By the time Saving Bambi released “Cooking Up Some Girl Shit“, they’d already spent months speeding it up, changing the drums and figuring out how their voices worked together. The four women from Timmins, Ontario, had first played it at a Galentine’s house show in February, back when drummer Carlea Luxton was still getting used to writing her own parts. Nine months later, the song has become their recorded debut, a guitar-driven mix of pop-punk, garage rock and alternative rock, with a big repeated chorus, gang shouts and low and high harmonies.
There’s a fair bit going on behind that chorus, too. Singer and guitarist Mallory Tomiuk wrote the song out of the excitement of starting a band with three other women, then filled it with kitchen jokes about the expectations placed on women. Its accompanying video takes the four of them to a scrapyard to beat up an old truck. And there’s already another song waiting behind it, “Tear the Veil”, which gets into leaving relationships and holding onto your identity.
The band had been playing both originals long before anyone outside their local scene could hear a studio recording. By the time their first single arrived on 4 November 2026, they’d already played bars, festivals and some fairly impressive bills around Northern Ontario.
Saving Bambi first got together in August 2025, following a conversation between Mallory and bassist Jasmine Chenier over a beer. They’d known of each other for years. Jasmine’s brother and Mallory’s fiancรฉ had gone to school together, and the two women had occasionally crossed paths at social gatherings. Eventually, they ended up living down the street from one another.
Mallory had recently seen NOBRO at Pouzzafest and couldn’t shake the idea of putting together an all-women punk band. Jasmine was up for it. They also had somebody in mind for drums, although their approach to recruiting her was a little unusual.
They started telling people around Timmins that Carlea would be their drummer before they’d actually asked her. Fortunately, Carlea agreed, and the three began jamming together.
Karine Goulet joined on keyboards and vocals in November or December. Some of the members were still learning their instruments, and the rehearsals were full of experiments that didn’t always work. Nobody seemed too bothered.
“We would leave practices buzzing. It went from a half-serious idea over beers to something that suddenly felt like it had potential,” the band recall.
The words “Cooking Up Some Girl Shit” had actually appeared before Karine joined. During those early three-piece jams, Mallory, Jasmine and Carlea took a photo on an old digital camera and uploaded it as their first Instagram post. Mallory captioned it with something along the lines of “We’ve been cooking up some girl shit, consider this your warning.”
Friends from school and people around town started responding. Mallory liked the phrase enough to keep thinking about it, although she hadn’t written a song around it yet.
A few months later, the four women went to a local punk gig together after rehearsal. They’d been having such a good time playing earlier that evening that watching other bands made the whole idea of Saving Bambi seem much more achievable.
“Something about being there together, watching the other bands do their thing, made it all feel so possible. We had this vision of what Saving Bambi could become, and suddenly it didnโt feel so far-fetched anymore. It was like we stumbled into something we didnโt even realize weโd been missing.”
Mallory began writing around the old Instagram caption, building the song from the hook. The lyrics came out of the fun the four were having together, with a few pointed jokes about what women are supposed to be doing with their lives.
Growing up with three sisters had given Mallory plenty of experience with a noisy household full of different female personalities. Even the family dog was female. She’d grown up around women who were funny, stubborn, ambitious and occasionally chaotic, and she wanted some of that in the song.
The kitchen imagery gave her plenty to play with. Pots get spat into, pans get broken, the stove gets turned up and dinner becomes a chance to make a mess. Behind the jokes are the demands women grow up hearing about being successful, nurturing, responsible and somehow always looking completely put together.
“Thereโs definitely a feminist undertone to the song, but we never wanted it to feel like a lecture. The kitchen imagery was our way of poking fun at those traditional roles and turning them on their heads. Itโs less about telling men to shut up and more about us doing girl shit together, without apology.”
The music was being put together in much the same way as the band itself. Everybody had ideas, and they tried them out in rehearsals or at gigs to see what stuck.
Jasmine started by following Mallory’s guitar chords on bass. During a demo session with sound engineer Tory Holmes, she experimented with dropping to a low E in the chorus, an octave below the guitar. They liked the extra weight and kept it.
