THE SITUATION I’m lounging at Capitol Hill’s 611 Supreme with two of the bar’s regulars: Kristin Brewster, 26, is blonde and wears tight orange jeans; Dalisha Phillips, 28, sports braided hair and a striped minidress; both are drinking gin. Collectively, they represent the local hip-hop/R&B duo Side Pony.

The girls went to the same high school in Kent, and they both played on the rugby team, but their friendship was slow to start because Brewster was crushing on Phillips’ boyfriend. “I was like, I’m just going to be friends with her, and she’s going to like me so much that she won’t be trying to get with my boyfriend anymore,” says Phillips.

HOW THEY GOT HERE 10 years later, that old boyfriend’s been ditched and the girls are together all the time. They share an affinity for cooking, nail art, and toilet humor, and both work at Aki Kurose Middle School, Brewster running after-school programs and Phillips in dropout prevention. Side Pony—the first musical venture for both—was started in January 2011. They describe the first song they wrote together as “witty and silly and raunchy.”

SHOP TALK Those descriptors still apply to Side Pony’s fresh, sassy music. They recently released an eight-song EP called That Plus Weird, featuring Phillips’ upbeat, audacious rapping and Brewster’s honey-smooth singing, but their most notable release is a song over a year old called “Thicky Thick Anthem.” The track celebrates curvaceous women, yoga pants, and getting your grub on. “I had a hard time writing it at first,” says Phillips. “Everything I wrote was kind of hokey, and I didn’t want it sound like, ‘Oh yeah, this is a fat-girl jam.’ “

What’s the difference between a thick-girl anthem and a fat-girl jam? “One could really just promote taking ownership of sitting on the couch and eating all the time and never getting off the couch,” explains Phillips. “That’s not the direction we’re trying to go, because we’re not like that at all.” “No, we do Zumba,” says Brewster.

BTW: There’s a massively entertaining “Thicky Thick Anthem” video that features the girls dancing in front of green screens of fried chicken, doughnuts, and stacks of buttery pancakes while Brewster sings about eating two steaks and Phillips raps about carrying condiments in her bag. “It’s definitely tongue-in-cheek,” says Brewster. “We don’t take ourselves so seriously that we’re like, ‘This is a revolution in music.’ But that’s still shit that came from our hearts; it’s real shit.” “But,” clarifies Phillips, “I do not have ranch and hot sauce in my purse right now.”