Genital Shame to Release New LP WELLNESS PLAN on The Flenser
Erin Dawson blends black metal and noise on her second full-length as Genital Shame.
The Flenser has announced Wellness Plan, the second full-length album from Genital Shame, the solo project of musician Erin Dawson. The label will release the record on October 30, preceded by the single and music video I Want to Die Before You, which is out now.
What keeps you alive? Your will? Your conscious mind? Your choice to remain open, alert, present? Or is it something just beyond your grasp: an obscure automatic process, quietly carrying you forward until it doesn't?
Dawson's approach is informed by a background in music education and classical guitar, which she brings to her own strange iteration of experimental music rooted in black metal. Wellness Plan is harmonically dense, with riffs and melodies folding into one another in unexpected ways. It draws from a tradition of weirdo black metal that treats the genre less as a fixed language than as something to pull apart, distort, and reassemble.
While making the album, Dawson encountered old microscopic footage of white blood cells searching for viruses. 'I love the idea that even if you struggle with and mask a deep self-hate, there's something microscopic inside you voting for your continued, healthy existence — even if you feel like you don't deserve it,' she says. 'It's also about the idea that as beautiful as that image is, it's still not quite enough.' The album's first single 'I Want to Die Before You' references that, and Dawson adds '...the 'You' in the title refers to both a literal person and a metaphor: the white blood cell.'
Dawson describes Wellness Plan as 'a process of acceptance through images of disappearing.' The contradiction between the desire to disappear and the body's impulse to survive runs throughout the record, returning to the question of how much control we have over our own survival.
Tracklist
Replace What I'm After
Down Titration Strategies
Spiced Loam
I Want to Die Before You
Suicide Wellness Plan
Nucleus Accumbens Atrophy
Punished by Rewards
Górecki Peace
Gratitude Meditation
Goodbye (I've Left It Open)
Genital Shame is scheduled to perform in Los Angeles on October 3 at Oblivion alongside Slow Mass and Disheveled Cuss, ahead of the release of Wellness Plan on The Flenser.
Photo Credit: Carolyn Kendrick | Hi-res here
Photo Credit: Carolyn Kendrick | Hi-res here