Then came the vocal harmonies. Karine could sing the high part, so Jasmine tried going low beneath Mallory’s lead. That worked too. For the gang shouts, all four gathered around a single microphone and recorded together.
Karine, who has played piano since childhood, uses her keyboards to fill out sections or add a different sound where the song needs one. Sometimes she’ll choose a patch that sounds like a punchy lead guitar. Her singing gives Saving Bambi another voice to bring in on particular lines, with Jasmine also stepping forward when they want more people singing.
“A lot of those decisions develop naturally as we rehearse together,” Karine said.
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She’s also enjoyed listening back to the earliest recordings and hearing how much they’ve changed. The band regularly bring in extra vocals on lines they want everyone to sing, and those decisions can keep changing once they start rehearsing the song properly.
Carlea had a different adjustment to make. She’d grown up reading drum music and learning other drummers’ parts, so being free to write her own was unfamiliar territory. The first version of “Cooking Up Some Girl Shit” was quite slow, especially at that February house show.
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Playing it repeatedly gave her room to work out what she wanted the drums to do. The tempo gradually increased, and she began using the floor toms in certain sections, building the snare parts and easing back when the vocal harmonies needed more room.
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By the time they went into the studio, the song had already changed through months of being played live. Tory Holmes handled the recording, mixing and mastering through Disruptor Records, keeping the parts the four had worked out together.
That process started in front of a very forgiving crowd. Their Galentine’s Day gathering at Jasmine’s new house brought together friends and family for an evening of music. Saving Bambi played a mixture of songs, tried out arrangements and got their first experience of performing together for other people.
Their first public venue show followed on 31 May 2026, when they opened for Montreal Oi! band Bรฉton Armรฉ at Victory Tavern in Timmins.
“It felt like we were learning how to be a band while already being one.”
Things moved quickly after that. Rock on the River came in July, followed by Heart of Gold Fest in September. They found themselves on bills with Plush, MakeWar, Death by Stereo, Weird Nightmare and Fan Club, among others.
For a band whose members had only begun practising together the previous August, it was a lot to take in. They’d started with the simple idea of making music with friends, and now promoters were offering them festival slots. There was some imposter syndrome, especially as the bookings got bigger.
The band remember the point when their thinking changed from “weโre just girls having fun” to “holy shit, people are actually taking us seriously!”
Friends, musicians and local promoters were encouraging them to keep going, and invitations began coming from Sudbury and other parts of Ontario. Their shows were also giving them more time together outside rehearsals, which ended up having an unexpected effect on the artwork for the first single.
Jasmine, whose background is in graphic design and advertising, had originally imagined a cover based directly on the song’s cooking imagery. She tried photographing wooden spoons on her dining-room table. The results weren’t quite right.
She began thinking about the things the women carried around when they travelled to gigs. Before each trip, there were conversations about clothes, guitar picks, cables, hair curlers, butterfly clips, tampons and whatever else somebody might need.
“Somewhere between the packing chats and time on the road, we learned a lot about how we each roll, including that Carlea carries enough snacks to look after all of us. Mom mode never clocks out!”
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Jasmine came up with the idea of a handbag with its contents spilled out. Mallory wanted an amplifier somewhere in the photograph, and Jasmine dug a lacy bra out of her closet. They arranged the objects in their practice space and took the picture just before rehearsing one evening.
The finished cover ended up containing things that actually belonged to the women, gathered from their everyday lives and time travelling together.
They’d also been considering a cooking-themed music video, but a friend with a local business had something considerably more appealing to offer: an old truck they could destroy.
The four headed to a scrapyard and spent three hours one Sunday afternoon filming themselves playing and smashing up the vehicle. Saving Bambi directed the video together, with Tory Holmes, Sophia Hamelin and Ciara Pulice helping with production. Jasmine spent another three or four evenings editing the footage.
Carlea had a pretty good reason to enjoy swinging a sledgehammer again.
Before becoming a mother, she’d spent ten years working as a heavy-duty mechanic, a job involving plenty of physical labour and heavy tools. She’d missed being able to get stuck into that sort of work.
“I spent a decade working in a pretty physically demanding, hands-on environment, and there were days I’d swing a sledgehammer for hours! I think smashing the truck brought me back to that part of my life where I wasn’t afraid to get dirty, use a little physical force and just get the job done.”
