Dawn Ray’d: Anti-Fascism Is A Social Duty

Politically minded bands are not uncommon in 2023. After all, there is more than enough to be angry about, and music has long offered an outlet for that in just about every subgenre one can imagine. What is far more rare however is a band like DAWN RAY’D, who live and breathe the anarchist values at the heart of their music and hope to inspire their listeners to do the same. As vocalist and violinist Simon Barr puts it towards the end of our conversation about their latest album To Know The Light, “I don’t just want to perform people’s politics for them. I want people to engage with this and engage with the world and have the confidence and the courage to speak out about some of this.”

Of course, this isn’t new territory for DAWN RAY’D. Formed in 2015 at a time when there were hardly any anarchist/anti-fascist black metal bands, the trio have never been shy about sharing their beliefs, and if anything they are being proven increasingly right over time. Glance at the news on any given day and you’ll find stories of political disillusionment, police corruption and brutality, and the relentless destruction of our planet under capitalism. To Know The Light touches on all of that and more.

“It probably all looks a lot more considered and orchestrated than it actually is,” smiles Barr. “In reality it’s just three fucking idiots shambling their way through a band and trying to go on tour, and just trying to do the right thing. I have to think of 10 things every two years to write songs about. I guess you just have to trust yourself a bit. This band is very political and it is probably agitprop, but I try to be sincere and emotional in it and only talk about things that I really give a fuck about.”

“I think anti-fascism is a social duty,” he continues. “Things like knowing not to trust the state and not to trust the police makes your life better in real terms and in real ways. As soon as you realise that the state doesn’t act in your best interest, you yourself can have a better life because I’ve seen that happen to me and to others around me.”

Barr doesn’t throw his words around loosely either. It is clear that he and DAWN RAY’D really know their stuff, they’ve researched and tested their ideas so they can share them with others with full confidence. “I would hate to be somebody who believed in something immoral,” affirms Barr. “I definitely feel it’s something I’ve tested a lot, and you look at the Zapatistas and Rojava and I know those places aren’t exact perfect examples of anarchist utopias or whatever, but you can see some of these non-hierarchical ideas and stuff happening in real time there.”

It’s no surprise then that To Know The Light often speaks of revolution, of defiance, rebellion and the power of us ‘wretched masses’ working together. But sadly the barriers to that vision becoming a reality are many. “We all have full time jobs, as I’m sure everyone reading this does, and it’s fucking exhausting,” offers Barr. “It takes up all your time and then you’re left with a few hours at the end of each day where you’re fucking knackered and maybe have to do some housework and then you might get to spend a bit of time with your family or your loved ones. And then to try and organise politically is fucking hard, and they make it so you risk a lot. If you look at the way they punish graffiti in this country versus the way they punish sexual assault, it’s quite clear that actually the laws and the punishments we have are not based on morality and they don’t give a fuck about protecting us, they give a fuck about controlling us.”

“Also the propaganda machine of the state is fucking phenomenal,” he emphasises. “They have infinite resources and you are just blasted by it constantly. I started watching Happy Valley – the TV program based in Yorkshire – and I had to turn it off because, maybe this makes me sound like a miserable shit, but it’s just fucking copaganda. And there’s so much of that telly, there’s so many police dramas, and I think we’d be foolish to think that there isn’t at least a propaganda element to that… I think it’s a myth that the police keep us safe at all. The neighbourhoods you see that have less crime, less violence, are the neighbourhoods that have more money and more resources. So the way to stop violence and to stop ‘crime’, however we want to define that, is to just give people enough.”

It’s a shame we don’t have double the word count to give Barr’s anarchist ideals more space, but even on a purely musical level To Know The Light offers plenty to unpack. Barr admits that initially the band weren’t too happy with early drafts of material for the record, however upon returning to the drawing board they decided that absolutely nothing should be off the table, and the results speak for themselves. To Know The Light is easily the folkiest, most expansive and most melodic album from DAWN RAY’D, and yet it sheds not an ounce of their most compelling fury. Their vision clear and unified, Barr explains, “We were all quite enthused with just trying to throw everything we could at this, and there were definitely things that didn’t end up going on there and bits we binned off and stuff, but the rule was ‘let’s just try everything’. Any genre, everything goes, if the song sounds good, then the song is good.”

Finally, it is fitting that there is a real timelessness to the sound of To Know The Light – whether that’s in a folky ballad like Freedom In Retrogade that one can imagine being sung in some kind of mediaeval tavern, or even just the archaic feel of the band’s black metal core. It suits the fact that, as Barr puts it, “these struggles are as old as time”, and as our attention moves from the past to the future we allow him to conclude, not with hope, but with a ‘cruel optimism’ that sums up the band’s new-found interest in the concept of anarcho-nihilism.

“My understanding of anarcho-nihilism is that you accept that things are terrible and accept that everything is fucked, no-one’s coming to save us, they’re not gonna save the climate, we’re not going to be able to vote in a government that fixes this. We’re on this path and this is happening. But the sun still shines and we’re still here. The only time we have is now and this is the only life you have and the world is still beautiful, it is not burned and destroyed. It is still amazing. And people are inherently good and beautiful and amazing and inspiring… Things are fucked but we’re still alive and this is all we have, isn’t it, so we have to make the most of it.”

To Know The Light is out now via Prosthetic Records.

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