Genital Shame’s full-length debut, Chronic Illness Wish, is out now on The Garrote.
Genital Shame’s Erin Dawson has always tinkered with black metal the way a mad scientist does with a corpse and an array of metallic bits, and Chronic Illness Wish scribbles along the same inventive, idiosyncratic streak that made Genital Shame’s previous EPs–2022’s Lion Piss + Arm Vulnerability and 2023’s Gathering My Wits–so memorable. The album is a finely-tuned bedroom recording that brutally pummels and softly plucks, soars starward and plummets hellward, and it’s got a song named after a RuPaul’s Drag Race contestant. “Taste Rot” is a shrieking epic shot through with modulated zigzags of guitar lightning. It cudgels and gallops with gale force and then collapses into a pit of swaying, seasick acoustic guitar. The distorted caterwauling continues even as the instruments grow gentle, because this is a Genital Shame record, after all. Things end on a twinkling synth cascade–the final sprinkle that ushers out the dark and stormy night.
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