Genital Shame – Górecki Peace

Erin Dawson, the mastermind behind Genital Shame, describes the upcoming LP 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.  Dawson’s music exists in a dissociative fog where terror, resignation, and determination become nearly impossible to separate. On Wellness Plan, Dawson widens that world, folding black metal and noise together with fragile moments of stillness.

The album’s third and latest single “Gòrecki Plan” is massive in sound, and its new video, directed by Paul Manganello, is iconic and timely.

Dawson comments: “I think we all struggle with intrusive thoughts. This song kind of personifies them (the ‘imago’) and is really just about feeling terrible about a specific thing and finding comfort in music. The ‘Sorrowful Songs’ line in the lyrics refers to Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 of the same name. I’m basically disgusted by how pretentious that sounds, but what can I say? It’s a beautiful piece/peace.”

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.

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