This post was written by Hatchet staff writer Margaret Kahn.

“I’ll bring the pussy, you bring the dick!”

Sung in the style of a sweet 1960s girl group — if those girls had been allowed to jam out to The Ramones and rip their jeans — these bold lyrics from indie rock n’ roll band Those Darlins brought cheers from the bespectacled, flannel-shirted crowd at the Black Cat Thursday night.

The four-piece band combined a retro girl-group sound with punk sensibilities, along with a touch of Southern twang — the founding members met at the Southern Girls Rock & Roll Camp in Tennessee, after all.

With serious badassery, guitarists Jessi Zazu and Nikki Kvarnes’ stage antics balanced each other out, with the petite Zazu’s over-the-top theatrics complementing the husky-voiced Joan Jett doppelganger Kvarnes.
“It feels like we are all married and family,” Kvarnes told The Hatchet, describing the tight-knit group that includes drummer Linwood Regensburg and new bass player, Adrian Barrera, who replaced original member Kelley Anderson.

The set spanned a bevy of musical themes across Those Darlins’ three albums, from mournful ballads to acerbic garage rock. The quartet treated the crowd to tracks from their new album “Blur The Line,” playing singles like “Oh God” and “Optimist.”

The heartbreaking tell-all ballad, “That Man,” was the real standout of the night: Zazu took a song about rejection but didn’t take it lying down, brutally slicing through lyrics and embellishing the set with blistering guitar solos.

Summing up the encore with the crowd-pleasing “Be Your Bro,” a song about a girl who just wants to be friends with her pursuer, Zazu growled, “I just wanna run and play in the dirt with you/
You just wanna stick it in.”
Their sound is so boisterous that you want to contain it in your next basement house party, but shows like this prove they’re much too good for that.