V Torres Took the Producer’s Chair for “Woman” — and the South Bay Gets It First

For eleven years, Veronica Torres did the thing Los Angeles musicians are quietly advised to do: she kept the job. She was an auditor, then a controller, working in corporate accounting and finance while playing guitar in a rock band on the side. In an interview with Voyage LA, she described the arrangement in a sentence that should be printed on a poster somewhere off Pico: “One foot in and one foot out doesn’t get you moving forward in life.”

Both feet are in now. On September 1, 2026, recording as V TORRES, she releases Woman — seven songs, independently released, and the first full-length she has produced herself. Eight days later, on September 9, she plays The Mint on Pico, the only date currently on her calendar.

At a glance

• Artist: V TORRES (Veronica Torres), Hermosa Beach, CA
• Album: Woman — seven songs, released independently
• Release date: September 1, 2026
• Produced by: V Torres and Steve Aguilar
• Singles so far: “Woman” (June 11), “Winter Solstice” (July 9), “That Night” (August 6)
• Music video: “Woman,” a film by Dylan Pelle
• Sound: indie-rock, beach Americana, desert psych, stripped-down balladry
• Next LA show: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 — The Mint, 6010 W. Pico Blvd., with Sue Foley
• Vinyl: pre-order at vtorresmusic.com

The record she produced herself

The headline fact about Woman is not the subject matter. It is the credit line. Torres co-produced the album with Steve Aguilar, a longtime collaborator, and it is the first time she has taken production duties on a full-length of her own.

She has been direct about why that mattered. “I’ve been in situations before where I felt muted creatively,” she said in the album announcement. “This time, there was safety and freedom. If something didn’t feel fully expressed, we kept working until it did.”

That is a modest way of describing a structural change. A songwriter who is not producing is, functionally, submitting drafts. A songwriter who is producing decides when the draft is finished. The looseness across these seven tracks — the willingness to let a song start as surf-punk and end as a choir, to leave a slide guitar hanging in the space where a lyric would normally go — reads as someone using that authority rather than announcing it.

“Winter Solstice” is a song about not knowing what to say

Of the three previews released so far, “Winter Solstice” is the one that gives away the most about how Torres writes. It came out of a friend’s worst week — the friend’s brother had been killed in an accident — and out of Torres’ own uselessness in the face of it.

“I was in a position of wanting to console and be there for them, but there really was nothing I could do for them at the time,” she says in the release materials. “These words came out fast and the song was written on the Winter Solstice, hence the name.”

That is the whole conceit, and it is a better one than the standard consolation ballad. The song is not about finding the right words; it is about showing up when there are none. Torres extends it outward in a way that most grief songs don’t bother to: “I wanted this song to embody that feeling of being there for someone who’s always there for everyone else. I think in some part of this it was also giving myself that love.”

Structurally it earns the sentiment. The track opens tight and fast, closer to surf-punk than to Americana, then blooms into stacked harmonies on the chorus — the same movement from isolation to company that the lyric is describing. The instrument that does the emotional work is a slide guitar. “When I hear the slide guitar, it feels like a hug,” Torres says. “It feels like comfort and can bring me to tears.”

The single artwork is worth a look on its own: a hand-drawn desert at night, saguaros in silhouette, an owl on a cactus arm under a thin crescent moon and a band of aurora-colored light on the horizon. It is the “sliver of light” Torres describes hearing in the song, rendered literally.

The title track outgrew her

“Woman,” released June 11 with a desert-shot video by cinematographer Dylan Pelle, started as a private complaint and became a communal one. Torres has told the story plainly: “When I wrote ‘Woman,’ it felt heavy. The line, ‘my work never ends, it just starts over and over again,’ felt so fitting to how I was feeling at the time — and honestly, most of the time. But when I started playing it live, women kept coming up to me afterward saying, ‘You wrote this song for me.’ That’s when I realized it had become something bigger than my own story.”

The video puts her in the high desert in a tiger-print coat and a black hat, driving, sitting, walking — a Western without a plot. Torres marked its release with a screening, a live set and a Q&A with the creative team at The Studio in Hermosa Beach on June 11, and there is a twelve-and-a-half-minute behind-the-scenes conversation with Pelle on her YouTube channel for anyone who wants the making-of.

The third preview, “That Night,” arrived August 6 and moves in the opposite emotional direction — raw guitars under a melody that keeps climbing. Torres describes it as “the moment when you go from being friends with someone to falling for them and seeing them in a completely different way.” Between the three singles, the record’s range is already visible: grief, exhaustion, and the specific vertigo of wanting something new.

Seven songs, and at least two of them are old friends

The full sequence runs: “Beginnings,” “Woman,” “Winter Solstice,” “That Night,” “Slow,” “Great Escape” and “I Know Nothing.” Torres has said “Beginnings” wrestles with endings and rebirth, that “Slow” was written against a Joshua Tree backdrop and deals with identity and freedom, and that “Great Escape” came out of the loneliness — and the liberty — that followed the end of her marriage.

Here is a detail the press release doesn’t mention. Two of these songs have been in her live set for years. Her own YouTube channel holds performances of both “Woman” and “Great Escape”, filmed at Hermosa Music Company and posted four years ago. These are not new compositions rushed onto a record. They are songs that have been played into shape in South Bay rooms and are only now getting a definitive version — which is a reasonable explanation for why an album made by a first-time producer sounds as settled as it does.

