One of the promo shots for Genital Shame’s new album Wellness Plan pictures Erin Dawson, the brains behind the project, standing atop a parking garage, a blue sky taking up more than half the photo. It could be any downtown in America, but it connects with the project’s fixation on our physical and mental health, and our sense of well being. There’s a photographic meme going around of cars left behind in hospital parking garages. The cars are covered in dust, a reminder of how truly alone we can be in a country with over three hundred million people. We exist in a world where we are severed from each other, like an amputated limb. If unattached, we are useless, and yet in our own bodies exist a myriad of possibilities and personalities.
Wellness Plan, Dawson’s first album from The Flenser, takes a literal look into the insides of what makes us human. Her exploratory black metal is intense and diverse, a bipolar exploration of not just sound but of existence. The songs seem to work like body systems, each one serving its own function, strands of DNA activated and silenced, and yet still serving the greater whole. We may not actively celebrate living, but our bodies are working non-stop to keep us alive.
Genital Shame’s approach to music is much like this search for understanding. While indebted to the original forefathers of black metal in its rawest forms, Dawson tries to pick as much from those strands of DNA as she can, snipping and inserting codes from various genres into one glorious inhaling and exhaling of sheer noise.
‘As a musician,’ writes Dawson in a recent exchange of ideas, ‘I value harmony, shrewdness, and authenticity.’ Her allegiance lies with all things cvlty, and historically black metal has always been shrewd and authentic, if not always harmonic. In this sense, she draws inspiration from many places.
Black metal, after all, keeps its gates checked as well as any genre in the world. ‘At its best, its insistence on itself doesn’t keep my interest and really only gives me one of the things that I value,’ Dawson says of the genre. ‘So what I try to do is work within the idiom of black metal while prioritizing what I wish the ‘art form’ hasn’t historically provided. In this way, I’m not purely a black metal project, but a weird hybrid, I suppose.‘
Wellness Plan, like her debut album Chronic Illness Wish from 2024, is a fascinating amalgamation of fractured pieces. Chronic Illness Wish was, like many debut albums, explosive and raw, another trial run in the process of putting together something all together new. There’s a physical aspect to the music, both lyrically and musically, as if trying to communicate what it’s like to be trapped in our own heads and bodies.
When asked about the growth from Chronic Illness Wish to the new record, Dawson writes,
‘Evolution between these two records looks like a couple things. One is simply in terms of production. Wellness Plan features drums captured in a studio, mic’d guitars, and so on, which is closer to my initial vision than how I was previously working. Otherwise, I think I take a few more songwriting risks on this one, especially with sort of set pieces like the title track and the final track, and the length of the last full song. Lyrically, it’s more focused than Chronic Illness Wish. Genital Shame has always been very biographical for me, but in the past, there’s been lots of impressionistic vibes. Less so here.’
“Suicide Wellness Plan”, the title track Dawson alludes to, is an interstitial exploration of guitar and our own internal monologues. Her spoken word sits within the distorted melodies as opposed to on top of them, a striking juxtaposition of our deepest thoughts drowned out by the world around us.
These disparate elements are no clearer than the short opening breath of “Replace What I’m After”. It’s either the first stretch of the morning or the moment at the end of the day where you’re standing with your hands on your knees, an acoustic interlude that devolves into “Down Titration Strategies” in a conglomeration of distorted guitars, vintage synth-sounds, blast beats and attitude; black metal done with a sneer.
There’s this constant struggle of existing in space along the side of each other. The band can linger in one zone for minutes, extracting a myriad of moods. An 80’s inspired groove can morph to something much more progressive before switching to an inevitable expulsion of black metal viscera.
And yet it feels very much like Appalachia, hailing back to Dawson’s roots in West Virginia and western Pennsylvania. The songs move through peaks and valleys. They drink in the liquor and the spirits of the hollers. There’s a true connection to the stark reality of Native American burial mounds and the shells of abandoned coal mines that rings through Wellness Plan that makes it distinctly of its place. By her own admission, any connection to these geographical bonds are implicit at best. ‘The ways that West Virginia informs or does not inform my work is not clear to me, but the most meaningful connection is my mentorship from Aaron Carey, currently of the band Nechochwen.‘
Carey’s approach to classical guitar, black metal and Appalachian folk music has a clear connection to the work Dawson does, and this in itself makes for a fascinating listen. ‘I took classical guitar lessons from him as a kid,‘ she continues. ‘Which changed my life, and it was he who eventually burned me CDs that formed my identity as a metal-loving musician — from Cynic and Obituary, and Atheist to Katatonia, Pestilence, Opeth, and Death. If he had not done that, I seriously doubt that I’d have been exposed to that kind of music so soon or have such a love affair with the classical guitar and classical music in general.‘
The sonic pathways laid out starting in her early years reach fruition on the lead single “I Want to Die Before You”, an exploration of our own bodies consuming themselves, white blood cells let loose on foreign invaders. Dawson playing a Telecaster with humbuckers on a black metal song is already brilliantly subversive, and the song’s clever title (do I die in front of you? or do I die before you die?) play with this dichotomy. ‘I think the idea that our bodies do their best to reach homeostasis is inspiring to me both as a biological reality and metaphor. And the ways that that can lead to identity-formation (along gender lines, interpersonal or psychological character, etc., etc.) is lowercase-s spiritual to me, maybe due to the mystery of it all.’
Genital Shame‘s Wellness Plan will be released by The Flenser this Friday on October 30th. It’s Erin Dawson’s attempt to dig into the spiritual ‘mystery of it all’, an audacious exploration of what it means to be human in all of its guts, glory, and ignominy. In a world where we’ve continually acted in ways that dig the knife into the flesh and bone in bizarre acts of self-mutilation, the music of Genital Shame acts as a soundtrack to our limbs falling to the ground, a satisfying thump that gets lost in howls of despair. Wellness Plan makes us realize we’re all in this sordid, gangrenous mess together.
