The Furious Tits Rage at the Climate Apocalypse

During an angry shower early in the pandemic, Zoe Young began spitting lyrics about the state of the planet.

The San Francisco musician with short platinum hair and dark roots was thinking about the “scariest night” of her life when, back in 2017, she convinced her stubborn father to evacuate his home in Ojai as the Thomas Fire approached.

It was the first time our altered Earth had a clear impact on her life. Zoe needed an outlet, so she started a punk band, The Furious Tits.

“A lot of what came out of my brain was based on climate, and they turned into these punk songs,” said Zoe, who was previously a writer for a large environmental organization.

The Furious Tits, whose members are mostly queer, blend lyrics about climate chaos with irreverent humor and sexuality. In “Cougar Town,” Zoe sings about P-22, a deceased wild mountain lion in Los Angeles, and dating older women. “Desperate Pleasures” is about finding love in a time of climate change and swipe-left culture, with lyrics like “we don’t need to break the ice because it’s breaking up on its own.” Their diss track about golf was inspired by a trip to Las Vegas last year, where they noticed a lush, green, empty golf course in the middle of the desert, watered by “ancient aquifers.” Their newest song, “Microplastics,” details how scientists have found synthetic bits in human brains.

While the links between climate, queerness and punk may not be obvious, Zoe points to how the state of our warming planet affects, well, everything. “Climate change is coming for every aspect of our lives, including our sex lives,” said Zoe, whose bandmates lovingly refer to as the Band Domme. “You can’t hook up in your house if it’s burned down.”

In mid-July, The Furious Tits performed at the Castro Night Market to a relatively wholesome crowd of kids, people eating barbecue and their diehard fans, who showed up in cropped black T-shirts emblazoned with different-sized cartoon breasts. Their usual venues, however, are more of a scene: dark dive bars, queer landmarks like El Rio and kinky events like San Francisco’s famed Folsom Street Fair.

“We found that it turns out the kinksters care about our planet,” said Miju, the band’s bassist, whose nickname is Punk Jesus. She took the stage in black boots and a black latex one-piece at last year’s festival. “I don’t think it was a bait-and-switch to play climate songs at Folsom. Kinky people care about other people.”

The Furious Tits create space for concert-goers to let out their frustration and anxiety about orange sky days and flash floods, inviting them to “tenderly mosh” to their songs. “It’s been amazing to look into the mosh pit and see the audience jump and elbow each other along to a song about how golf is unsustainable,” Zoe said.

For drummer William Renauld, whose alias is Will Yummy, joining The Furious Tits provided him a place to “push anger and aggression” about the climate crisis out of his body and into music that has the potential to sway culture.

“It’s this beautiful ball of angry, horny, hilarious joy that we just get to serve up to the people who listen to our music,” Will said. “Punk can be so gloriously scrappy, and I envision a climate future where that kind of resourcefulness and that kind of resilience is gonna be an absolute necessity.”

The band’s first climate song, “Desperate Pleasures,” came to lead guitarist David Griswold, known as Daddy in the band, as he was pondering online dating culture and the apocalypse. He came up with the lyric “desperate times call for desperate pleasures” to show listeners that “in the midst of these desperate times,” they have to find joy.

The Furious Tits are currently writing a climate-themed album they plan to release in early 2026.

“What’s queer about our climate songs is that we’re talking about changing culture,” Miju said. “Queer people have always had to make new culture because it hasn’t existed before. That means we don’t always have role models. We have to chart our own course.”

As The Furious Tits think about the future, they ponder the higher purpose of their activism: Ensuring their families — and chosen families — are safe as wildfires rage, flooding increases and air quality worsens.

“It’s so overwhelming thinking about how I can leave my children a functional world where they can feel safe and experience joy amid all these overlapping crises,” David said. “Art is what continues to give me hope.”

As the band sets their sights on completing the album, Zoe and Miju want to explore a song about endangered coral reefs. Miju recalls a scene from the Chasing Coral documentary on Netflix, featuring an aerial view of fluorescent coral in shades of purple, blue and green. In the film, the documentarian notes the vibrant colors represent “the incredibly beautiful phase of death,” as if “the corals are saying, ‘Look at me, please notice.’”

Miju’s son burst into tears during the clip.

“I was like, ‘Holy cow, that’s the right response,’” Miju said.

Will, the drummer, dreams of turning lyrics about airplane emissions into the band’s “next hit song” as a way to explore his fears about the planet his future children will inherit.

“It feels so existentially grounding and artistically meaningful to throw these musical darts at these large climate targets,” said Will, “and eke out the hilarity and the joy while doing it.”

Sitting on mismatched couches in the band’s Oakland practice space, surrounded by gear and relics from previous tenants — lamps made from laced-up heels and lyric-filled white boards — Zoe and her bandmates reflect on how music can foster the kind of solidarity needed to survive the climate crisis.

“We rely on each other, and that can be a model for the climate movement,” Zoe said. “This is a long fight, and we don’t even get the clean apocalypse where we’re all gonna die. We’re going to have to figure out how to live through it. There’s no way to do it if we don’t do it together.”