Bullet Height, hailing from Berlin via the UK, have today released their debut album, 'No Atonement'. To help celebrate the release, vocalist Sammie Doll spoke to us about the effects of social media on young female fans, and how she would like to empower young people through Bull Height's music.

You’ve been involved in the alternative music scene in LA. What kind of role did you have?

I kind of got my start with this website that was called Stickam.com. I was an entertainer on that, and we’d do bi-weekly shows about empowering girls in music and sports, and it would cover relevant things to the people watching, who were mostly teens. It covered things like bullying, depression and mental illness, even eating disorders. We’d bring people in just to talk about that, who were people just like them or people they might have admired. It was very empowering, I was a part of that and that’s where I got my start. Then I played in a shoegaze band in Los Angeles called My Satellite.

Being a part of that scene, how did you learn about the issues that young alternative music fans, particularly girls, are most passionate about? How did that inform the kind of music you wanted to make?

I think that times have changed so much from when I was in school, but the same core issues are there. People are always going to feel self-conscious and like they’re too fat or too thin, people are always going to get picked on, but nowadays with technology advancing as much as it has, people feel like they have this platform to be able to broadcast it or pick on people they haven’t even met. The core issues are still there, but it’s moved onto a larger platform. Kids would just start talking to me through Stickam, then Twitter came about, and they’d ask me advice. I don’t know why they felt they could ask me, mostly because I was somebody removed from their immediate circle that they could speak to, and I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed speaking about my own experiences and giving them some advice on how I would have done it knowing what I know now.

You’ve communicated a lot online since you first started out, do you think social media puts people under pressure and encourages feelings of not being good enough, comparing themselves to others? How can people communicate more positively?

Yeah, social media definitely affects people’s everyday images about themselves. I feel that nowadays, there’s a lot of positivity surrounding body image and diversity, and finally now after so many years of negativity there is more of an influx of positivity from people who are tired of seeing the same “perfect” figure in society’s eyes, or the same “this is how you’re supposed to do your hair”, you’re conditioned to think you have to have all these things to feel beautiful. And I think there is a lot of this movement where it’s more about being yourself and believing that that’s beautiful. I always try to push that with the people I speak with and it always seems to push back in a positive way.

In terms of the album, are there any particular songs on there that mean a lot to you in terms of the message in them?

There’s a lot of emotion that’s expressed in the songs. A lot of them aren’t necessarily positive just because it ranges from bitter to angry to forgiveness. But I feel Cadence is probably the most hopeful song we have on the album. I feel it has a sense of hope when you listen to it and it’s very uplifting.

‘No Atonement’ is available now via Superball Music/Sony Entertainment.