She remembers feeling cornered—the sound guy hovering over her, his breath sharp with beer, his tone sliding from advice to accusation.
“It was terrifying,” said Juliet Bradley, 24, lead singer of local band, Iliad. Born and raised in Miami, Bradley has been surrounded by music her entire life—yet has rarely seen women leading it. That night, she was in a lineup with three other groups—all men. She was the only female on stage.
The venue was poorly prepped: sound bounced off the bare walls and one of the vocal monitors was completely dead. When the feedback grew worse, the sound guy blamed Bradley, claiming she “wasn’t singing loud enough.”
“I just knew—in my bones—that if I were a man, he would’ve never treated me that way,” Bradley said. “None of them would.”
While local lineups are mostly men, Bradley, uses it to fuel her powerhouse performances on stage. Her story isn’t one about waiting to be invited, but claiming space.
Finding Her Frequency
Before she had a band, or even a clarinet, Bradley had a voice.
At four years old, standing in front of the TV in her family’s living room, she would sing along with “The Little Mermaid” soundtrack. She’d hum a note just above or below the melody, fascinated by the way the sound waves vibrated against each other.
“I discovered those sound waves at a very early age,” she said. “I’ve always had a certain ear for music.”
By fifth grade, she was learning the recorder, then the clarinet. “Music’s always been a part of my life,” she said. “I never really stopped.” She moved from clarinet to piano, taking private lessons from a family friend. At fourteen, she picked up a guitar for the first time after seeing her cousin play it. “I thought she was really cool,” Bradley said. “And I just wanted to try it.”
After a heart-wrenching breakup during her high school years, she began uploading songs to SoundCloud, teaching herself production along the way.
“I dated this loser long distance, and the breakup was so bad that I wrote a bunch of songs about it and put them on SoundCloud,” she said, her tone turning reflective. “A few of those songs got a good amount of attention… but I did get a little bit bullied for it.”
Still, one track stayed with her— “Control,” written in 2018, a song about “losing control of your reality,” Bradley puts it. It was the first time she realized her writing could carry something bigger than her.
After leaving an abusive relationship, she craved connection again. “I was in a very, very, very abusive relationship right before I started Iliad,” she said. “I just craved a sense of community after being isolated from the people that I love for a long time.”
The Beginning of Iliad
She didn’t want to make music alone anymore.
In 2022, she started Iliad from scratch, holding auditions and building the band herself. “It was half craving community and half wanting to see more representation in the scene,” she said. “I wanted to show people that I can also do the same thing that all these men are doing.”
By the time Iliad began rehearsing, Bradley already knew what she didn’t want. She’d seen enough of Miami’s music scene from her past relationships to expect tension. Bands that argued more than they played, egos clashing over setlists.
“Their dynamic was very, very tense,” she said of one group she once observed. “I had expected conflict. I had expected disagreements.”
So she built Iliad on a different foundation. “I wanted to go into it very, very blind,” she said. “We’re all equal here. We all share the same ideas, the same values and we’re all striving for the same goal.”
Their first rehearsals took place in her former manager’s garage, 45 minutes from her house in Homestead. “I would go all the way down there almost every other day,” she said. “It was really difficult at first because we had to teach the new members what we already had written, but we also had to figure out what to write next.”
Those early sessions—half covers, half originals—were sweaty and full of light-hearted energy. As gigs grew more frequent, the tone shifted from playful to purposeful. “Now we take ourselves a little more seriously,” she said, “but it’s still about collaboration.”
The goal was never perfection—it was building a space where everyone could be heard.
Breaking the Boys’ Club
By the time high school ended, Bradley’s songs had outgrown her bedroom. Iliad today is more than just Bradley’s project.
The earliest member, Arkii Cala, plays bass and works as the band’s technical producer. David Cisneros soon followed on lead guitar, and Tobias Steewsma later joined as drummer. Together, they’ve built a sound that carries the urgency of what Bradley wants her music to mean—emotional, inclusive and loud enough to take up space.
Behind the camera, photographer Cameron Gonzalez has documented the band’s growth from garage sessions to crowded shows. “It’s for the girls, the gays, and the theys,” he said. “That’s really the heart of it. It’s a place where people can dance, scream, and let go.” His photos capture what the band tries to create onstage—a space where people who have been underestimated or dismissed can breathe without apology.
