Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad

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“I think of everything I write as a score.”

For Mia Berrin of Pom Pom Squad, how a song looks is as important as how it sounds.

Oh how I wish I were still teaching writing on the university level. My first assignment: a semiotic analysis of Pom Pom Squad’s video for “Head Cheerleader.” (The song itself is amazing and one of my favorites of 2021.) It’s rife with colors, images, and symbols. I love it, and you don’t see many like it anymore.

But what Berrin did with the video is not surprising if you know her background: she first moved to New York to study acting at NYU. And while the video is awash in vivid colors, red stands out. That color played a big part of the songwriting process for Death of a Cheerleader. In fact, she surrounded herself with it during recording, “lots of red velvet and red vinyl. I had red curtains and wore red gloves,” Berrin says. It was important for her to carve out a physical space during writing that “looked like the internal space of the record. And red is what I wanted the world of the record to look like.” Berrin says that when she writes, she can often feel the shape of the song before she hears it. The easiest way for her to start, then, is to imagine an image that goes around the song, then write from there.

Berrin cites John Waters and David Lynch as influences in the making of her videos, which she says are heavily stylized representations of the world.

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