Taco Sallie

Tacocat to the ever-evolving punk-rock soul of Portland’s Sallie Ford.

Tacocat
Tacocat

Friday at Hi-Fi Music Hall will showcase a fantastic fuzzy spectrum of garage rock, from the surf pop of Seattle’s Tacocat to the ever-evolving punk-rock soul of Portland’s Sallie Ford.

“We wanted to play a bunch of our news songs,” Tacocat’s Emily Nokes (vocals) tells EW on speakerphone from a van barreling toward Arizona. She’s referring to Tacocat joining Sallie Ford for this mini Western tour.

“We just recorded a new record,” Bree McKenna (bass, vocals) chimes in. “It’s not an announced thing — we just wanted to try it out.”

While Tacocat is no new kid to the block — it formed circa 2008 — the band may have only entered your media-soaked consciousness in 2015 when band members — and MTV — called out Katy Perry for ripping off their dancing-shark motif for her Super Bowl halftime show. Exhibit A: Tacocat’s 2014 music video for “Crimson Wave,” a hilarious, kitschy ode to menses off the 2014 album NVM.

But forget Katy Perry: We’re Team Tacocat, anyway, because the band rocks a solid punk-pop sound and writes some of the wittiest lyrics coming out of the Pacific Northwest today.

“It’s an extension of how we talk about it as a band — the things we care about,” McKenna says of their tongue-in-cheek feminist bent. “Everything has a good sense of irony and satire. We think that satire is pretty powerful; to me it’s more powerful than screaming at people.”

For longtime fans, expect to hear some yet-to-be released songs the band says have drawn comparisons to The Cranberries. “It sounds a little bit darker,” McKenna says.

“It seems like a perfect bill,” Sallie Ford says, while also on the road to Arizona, of touring with Tacocat.

Ford, along with her eponymous band Sallie Ford, recently wrapped up a European tour. They were in Belgium when the November Paris attacks happened and had to cancel a Paris show in the aftermath. If you’ve followed Ford from her days with The Sound Outside, you know Paris is close to her heart (listen to “Paris” from 2013’s Untamed Beast).

“We were supposed to go to Paris the following day,” Ford tells EW. “I love Paris and I have a bunch of friends there, and I spent time in that neighborhood where [the attacks] happened. I’m trying to stay hopeful about things.”

While winding down touring for 2014’s Slap Back, Ford says she’s already working on tunes for a new album. “I’m hoping to go into the studio early next year,” she says, adding in an email later: “My main goal is to blend what I did with The Sound Outside and with the new band, so maybe not as ‘rock.’”

She continues, “I wanna be inspired by soul and ’60s music, especially the vocals. I am always attracted to raw, emotional music.”

Tacocat and Sallie Ford play 9 pm Friday, Dec. 11, at Hi-Fi Music Hall; $12 adv., $15 door. 21-plus.