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Like an outsider art version of Sugababes, or kids singing over Depeche Mode ringtones, there’s something both familiar and odd about Summer 2000 by X-Cetra. Recorded by four preteens in Y2K California, the album distils sleepovers, crushes and butterfly clips into 11 tracks of bedroom pop and Windows 95 R&B, equal parts carefree and gravely serious.
Only 20 CD-R copies were ever made. But a still-unknown person posted one of them online in 2001, and by 2020 the girls – now women – were astonished to find it being discussed on muso forum Rate Your Music. “Pure creative expression of these preteen best friends who love each other and wanted to make art together, and that’s so beautiful,” says one user there; “Definitely on the poppier side of ‘accidentally avant garde music made by children’,” says another.
US label Numero approached them about properly releasing the album, which came out on vinyl – with matching nail polish – in January and has further grown X-Cetra’s cult following. (The 1975 frontman Matty Healy was spotted picking up a copy in an LA record shop.) Now the band are back together and the subject of a forthcoming documentary. “It’s been amazing to reconnect musically and creatively with these girls – we’ve already made two songs,” says member Jessica Hall.
X-Cetra were four childhood friends, aged between nine and 11: Hall, Ayden Mayeri, and sisters Mary and Janet Washburn. “There were lots of adventures,” says Mary of “iconic” 90s summers spent in their home town of Santa Rosa. “We were talking to boys and eventually going to the mall and stuff, but we were also still able to access imagination and play.” The inseparable four formed their own dance troupe and made lo-fi movies, which usually involved “a mistaken identity or gang members, and always murder”, according to Hall. “It’s that perfect age where you’re not self-conscious about it, you’re just ferociously making stuff.”
When the girls started writing songs, they approached Mary and Janet’s mother Robin O’Brien, a musician active on the home taping scene in the 1980s. “Our mom is very respectful of children’s personhood and was not condescending,” Mary says of the album’s recording. “She wanted to represent us in a very authentic way.” O’Brien helped the girls fit their lyrics and melodies to pre-recorded tracks by a German friend, musician Achim Treu. The album’s resulting disjointed oddness is striking, rather like a sassier version of reality TV star Farrah Abraham’s outsider pop classic My Teenage Dream Ended. Speechless has a lugubrious reggae beat; Promises matches girl-group harmonies with ultra-minimal guitar; Wonderland “is using Alice-in-Wonderland imagery to talk about the discomfort of growing up”, says Hall.
Mayeri says the Y2K era “is so popular right now with young people, but it’s all very commercial stuff being recreated” – see the remake of I Know What You Did Last Summer, or how pop star Addison Rae channels peak Britney. X-Cetra were drawing from a “whole quilt of stuff we were listening to, ways we were dressing, and things we were doing that you only really know about if you were there,” she says. As well as the Spice Girls, Mariah Carey and Ace of Base, the girls were into Fiona Apple, the Space Jam soundtrack and Pure Moods mail-order CDs. They loved The Craft (“we were doing seances all the time” says Mary) as much as Titanic. “We were distilling what we saw in the culture,” says Mayeri. “It came out in a warped way because we didn’t understand the context. The situations weren’t relatable, but the feelings were.”
The band’s lyrics pull from a mix of childhood experience and imagined adulthood. The breezy girlishness of Summer 2000’s title track (“party ’til two, sleep ’til one”) is followed by trip-hop and, on Conversation, themes of domestic violence. “The lyrics can be jarring for people: how do these kids know about these adult topics?” Janet says. “A lot of them are about what we thought could happen in adult relationships. [That age] is such a weird time of mystery and intrigue, with all this unknown stuff ahead of you – it’s exciting but scary.”
Janet says X-Cetra were “ready to become the next Spice Girls”, but after the album was finished, they almost immediately disowned it – a combination of the rapid self-consciousness of turning 13, and their confusion at the “dissonant and haunted” sound of an album that they hoped would resemble the polished pop they heard on the radio. “We wanted to sound like hot teens and good singers,” says Mary. “We sounded like ourselves, which was uncomfortable.” The girls grew up, went to college and left their home town, pursuing careers in tech (Hall), finance (Janet), publishing (Mary) and acting (Mayeri, whose TV and film credits include New Girl and Veep).
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Although they never lost touch in adulthood, retaining what Janet calls a “familial” relationship beyond the two sisters, the rediscovery and reissue of Summer 2000 has brought them closer. “The four of us hadn’t been talking regularly for decades until this happened, and now we’re talking every day,” says Mayeri. She is co-producing the upcoming documentary about the band, which will feature their home movies from the time, as well as the new music they made after getting together to film reunion footage last year. “We got back together in our home town and it was four days of sleepover energy,” says Mayeri. “We choreographed a dance; we wrote a song with Robin, to see if we could. It was scary as none of us identify as singers, but exciting.” They’ve since done a second session with producer Owen Jackson and songwriter Alexandra Veltri, who has credits with Y2K icons Paris Hilton and Heidi Montag.
Becoming X-Cetra again has been a full circle moment for the four friends, now in their 30s, creating without the self-consciousness that can plague teens and twentysomethings. “Once puberty hits you start obsessing about being cool, you get boy-crazy, and all of the creativity goes away,” says Hall. “I completely abandoned a very important part of myself, something that really lit me up as a kid. And now it’s shoving itself back into my life.” Mayeri agrees: “In your 20s you’re trying on different personalities, then in your 30s, you’re like, I just want to be who I really am. It’s been a homecoming for us to all reconnect to that and to each other.”
The documentary is almost finished, and the band are keen to continue making music. “We’re still figuring out our collective identity as musicians now,” says Mary. A quarter of a century since Summer 2000, the four friends’ connection and creativity are still palpable – as the Spice Girls said, friendship never ends. “We’re all in,” says Janet. “I want to be making an album when we’re 70.”
