Veruca Salt is:
Louise Post, guitar and lead vocals
Stephen Fitzpatrick, guitars
Kellii Scott, percussion
Nicole Fiorentino, bass and vocals

Veruca Salt’s Louise Post is now walking through all the right doors. The singer and guitarist for one of the most successful female-led rock bands of modern rock took an extended break from music, realigned her life in a new town, and put together her band’s strongest lineup to date. The resulting album, Veruca Salt IV, reflects Post’s extraordinary evolution as a confident and powerful singer-songwriter, and her group’s mixture of ferocity and melodic prowess.

Post said that Veruca Salt has made the strongest record of its career, but it happened because she stepped away from it all, gained perspective and realized what needed to happen for her band, featuring longtime guitarist Stephen Fitzpatrick, former Blinker the Star/Failure drummer Kellii Scott and bassist Nicole Fiorentino, a former member of the Los Angeles dark-wave band Radio Vago. She knew that Veruca Salt flourished when all the conditions were right: massive U.S. radio hits like “Seether” and “Volcano Girls” and the band’s string of huge overseas singles from 2000’s Resolver were a testament to that.

So, she packed up her Chicago home, moved to Los Angeles, worked on her music and re-energized herself, eventually finding the people and inspiration she needed to make the revelatory rock of Veruca Salt IV, featuring the first single, “So Weird.”

“For a while, I felt like I was banging my head against the wall, trying to put together the perfect lineup for my band, the perfect label, and not feeling like I could release anything until all my ducks were perfectly in a row,” Post said.

“I started following this philosophy of going where the love is — as corny as that sounds,” she said. “Just sensing around me where there was an open door and where the door was shut, and choosing to walk through the open door. I started gravitating toward similarly healthy, creative, productive and happy people.”

That creative energy comes through viscerally on Veruca Salt IV, Veruca Salt’s debut for legendary independent record label Sympathy for the Record Industry. Produced by Rae Dileo (Filter), Veruca Salt IV gets its monster kickoff from “So Weird,” powered by Fitzpatrick’s arena-ready guitar lines and Post’s distinctively fierce and melodic lead vocal. Written about the odd mélange of eccentrics, fame junkies and groupies that glom onto famous bands on the road, the song began life as a riff in Fitzpatrick’s collection, a show-starter on their 2005 tour that Post and the band fleshed out into an instantly addictive Veruca Salt mainstay and obvious first single.

“In cases like “So Weird” and “Centipede,” the first two songs on the record, those were riffs that were kicking around in Stephen’s arsenal for years, just waiting to be turned into full-blown songs,” said Post, who began working with Fitzpatrick during sessions for Resolver, but only started writing with the guitarist in the run-up to Veruca Salt IV. In the process, she discovered a “partner in crime,” the kind of guy who was fated to be a rocker from an early age.

“He was the kind of kid who learned all the metal riffs in his bedroom,” she said. “I love his taste, his aesthetics and his sensibilities.”

Post found similar common ground with Veruca Salt’s multi-talented rhythm section. She describes Scott as her “dream drummer.”

“He’s the drummer I’ve been waiting for my whole life,” she said, before breaking into fits of laughter. “That’s a phrase I never thought I’d ever say. He hits so hard, his fills are tasteful and creative; he plays in this intensely sexual, exciting way. They say every band is only as good as its drummer, and Kellii brought us to a new level.”

She also found a secret weapon in Fiorentino, whose resonant and melodic bass lines were her initial selling point, but then Post heard the former Radio Vago member sing. They soon found that their voices melded into that perfect, sisterly harmony that has characterized Veruca Salt’s music since the beginning.

“She sings like an angel,” Post said. “Harmony is what I’ve loved to do since I was a little girl. I love the sound of two women singing harmonies together, and Nicole blew my socks off in the studio. We hadn’t had a lot of time to develop our singing and our harmonies together, but it was a magical surprise, because we hadn’t had the two years of singing harmonies with acoustic guitars that I had with Nina Gordon (the co-founder of Veruca Salt who left the band in 1998). But it was a great turn of events: I went from having Nicole just singing on the new songs to having her sing on almost everything. I even had her replace the harmonies I had done myself. I wanted her voice all over the place.”

Those tightly integrated vocals take the spotlight on the hook-filled “Blissful Queen,” one of the record’s most immediately gratifying power-pop songs. However, Post handled all the vocals on some of the album’s most personal songs, including the spellbinding “Wake Up Dead.” That song was inspired by a childhood friend’s struggle with drug addiction, and it is one of the band’s most heartfelt, and passionate ballads to date, with Post accompanied only by piano, cello and acoustic guitar.

And now, with Veruca Salt more powerful than ever, Post is ready to rock the fans who came on board with earlier albums such as American Thighs and Eight Arms to Hold You and turn new fans onto her band’s instantly identifiable, melodic hard rock. She knows that both new and established fans will instantly fall for Veruca Salt IV, because she has been in love with it from the beginning.

“We lived, breathed, ate it, slept it, dreamed it,” Post said. “It was my 24/7 obsession, but not in an unhealthy way. It felt like a poetic fusion of these individuals to create this piece of art. What I love about making albums is they are documents of times in a band’s life. I instinctively stayed true to the aesthetic I established with this band while trying to write lyrics that reflect where I am now.”

“There was so much love that was put into the album,” she said.

— George Lang