June is Pride Month and all month long we’re spotlighting queer Austin musicians of today and the legends who paved the way.
Terri Lord was raised in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. She became enraptured by the drums before she started kindergarten and got her first real drum set when she was nine. She immediately started her first band, Terri and the Termites, featuring Christmas lights and her friends dancing on top of a dining room table. It was a telling start to how Lord would approach her music career for decades to come.
Lord moved to Austin to study film at UT in the early 1980s. She joined the city’s burgeoning punk scene, sharing stages and gaining attention from groups like Big Boys and the Dicks. Lord says she’s been in over 30 bands over the years, including the Rite Flyers, Girls in the Nose, and Lord Douglas Phillips, but her most national project came in the mid-90s with Sincola. This was a ”sexually grotesque” rock quintet who finished 1993’s SXSW with the dream every performer seeks: a record deal. Sincola released What the Nothinghead Said in 1995 and returned to SXSW that year as one of the premier acts of the festival.
Since then, Lord has remained in Austin, playing in dozens of bands, running her own recording studio, teaching the next generation of drummers, and being a coach for Girls Rock Austin. Lord took home the Austin Music Award for Best Drummer in 1982 and 1983 and was inducted into the Austin Music Hall of Fame in 2004, where, in true Terri Lord fashion, she had to immediately leave the ceremony to get to a gig.
