Stabby Unicorn can be found playing around Reno, at charity events, after-parties, bars and pajama parties, and, if you’re lucky, you may even catch them with bloody horns on. A nod to their name, the three members of Stabby Unicorn—Rhiannon Box, Daisy Foreman and Eric Foreman—sometimes wear sets of bloody horns on stage.
“We save those horns for special occasions,” Box says.
“Eric’s a really good sport, you know, being in a band with two girls and us pretty much [telling him], ‘You’re doing this today,’” Daisy says of her husband.
The group credits their eye-catching name for some of their turnout at shows.
“It gets people to come see us, which is kind of neat,” Daisy says of the band’s name. “They just say, ‘We saw a name—we have to come see a band called Stabby Unicorn.’”
So what inspired the band’s moniker? The movie The Cabin in the Woods.
According to its members, the band originally had a different name, but after some internet research they discovered another band with the same name in Sacramento. Because they thought it was too close to home, they decided to rename themselves before playing their first gig.
The admitted horror movie buffs said—spoiler alert—the murderous unicorn in The Cabin in the Woods inspired their name, which was originally meant to be temporary but stuck after their first gig.
Box and Daisy’s intense Immersion Composition Society (ICS) sessions, where people get together in an attempt to write as many songs as possible in one day, jumpstarted their band.
Their first ICS session in January turned out 22 songs in 24 hours, three of which they play at gigs today.
“We were barely speaking English by the end of the day,” Box says.
All members of the band write lyrics and music for their songs, and more often than not, they do it together.
“We’re really good at just saying random things to each other in the middle of practice and sometimes that is the inspiration for what we write and other times we like have heated conversation about things that irritate us or we think are awesome and that becomes the topic of the song,” Box says of the group’s collaborative style.
Eric, who described the band’s working vibe as “collective,” says, “[We] bounce ideas of each other. No one is in charge of a certain song or anything. We just kind of let it go to where we wanna take it. … Everybody’s free to add ideas.”
“It’s pretty natural, I think,” Box adds.
The group’s easy vibe comes from years of friendship. Daisy and Eric are married, and Box has been a close friend of the couple for almost five years.
“We get along really well,” Daisy says.
The group’s sound is a mish-mash of multiple styles that Box describes as “experimental, noisy, shoegazey, gothish, awesome. … ’80s noise pop meets ’90s shoegaze.”
And the biggest compliment she says she’s gotten is a comparison to Joy Division.
Eric, who says he sounds like the Cure given his vocal range, says his inspiration for the music he plays in Stabby Unicorn is Sonic Youth and My Bloody Valentine.
While Box and Eric have been playing music and participating in bands for quite some time, Daisy, who played band in high school but hadn’t played music as an adult, is the newbie.
“I started getting into [music] as just a release more than anything,” says Daisy, who bought her first drum kit just months before Stabby Unicorn played their first show.
And while Sonic Youth and Meg White have been inspirations for her drum playing, Daisy says her biggest musical inspirations come from her band mates.
“They’re my music inspiration,” she says. “They tell me to listen to stuff, and I do.”