DEI Metal: June 2025

Artist: Laura Jane Grace
Album: Adventure Club
Song: “Wearing Black”

New Pride anthem just dropped! This song is going to be stuck in my head for the rest of my life. And I’m okay with that. In light of the fascist law enforcement occupation of Los Angeles and the nationwide protests of Trump on his birthday, this song really has arrived at the perfect time. “Wearing black to the pride parade,” Laura Jane Grace, former Against Me! guitarist and lead vocalist, sings in the song’s chorus. “ACAB but the gays are OK!” (ACAB, of course, stands for Always Carry A Book because reading is a fundamental right.) In one of the verses she sings, “I’ll wear my rainbow another day. My pride’s a riot, it’s not a parade.” That’s the spirit! Look, things are pretty fucking dire in the U.S. and, honestly, the rest of the world right now and not likely to get better any time soon. “Wearing Black” radiates the kind of joyful fury one can wield as a fabulous weapon.

Artist: Antagonizör
Album: Edgelords from Hell
Song: “Into the Fire”

Antagonizör is a three-piece band from Gainesville, Florida consisting of Sarah on vocals and guitar, TzuWei on bass, and Mykel on drums. Antagonizör calls their music “evil metalpunk straight from Hell to torment you” and describes their sound as a blend of “old-school heavy metal, NWOBHM, first-wave black metal, hardcore punk, and speed metal.” Lyrical themes include “blasphemy, lust, rebellion, and anti-authoritarianism.” It sounds fun because it is fun! “Into the Fire” falls into the blasphemy category with lyrics like, “I have been enlightened by Satan’s dark ways.” Also, guess what? Sarah and TzuWei are married. “That’s right we are HEAVY METAL LEZBOS!” reads a post on Instagram. “We’ve been in love and in bands together for almost a decade, and have been married for over 4 years! If you’ve got a problem with LGBTQ+ folks, FOAD.” As I’m legally obligated to support heavy metal lezbos, I bought Edgelords from Hell on CD. I did not buy the matching t-shirt, however, because it has a bare ass on it with a tattoo of a burning church on one cheek and wearing it would embarrass my teenage son. Instead, I’m just going to get the burning church tattoo and post it on Instagram where his friends can see it.

Artist: Cwfen
Album: Sorrows
Song: “Embers”

“Holy. Shit.” That’s an exact quote from when I heard the song “Embers” from Glasgow’s Cwfen (pronounced Coven, the alphabet be damned). In fact, the entire Sorrows album is “holy shit”-worthy. The band are basically the doom child of Type O Negative and King Woman. I discovered Cwfen in the July 2025 issue of Decibel where vocalist Agnes Alder says of “Embers,” “It’s about girls that fall in love at a time and in a culture where that would result in certain persecution. It’s about love, yearning and defiance. I’d say it’s a tribute to the struggles of the past, but looking at where we are now, and the increasing challenges faced by the LGBTQIA+ community, people are still living and loving in the way that is true to them, despite the dangers. So this song is an acknowledgement of that unbelievable strength.” It is all that and more. This album is guaranteed to be on my Best of 2025 list. I love it so much.

Artist: Well Hell
Song: “solovino”

I was kind of randomly looking for new metal on Bandcamp when I came across Well Hell and, truthfully, what made me click on this particular band was that their name reminded me of a card game I have played with a very dear friend of mine who I miss very much because she lives far away called Oh, Hell. I expected I would probably listen to a few seconds of a song and move on. Instead, I happened upon some very doomy goodness with a mix of clean lead vocals and growled background vocals. “Solovino” is their latest single and they also have a three song EP, floriografia, that came out last year. Given that proceeds from “solovino” are to be donated to The Sanabel Team, a Palestinian-led mutual aid team providing support in Gaza, the song’s lyrics are especially haunting: “Smoldering wild grass poisons my lungs. God damn, you know I’ll die before I run. You know I’ll die before I can run.” The song ends with sounds of a crowd chanting “Free Palestine.” I have poked around on the internet for a while and can’t really find much info about Well Hell. But all you really need to know is that this is good stuff and you should listen to it.

