Some shoots feel clinical before the camera even turns on. Everyone is technically doing their job, but the room is cold. People are guarded. The artist is in their head. The images might still come out beautiful, but you can feel the tension in the process. This was not that.

From the second Mandy walked in, there was an openness to her. A real willingness to play. The shoot only worked because of that. At its core, what we were doing was performance. The hand cam, the movement, the looseness of it all, it demanded someone willing to trust instinct over perfection. She gave us that immediately.

“You guys facilitated such a good energy and made it so easy and fun,” she told me. “A lot of the times shoots can be really sterile, or you’re in your head because vibes are off, and you guys just made it a fun, safe environment where I felt like, okay, I’m just gonna have fun with this.”

That word, safe, ended up becoming one of the quiet anchors of our conversation. Because the more we talked about Cherry Bomb, the more it became clear this project is not just a sonic pivot or a side quest while her band is on pause. It is the result of safety, freedom, and time finally converging in a way that let her get back to herself.

“I had this closet staring me in the face of all these sequins and tulle and fabulous colors and opulence,” she said. “And I was like, oh, maybe it’s time to take her out of retirement and connect with that part of me again.”

For well over a decade, Mandy has been creating and touring with her band MisterWives. Over time, she arrived at a point where making space for her own project simply made sense. And in that space, she couldn’t stop writing. What changed was what that writing was now allowed to reach for.

“This was the catalyst for the project, for this to be joyous and fun and just an exercise in authenticity,” she said. “A love letter to her, and with that, a permission slip for everyone else to be their biggest, boldest self.”

That line stayed with me. A love letter to her. It says so much about the project and the person behind it. Cherry Bomb is not some fabricated persona dropped in to create separation from her past work. It is actually the opposite. It is Mandy getting closer to the little girl who wore sequins to kindergarten and sang “Respect” by Aretha Franklin for the talent show. The one who already had names like Glitter Bomb and Firecracker orbiting around her long before she ever needed to explain herself.

“I always had this firecracker energy,” she said.

What I appreciated in our conversation was how nuanced she was in talking about the relationship between Cherry Bomb and MisterWives. MisterWives didn’t suppress her ability to create the way she does within Cherry Bomb. She was very clear that the band is a collaborative effort, and that collaboration itself is one of its strengths. But she was also honest about what happens when your creative life exists inside a group, inside an industry, and inside a genre that can all subtly lead to filtering parts of yourself out.

“You’re not going to be like, well, this is everything that I want to do, because there isn’t space for that,” she said. “That’s not in a negative light. That’s just what comes from the beauty of a band.”

But the external forces around that band life were different. Harder. Less generous.

“We were dropped by every label. I used to be on shoots and A&R would tell me what not to wear, to suck in my stomach,” she said. “You were just constantly bombarded with, hey, change everything about you.”

And then she said the thing that really opened the wound underneath all of it.

“I want to feel, I don’t want to feel shame for being a woman like the music scene did.”

See, Cherry Bomb is not just about sequins and bows and camp and color, though it has all of that. It is also a reclamation project. A refusal to keep muting the parts of herself that once made other people uncomfortable. A refusal to keep editing out femininity just to survive in a male-dominated scene.

And what makes that reclamation land is that it does not come through as bitterness. It comes through as liberation.

“If I’m gonna do this, it needs to be fully emboldened and liberated,” she said.

You can hear that in the music. But even more than that, you can hear it in how she talks about writing now. I asked her what had changed, if the process itself felt different, or if she was simply tapping into different parts of herself.

“I think the only thing that has changed is I’m a little bit more daring in saying the thing that I was a bit more fearful to say in the band,” she said.

That blank canvas gave her something else too. Not just honesty, but intuition. She told me one of the challenges of doing this project has actually been learning what she likes when it is not filtered through five other people. Learning to trust her own taste again.

“As someone who has had an issue with trusting intuition, it’s been a really good exercise,” she said. “Okay, what do I like without it being filtered through what everybody else likes?”

