Grace McKagan, courtesy.

When her punk band the Pink Slips broke up during the early part of the pandemic and Grace McKagan set out as a solo artist, she wanted to show off a different, softer side of her music. Her first solo EP, 2022’s Heart of Hearts, showed a much more vulnerable side of the artist on purpose.

The thing is, the daughter of Guns N’ Roses’ bassist Duff McKagan loves the hard stuff. And McKagan still had songs she’d written as a teen for her band that she didn’t want to let die. Her three latest singles, which she’s been dropping since last December—“Ting Ting,” “Angeline,” “Checkmate”—all date back to the Pink Slips days. She was done waiting and wanted to get them out into the world.

And she’s got more of those on deck, which she’ll mix with equally raucous new songs that will eventually comprise a mixtape she’s planning to release sometime this summer.

She plans to play some of them when she performs at BottleRock Napa Valley. She last attended with friends and family when her dad’s band played in 2021.

“I think my new sound is gonna be more in the vein of that industrial punk sound, and I think now it’s popular,” McKagan said recently during a video call from her home in L.A. “I was too scared to put it out before.”

The Pink Slips had run their course around 2020, and all its members were interested in exploring different projects. Being separated during lockdowns sped up the dissolution.

McKagan said she didn’t see herself becoming a solo artist. Thanks to her dad, all she had known were bands. That made the decision harder. Talks with the other band members held great importance. It helped that the band’s longest-serving member, keyboardist Trent Peltz, stuck with her, now in the role of bassist. Her boyfriend, Blues Williams, joined the creative team as her guitarist. Both have their own projects, and they support each other in any way possible, she said.

McKagan’s initial musical inspirations, the likes of Iggy Pop, Sex Pistols, David Bowie, PJ Harvey and the Kills, were seminal to her life when she started the Pink Slips while a high school sophomore. She never stopped expanding her research into music history and now counts Sleigh Bells, Mazzy Star, Peaches and M.I.A. as additional inspirations for the music she’s writing now.

She described her mixtape as “industrial pop,” influenced by various forms of the indie sleaze sound.

“I am a little nervous to put out some of these songs because they were recorded on a computer that got lost. There’s only one version of the song, and I don’t want to re-record them because there’s these particular sounds we had … that we can’t get again,” she said. “They’re just raw demos from what they were at the time. …I don’t feel like [they are] super representative of my work ability now, but honestly, ‘fuck it.’”

This punk ethos isn’t lost on Grace McKagan. They’re not the best songs she can make now, she said, but they were fun to write and fun to dance to.

“Not everything has to be so fucking perfect all the time,” she said.

Other than her music, Grace McKagan has taken after her supermodel (and best-selling author) mom, Susan Holmes McKagan by modeling, and has gone back to school, pursuing an education in creative writing.

“I still model when I can. … I think it’s a really cool opportunity to meet other creatives and just learn about the fashion environment,” she said. “I think you learn so much about being on set and just seeing how the photographers work, and creative directors and stuff. I don’t take it for granted.”

She took classes at Seattle University but is now enrolled at Santa Monica College right now. At one point, she considered the University of San Francisco. She’s particularly invested in British literature.

“I really love reading Oscar Wilde and William Blake, Chaucer,” she said. “I actually want to get a tattoo that says ‘Tyger Tyger.’ I just saw [a Blake] exhibit at the Getty, and it was super cool. … I hope one day to incorporate my music and my love for writing and poetry and literature all together.”

But McKagan wants to write about music, too, whether it’s reviewing albums by others or talking about them on the radio. She recently applied to transfer to larger schools with her existing credits.

“I find out in a few weeks. Fingers crossed,” she said.

She credits both of her parents for supporting her and her New-York-based sister Mae’s creative endeavors. Mae is a fashion designer. Dad Duff McKagan has never worked with his daughter in the studio but has shown her the music world in plenty of other ways. She grew up performing for her parents from the time she was 4 years old.

“I was really lucky that I got to grow up and watch Scott Weiland perform [with Velvert Revolver],” she said. “He was a big inspiration to me as a frontwoman. I think his energy was super enigmatic, like no other, and we miss him.”

Follow editor Roman Gokhman at Twitter.com/RomiTheWriter.