Artist: Ruby Rockatansky
Album: Per Scientiam ad Justitiam
Song: “Our Vengeance Come”

If it’s trans rage you’re after, look no further than Ruby Rockatansky, “a Midwestern queer gal who writes songs to express and escape,” whom I discovered via Transgressive on Bluesky. Rockatansky’s EP is titled Per Scientiam ad Justitiam, which, according to Bandcamp, “Was the motto of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft [which] pioneered care, understanding, and knowledge pertaining to queer individuals, particularly in regards to trans healthcare. In 1933, the Institute was raided by Nazis and much of their work was destroyed.” Sounds a little too fucking familiar, honestly, especially given the Supreme Court’s recent ruling against gender-affirming care. “I’m trans and I’m angry at the genocides being committed against us and so, so many others in the world right now,” Rockatansky writes on Bandcamp. “Our Vengeance Come” has a very fuck-around-and-find-out attitude. For example, this lyric: “Death! Before detransition / Death! Before assimilation / Death! Before collaboration / But it won’t be our death!”

Artist: Seraphlesh
Album: Effigy
Song: “Salmacis”

Seraphlesh is described on Spotify as “a one-woman melodic death metal project out of Seattle” that “features introspective looks into spirituality, ritual, and gender, told through melodic/progressive death metal.” I will admit that I know very little about Greek mythology, so I had to look up “Salmacis.” From what I gathered from Wikipedia, Salmacis was a Naiad nymph who was hot for Hermaphroditus, the son of Aphrodite and Hermes. Salmacis tried to hook up with Hermaphroditus and when that didn’t work, she prayed to the gods to be united with him (Hermaphroditus apparently had no say in this whole thing) and “the gods answered by fusing them together for all time, into a deity that had both male and female parts.” Sounds complicated. And problematic! Consent is important, folks! I think that Seraphlesh’s “Salmacis” is a retelling of this story, but I could be wrong. As I have already established, I am not a scholar of Greek myths! All I know is that this song is very good and you should check it out immediately.

Artist: Divide and Dissolve
Album: Insatiable
Song: “Provenance”

Would you like to be haunted? It doesn’t matter, you already are. We are all haunted by white supremacy and colonialism. Unfortunately, the majority of people who are living today as benefactors of colonial oppression and racism (a.k.a. white people) seem to be, at best, willfully ignorant, and, at worst, very invested in keeping and increasing their power and privilege. Australia’s Divide and Dissolve, the doom/noise project by Takiaya Reed, creates music using drums, guitar, soprano saxophone, and live effects “to decolonize, decentralize, and destroy white supremacy.” Reed, who is Black, Cherokee, and identifies as 2-Spirit, is creating the soundtrack to the cultural dissonance that we are all living in and which harms each and every one of us, whether we realize it or not.

Artist: Guts Club
Album: Please Come Back to the Farm
Song: “Father Figure”

I have to say, I am really digging saxophone in metal music lately. (See: Sungoose, which I included in an earlier DEI Metal column, and Divide and Dissolve above). Guts Club is from New Orleans and, according to their Bandcamp page, this release is the band’s baritone sax debut and a “continued study in moody, droning doomgaze.” Please Come Back To The Farm “examines the existential cruelty far right cultural aggressions pose on the queer psyche with a special focus on themes of trauma, guilt, and domestic violence.” If that sounds heavy, that’s because it is heavy. And “severely gay,” to borrow from Guts Club’s Instagram. Speaking of gay, Guts Club’s cover of George Michael’s “Father Figure” closes out Please Come Back to the Farm. The song is stretched to 8 minutes and is virtually unrecognizable unless you already know it’s a George Michael cover, but Guts Club maintains the original’s tortured pleading for a seemingly unrequited and forbidden love.

Artist: Alicia Cordisco
Album: Sojourner
Song: “Something Beautiful”

I cannot remember when I first discovered the music of Alicia Cordisco. I suspect it was with Project: Roenwolfe, but I can’t tell you where I discovered that band, either. Regardless, Cordisco is involved in a lot of projects and is just a fucking awesome guitarist and songwriter. She announced a solo album back in March and released “Something Beautiful” at a time when I, and a lot of other people, really needed something, anything, beautiful in this very fucked up world. Spoiler alert: the world has just gotten more fucked up since then. But at least there is something to look forward to as Cordisco is working on a variety of projects right now in addition to her solo stuff, including new Transgressive and Wraithstorm albums. Thrash, melodic death, progressive, symphonic, gothic, power: Cordisco is a woman of many metal talents. “Something Beautiful” is about the game Disco Elysium, which I am not at all familiar with—but I appreciate the song’s unflinching look at the horrors that surround us while somehow maintaining a life-giving speck of hope in the lyrics, “Something beautiful will come / (Change must happen now) / To this world that’s been undone.”