Outside Iliad’s bubble, though, the music industry remains a harder stage for women to claim. From sound engineers to festival lineups to the people deciding who gets booked, the environment around them still skews male.
Bradley has felt that imbalance since her earliest shows, being blamed for technical issues or questions about which of her bandmates she was dating.
Miami New Times journalist Celia Almeida calls it what it is: a “boys’ club.” “There’s a comfort there that you don’t have to earn,” Almeida said. “Men have that level of comfort that women don’t have the luxury of in that kind of environment. If you don’t have that from the jump, because you’re in a space where you feel like the other, you’re already at a disadvantage.”
Almeida argues that the imbalance isn’t about talent—it’s about access. She explains that when an entire scene is built on competition for its limited space, women have to work twice as hard to reach their male competitors’ level.
“Women have historically been stereotyped as being in competition with each other because there were so few roles and so little room for them,” she says. “But once there’s more, you really see what the true nature of us is—to be in community and lift each other up.”
That’s what Bradley wants Iliad to be. Not just a band, but proof of what happens when women and their collaborators carve out room for each other, instead of competing for scraps.
Owning the Stage
Being on stage didn’t erase the challenges Bradley faced, but it changed how she met them. Sometimes they arrived in small ways—a drunk man shouting “Who are you?” in the middle of a set, or someone asking which bandmate she was dating.
“It’s always so weird when people ask me that,” she said. “Like, who’s your boyfriend? What do you mean? I am the boyfriend.”
Typically brushing those moments off with humor, she’d rather save her energy for the music. “I actually like it when people underestimate me,” she said. “Because when I prove them wrong, it’s priceless.”
That underestimation became fuel. When Iliad opened for Mustard Service this past August, she felt something shift. “There were so many people there,” she said. “Everybody was a little tipsy; the vibes were fantastic.”
That night, nearly 300 people filled the room, chanting along to one of her songs after she told them to repeat one of her lyrics. “Hearing that many people chant one of our songs was crazy,” she said. “Even though they had no idea who we were.”
It was the kind of show that reminded her why she wanted a band in the first place—community, collaboration and joy.
After shows, she still makes time for connection. “When people express to me that the music has made them happy, I love it,” she said. “If someone tells me, ‘Wow, your music is so good, you’re such a powerhouse on stage,’ that makes my entire night.”
Her favorite moments are the ones with young women or queer fans who come up shyly to say hello, sometimes with their parents. “It’s surreal,” she said. “When parents come up to me and say, ‘My daughter loves your music’—that’s one of the reasons I still do this.”
Control, Chaos, and Claiming Space
Bradley calls Iliad’s sound “indie-pop,” but what she writes reaches deeper. She’s drawn to the parts of life that blur at the edges: losing control, rebuilding connection and finding calm in the noise.
Her unreleased track “Skeletons” turns friendship and grief into melody. “Throughout my life, I’ve lost a lot of good friends,” Bradley said. “People change, they disagree, they have disagreements within themselves… It’s normal, it’s okay. But the latest one [loss] that I had really affected me in ways I did not expect. I was like, ‘How do I cope with this?’”
She’s been asking that question for years, and answering it through music.
“Control,” one of her earliest songs, remains a quiet manifesto. Written at 17, long before the band, when she still doubted her place in music. In the chorus, she sings, “I’m holding on, even when it slips away,” a line that feels less like surrender and more like proof of endurance.
Now, when she steps on stage, Bradley’s voice doesn’t ask permission. It cuts through feedback and chatter, layered with every version of who she’s been: the girl who sang along to “The Little Mermaid,” the heartbroken teenager who uploaded her songs to SoundCloud and the woman who built a band so she wouldn’t have to make music alone.
What began as a way to cope has become a way to connect. Every lyric she writes, every show she plays, pulls her closer to the sound she’s been chasing. Not perfection, but truth.
Bad monitors, drunk hecklers and voices louder than hers are interactions she’s bound to run into her entire career, but she’s learned how to tune them out. It’s not control she’s chasing anymore—it’s clarity.
