen.”
Summer Cannibals has been recording the new songs at Pet Club, with Boudreaux helming production. After being sent out for mixing, a new, as yet untitled album is slated for release sometime in 2026.
Boudreaux gave a disclaimer and a laugh before sharing a rough demo of the song “My Gut”: “Just keep in mind that there’s a lot happening and we’re still playing with things.” Even in its early form, some hallmarks of Summer Cannibals are front and center: fuzzy guitar, pounding drums and an anthemic yell of the chorus—My gut has never been wrong. But Boudreaux is also apt in her description of the music as a more grown-up version of Summer Cannibals: Lines like I fed you my joy like blood to a leech are markedly more poetic than previous iterations of the band, trading youthful anger for something more measured, and Boudreaux’s growth as a songwriter is evident in the tighter play between melody and lyrics. Perhaps maturation is making your anger work for you.
SEE IT: Summer Cannibals opens for L7 at Crystal Ballroom, 1332 W Burnside St., 503-225-0047, mcmenamins.com. 8 pm Thursday, Aug 21. $51.75+.