The experience hit her harder than she’d expected. She described smashing the truck with her bandmates as unexpectedly healing, a chance to let go of some anger and enjoy a kind of physical intensity she hadn’t experienced in a while.
These days, Carlea also teaches yoga, so she has two rather different approaches to working through things.
“Sometimes you find your zen through yoga, and sometimes you find it with a sledgehammer!”
One of her favourite moments in the video happened without anybody planning it. The spontaneous braid spin that made it into the finished footage was just Carlea messing around during the shoot.
Outside that afternoon in the scrapyard, she has two young boys, aged five and three, a small art business and work driving a school bus. Her husband and family help with childcare, and the other members have already suggested spacing out future tour dates so she doesn’t have to spend long stretches away from her children.
“I wear a lot of hats, and joining Saving Bambi has given me something thatโs just for me, something that fills my cup in the thick of motherhood.”
The rest of Saving Bambi have similarly busy schedules, which can make finding rehearsal time surprisingly difficult.
Mallory teaches school. When the band first started, she was working as a vice-principal, having spent years concentrating on her career in education, working and travelling abroad and completing a master’s degree. She’s since gone back into the classroom.
She’s happy to have an evening activity that involves playing loud punk songs with friends after spending the day teaching, and she likes the possibility of showing her pupils that people can have interests and ambitions outside their regular jobs.
Jasmine manages an onboarding team at a technology company. Her work involves travel, and she’s also the one looking after Saving Bambi’s social media and much of the visual work. People have asked who handles their accounts, which gives her the chance to answer, “Itโs me, the bass player!”
As if that wasn’t enough, she’s president of the Croatian Hall in Schumacher, where she stays involved with her Croatian heritage. She also keeps up her Celtic roots by bringing out her fiddle every St Patrick’s Day.
Karine works in accounting and lives about an hour outside Timmins. She commutes into town for work, so the others try to arrange rehearsals on days when she’s already there. Otherwise, getting together would mean another lengthy drive after a full day at her desk.
All four have had to make adjustments around work and family, and travelling farther from home creates another set of problems. Timmins sits far enough north that even getting to other Ontario cities can take serious planning. They have to think about equipment, transport, fuel, somewhere to sleep and time away from work.
Winter can shut down those plans altogether. Dangerous highway conditions and road closures are a regular concern in Northern Ontario, so the band have to think ahead when arranging gigs.
At home, though, plenty of people have been helping. Friends have filmed their videos, local businesses have supplied equipment or helped with ideas, and musicians and promoters have got them onto bills with bands they’d never expected to play alongside so soon.
“But weโre proud to be a band from the North, and we donโt see Timmins as somewhere we need to escape to make it.”
They’d like to get out and meet more women making music, play more shows around Ontario and eventually reach farther across Canada. For now, they’re making the most of the support they’ve found in Timmins.
There’s another side to their first recordings that people haven’t heard yet.
“Tear the Veil”, the second song planned for their old-school A-side/B-side release, was written lyrically by Jasmine, Karine and Carlea. It deals with the point when somebody realises the future they’ve been building with a partner isn’t the one they want anymore.
Most of the women in Saving Bambi have experienced leaving a marriage or ending an engagement, and all four have dealt with breakups and the difficult process of working out who they want to be afterwards. They’ve chosen to keep those individual experiences private, but they’re comfortable talking about what went into the song.
One lyric, “she won’t take your fucking name”, gets directly at the question of retaining your own identity inside a relationship.
“It’s not necessarily about being against marriage or commitment, but about having the freedom to make those decisions on your own terms.”
The song came from some of the band’s earliest writing sessions, just like “Cooking Up Some Girl Shit”. They liked the idea of pairing the two because of how much they reveal about the same four women. One grew out of the excitement of starting something with friends. The other deals with walking away from a relationship and deciding what kind of future you want.
For now, “Cooking Up Some Girl Shit” is the one people can hear. It’s already had quite a life before the release, from the February house party to festival stages and an early live performance filmed for the Pabst Blue Ribbon Art Can project.
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Saving Bambi released the single and their debut music video on 4 November 2026. “Tear the Veil” is planned to follow in spring 2027.