Before this: a band, a Blu-ray, and a job

Torres was born and raised in Harbor City and now lives in Hermosa Beach. She was a serious enough basketball player to consider going professional, burned out on it, and went to Loyola Marymount as a regular student — where she picked the guitar back up. She had gotten her first electric at eleven and taught herself to play it right-handed despite being a lefty.

Most of her early career went into Gorgeous Got a Gun, the indie-rock band she fronted through ticketed Sunset Strip rooms including The Roxy and The Viper Room. The band released a self-titled debut in 2009, Welcome Home in 2011 and a single, “I Remember You,” in 2016. Their video for “Violent Games” landed on the Blu-ray release of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World — the sort of credit that sounds like a fluke and is in fact how a lot of LA bands got heard in that era.

She dissolved the band and started again under her own name. The EP Real Life Love followed in November 2017, then a decade’s worth of singles issued a few at a time: “Restless Heart” and “Seasons” in 2018, “Golden Hour,” “Best of It” and “Maps” around 2020, “Hitting the Road for the Holidays” in 2021, “Never Should Have Come Here” in 2022, “The Comedown” in 2023. Then the catalogue goes quiet for roughly three years, until “Woman” in June of this year. Woman is what she was doing.

The corporate job ran alongside all of it, and by her own account it was not sustainable. Torres has said the external picture was fine — stable career, financial security, married to her college boyfriend — while she was dealing with “depression and anxiety” underneath it. She identifies the obstacle as “lack of self-worth,” and is unusually plain about the mechanism: “Putting your desires, needs, passion, etc. on the back-burner because you don’t believe you deserve them can lead you down a road that you might not even want to be traveling on.” She saved up, left, did a yoga teacher training that she says “stripped me down to my core,” and went to music full time.

The South Bay part matters

It would be easy to file V Torres under generic “LA singer-songwriter.” The more accurate address is the beach cities, and she has spent real effort building something there rather than just performing in it.

In August 2018 she launched Girl Crush, a curated all-female showcase, with a debut night at Saint Rocke in Hermosa Beach and the stated intention of running it quarterly across LA venues. In May 2019 she played the inaugural BeachLife Festival in Redondo Beach, on a bill that also carried Willie Nelson, Brian Wilson and Jason Mraz. Her record-release activity this year has run through The Studio in Hermosa Beach — the June 11 video launch, and another set on August 8 — and the live footage on her channel comes out of Hermosa Music Company.

The music reflects it. “Funky beach Americana” is her own phrase for part of what she does, and it is more precise than it first sounds: this is coastal music that keeps drifting inland toward the desert, which is exactly the geography of a weekend from Hermosa Beach.

Where to hear it

Woman is out September 1, 2026, independently, on the usual streaming platforms, with a vinyl pressing available to pre-order at vtorresmusic.com. “Woman,” “Winter Solstice” and “That Night” are already streaming; “Woman” and “Winter Solstice” are also on Bandcamp, where the artist’s cut is considerably larger.

The live date is Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at The Mint, 6010 W. Pico Blvd., where she appears on a bill with the blues guitarist and singer Sue Foley. It is the only show on her verified Bandsintown calendar, and it lands eight days after the record — which is to say, the first real chance to hear these seven songs played by the person who decided how they should sound.

V Torres and “Woman”: frequently asked questions

When does V Torres’ album “Woman” come out?

“Woman” is released independently on September 1, 2026. It is a seven-song album, co-produced by V Torres with her longtime collaborator Steve Aguilar, and a vinyl pressing is available to pre-order through her website, vtorresmusic.com.

What is the tracklist for “Woman”?

The album runs seven songs in this order: “Beginnings,” “Woman,” “Winter Solstice,” “That Night,” “Slow,” “Great Escape” and “I Know Nothing.”

What is “Winter Solstice” about?

Torres wrote it for a close friend whose brother had died in an accident. In her press materials she says the words “came out fast” and that the song was written on the winter solstice, which gave it its name. Musically it opens with driving surf-punk energy before widening into harmony-heavy choruses, with a slide guitar line Torres describes as feeling like a hug.

Who produced V Torres’ “Woman”?

Torres co-produced the record with Steve Aguilar, a longtime collaborator. It is the first full-length on which she has taken production duties herself, a change she has credited with giving the album its unguarded tone.

Where can I see V Torres live in Los Angeles?

Her verified Bandsintown page lists one upcoming date: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at The Mint, 6010 W. Pico Blvd. in Los Angeles, on a bill with blues guitarist and singer Sue Foley. She played The Studio in Hermosa Beach twice earlier this year — a June 11 launch event for the “Woman” single and video, and again on August 8.

Who is V Torres?

V Torres is the recording name of Veronica Torres, a singer, songwriter and guitarist raised in Harbor City and now based in Hermosa Beach. She fronted the Los Angeles indie-rock band Gorgeous Got a Gun for most of her early career, released the EP “Real Life Love” in 2017, and worked in corporate accounting and finance for roughly a decade before moving to music full time. She also founded Girl Crush, an all-female South Bay showcase that debuted at Saint Rocke in 2018.

Was V Torres in another band before this?

Yes. Gorgeous Got a Gun released a self-titled debut in 2009, “Welcome Home” in 2011 and the single “I Remember You” in 2016, and played ticketed Sunset Strip rooms including The Roxy and The Viper Room. The band’s video for “Violent Games” was included on the Blu-ray release of “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.”