Squeakie spell their genre with a vowel swapped out, and the joke is the whole thesis. The Oakland band, built around siblings Dakotah and Jessica Cherbak, describe themselves as a cuntry band formed in the East Bay with roots in Texas and Indiana, crooning about what it was like to grow up queer in small-town America. That line has stood since the 2021 debut Steers And Queers, and song titles such as Boy Scout Queen, Preacher's Daughter, Momma Is A Saint and Virtue Signaling Hypocrite do most of the storytelling before a note is played.
We're America Too, released in June 2025, is their most outward-facing record and the first to carry a co-writer from outside the family. Mya Byrne wrote it with Dakotah Cherbak and sings and plays guitar on it, and the band's own one-line description calls it a protest song. Byrne spent eight years in the Bay Area before returning to Brooklyn, came out publicly as trans in 2014, and made her most-heard record, Rhinestone Tomboy, in 2023 with Aaron Lee Tasjan producing; that album is dedicated in part to Patrick Haggerty of Lavender Country, which locates her squarely in the lineage this single extends. Weeks before Rhinestone Tomboy she had already released Burn This Statehouse Down with Paisley Fields, an outlaw-country answer to Tennessee's anti-trans laws. We're America Too is the gentler sibling of that song, its title a plain assertion rather than a threat.
The arrangement is fuller than anything in Squeakie's catalogue. Where Steers And Queers was credited to the two Cherbaks alone and The REDACTED Session from 2023 was literally a band practice put online, this single has a rhythm section (Madelyn Covey on bass, Brian Grupe on drums), Kat Harlowe's fiddle, Ethan Lee's steel, Casey Hudson producing and a master by Piper Payne. The lo-fi tag the band still attach to it is a matter of attitude more than fidelity: Dakotah's voice remains the small, unvarnished instrument that carried Songs From The Psych Ward, the January 2024 collection whose centrepiece is titled I Checked Myself Into The Psych Ward The Day Before Dolly Parton's Birthday.
That title is the key to the band. Squeakie do not treat country as a costume to be subverted; they treat it as the language they were raised in, complete with its saints, preachers and trucks, and simply refuse to leave. The 2024 album Chewed Up & Spittin' Back is all rodeo-clown self-deprecation and sharp domestic detail. We're America Too takes that same voice and points it at the country rather than the county line. It sounds like what it is: two siblings from red-state towns and a friend who has been shouted at in the street, standing in a room in Oakland and saying the obvious out loud.