That feels like a bigger story than just one project. It feels like the emotional backbone of Cherry Bomb. The songs are personal, yes, but the deeper narrative is that Mandy is rebuilding a relationship with her own instincts in real time.

She said she probably wrote thirty songs before she fully found Cherry Bomb. Early attempts still felt too safe. Too close to the sonic language she already knew. There was a point where she had to draw a line and say this project could not just be an extension of what came before.

“I was like, okay, I can’t just have this be an extension of the band. This needs to be my own identity,” she said.

When I asked if there was a specific song that felt like a declaration of that freedom, she pointed to “Never Be Me, Motherfucker.”

“She feels like a really good North Star for the attitude and freedom that has come with this project,” she said. “It was the first song I wrote where it was like, I’m letting the broken pieces lie, and I’m not going to try to piece them back together.”

That is such a powerful shift. Not because it suggests pain is gone, but because it reveals a different response to pain. In MisterWives, she described a lot of the writing as ruminative, doubling down into the wound. Cherry Bomb still comes from deeply personal material, but it processes it through a different lens. One where joy itself becomes the act of rebellion.

“Joy is rebellion,” she said at one point, and that might be the thesis of the whole thing.

Not in a toxic positivity way. Not in a fake “everything is fine” way. But in the sense that dressing up, being loud, letting yourself feel fabulous, playful, feminine, and free in a world that benefits from your shame is a radically defiant act.

And that is why Cherry Bomb feels bigger than a genre exercise or a side project. It has mission in it. It has service in it. I told her during the interview that the artists I most want to keep working with are not necessarily genre aligned, but mission aligned. The projects that matter most to me are the ones where the artist is trying to hand people something, not just show off what they can do.

When I said that, she answered in a way that got even more specific.

That is exactly what the project feels like. A bridge. A return route. Not just for her, but for anyone listening who has had pieces of themselves dulled by time, by industry, by shame, by other people’s expectations.

And the beautiful thing is that she is not doing it alone.

Throughout the conversation we kept coming back to the people around Cherry Bomb. Matty, her partner and creative collaborator. Jared, her longtime manager. Leigh, her publicist. The whole ecosystem around the project feels unusually safe, unusually loving, unusually invested in her winning for the right reasons.

“It’s just been nice to be like, it just feels very safe,” she said. “I’m very aware that it’s a small but mighty team, and everyone that is on this team is so, so special.”

That safety matters because play is fragile. People talk about freedom in art like it’s something you can just will into existence, but most of the time it has to be protected. It has to be nurtured by the right people, the right timing, the right trust. And Cherry Bomb sounds like what happens when all of that protection is finally in place.

As Cherry Bomb begins to take shape in the world, “Digital Girl,” out today, feels like a clear entry point into everything Mandy has been circling. Not just sonically, but philosophically. It holds that same tension the project lives in, between freedom and pressure, expression and expectation, the version of yourself you are and the version the world tries to script for you.

“Digital Girl is my love hate confessional to my dreams and the systems they exist within,” she says. “An unsettling reflection of modernity and how much we sacrifice who we really are in response to who we are told to be.”

You can hear the shift in it. The spark. The moment something locked in.

“She was the first song I wrote for Cherry Bomb that ignited the spark and unapologetic energy that I needed for this project. A total rejection of the impossible shapes we are constantly pressured to bend to. I hope she is a much needed reprieve from the endless comparison perfection trap doomscroll that lives in the palm of our hand.”

That is it. That is the thing. The glitter and the grit. The softness and the edge. The play and the rebellion. The bows and the bruises. Cherry Bomb is pop, yes, but the mentality is ***punk***.

In a world constantly asking you to shrink, refine, and perform, Cherry Bomb feels like the opposite. Not an escape, but a return.

And maybe that is why the project already feels so alive. It is not asking permission to be understood too quickly. It is not trying to make itself tidy for the sake of a cleaner narrative. It is letting all sides exist.

Cherry Bomb does not feel like Mandy becoming someone new.

It feels like Mandy finally letting all of herself in.