Cole Haden is the queer indie frontman of your dreams

Cole Haden is singing to me. His band Model/Actriz are playing at a Manhattan venue called Night Club 101, and he’s on the dance floor, prowling amongst the crowd, and now he’s maybe a metre away from me, eyeballing me seductively while singing Doves, a spiky ballad from the band’s new album, Pirouette.

I’m simultaneously thrilled and mortified – the louche, flamboyant Haden is wildly charismatic, but this kind of attention makes me squirm. Luckily for me, I’m not his only target. Intense crowd interaction is a staple of a Model/Actriz live set, and he soon moves on to serenade others in the audience. Unlike me, they’re clearly delighted to have their moment.

When I meet Haden for coffee in Brooklyn a few days later, he recognises me from the gig. “Were you there with that man next to you?” he asks. “No, he was cute though,” I respond. Haden agrees. “I was hoping you were a couple and that I was breaking you up,” he says impishly. “I was flirting with you both.”

The characteristically sweaty, raucous gig was a small one-off show ahead of Model/Actriz’s biggest tour yet, with at least 32 dates booked across the US and Europe until September. The band formed in Boston in 2016 after drummer Ruben Radlauer and guitarist Jack Wetmore saw Haden, a fellow student at the Berklee College of Music, perform. After watching him “writhing on the floor in a corset, fake blood dripping down his face,” they immediately asked him to join their band. In 2019, bassist Aaron Shapiro completed the four-piece.

Two years after the triumphant tour of their acclaimed debut Dogsbody, comes Model/Actriz’s second album, Pirouette. The music within remains compellingly abrasive: tense, menacing noise rock full of scuzzy, distorted guitars and mercurial percussion, while Haden’s voice ranges from a sultry murmur to an operatic soprano to a guttural growl.

Lyrically, Pirouette finds Haden moving away from the myth and metaphor he favoured on Dogsbody and exposing more of his own vulnerabilities. The grungy Diva begins as a boast about Haden’s sexual conquests in Europe, but really, he’s “looking for something more/ A home to take you home to.”

There are sweet odes to his sisters (Baton) and grandmother (Acid Rain), while on standout lead single Cinderella, he reminisces about his five-year-old, unrealised desire to have a Cinderella birthday party. “And when the moment came, and I changed my mind/ I was quiet, alone, and devastated,” he moans (in the song’s transgressive music video, he finally gets to act out his dream).

A 90-second spoken-word interlude called Headlights is about a high school crush on a friend of a friend. “Over time I started hating him, or I started hating myself/ But I hated most how I’d pray each night/ Asking God to make him see me in all the ways I couldn’t,” Haden sings.

“The process of finishing Dogsbody felt like a new dawn,” Haden says. “I had a chip on my shoulder then, and I was really bitter about my love life, and I was angry about a lot of the sadness that I carried with me from childhood.”

‘Lady Gaga put out Bad Romance and I started figuring it out – yeah, I’m gay!’

Haden is gentler with himself now, and on Pirouette, he’s more able to make peace with the pains of his past. “I really wanted to speak to my inner child, that was the mission statement,” he says. “I wish I could have heard my future self speaking to my younger self as a child, and I appreciate the ways our music can help people see themselves, especially people who might feel lonely.”

Haden says he didn’t have any deep friendships until he was around 14. “Before that, I was a very lonely kid and I didn’t really know how to help myself,” he says. “And then Lady Gaga put out Bad Romance and I started figuring it out – yeah, I’m gay!”

Gaga was a formative influence on Haden. “Like Germanotta, Stefani/ Pull the weight from under me,” he sings on Dogsbody’s Crossing Guard, referencing both Gaga (born Stefani Germanotta) and Gwen Stefani. On Pirouette, Haden channels Gaga and fellow divas like Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Janet Jackson and Kylie Minogue, infusing the heavy riffs and anxious beats with a dance-pop spirit that’s especially evident in the live shows.

“What I love about [Minogue] so much is that she doesn’t really carry a lot of baggage in her music,” he says, naming Aphrodite as his favourite Kylie album and her 1988 gem Turn It Into Love as one of his favourite songs. “I think she represents what an unabashedly fearless pop song should sound like,” he says.

Legendary performance artist Marina Abramović is another, less obvious influence on Haden’s stage presence. In high school, he travelled to New York with a friend to take part in her project, The Embrace. “I hugged Marina for about two minutes and I cried,” he says. Another of Abramović’s projects, The Artist is Present, was composed of prolonged staring contests. “Marina showed me that eye contact doesn’t have to be scary,” he says, as I’m reminded of his intense gaze the other night. “It’s more multitudinous.”

When I tell my friends, big fans of Model/Actriz, that I found the show hectic – in a good way – they tell me it was tame compared to other gigs, where they would go home with bruises from all the moshing and slamming their bodies into other crowd members. For the band, the shows are even more taxing.

“Jack was limping at the end of our last European tour,” says Haden. “He was banging his guitar into his hip so much there was a bruise all down his leg, and he couldn’t walk.” After screaming into the microphone for nights on end, Haden was often left with bleeding vocal cords. “My throat will bleed again, probably,” he says with a laugh and a shrug.

Outwardly queer frontmen are not the norm amongst noise rock bands. Possibly for this reason, people would often come up to Haden on the Dogsbody tour and ask if he was really gay. “I was like, ‘Am I really standing here right now?’” he says. “I thought, ok, it needs to be even clearer on this album because I don’t want there to be any question about it [his gayness]. I want someone who needs someone like me to listen to, to have no question that I’m there for that.”

Haden’s angsty confessions often inspire messages from fans who have experienced or are going through similar turmoil, who then get to thrash out their demons at the live shows. “When we’re playing a gig, it’s like we’re hosts to a party and I want those people to be able to come there and feel liberated from [their worries] and feel welcome in celebrating who they are,” says Haden.

“Being gay and queer is painful, especially romantically and especially in this climate in America – and everywhere. But I think we have to fight to make the world around us reflect the one we want to see outside of that.”

Model/Actriz’s Pirouette is out on Friday.

To read more from Spectrum, visit our page here.