Dead Posey: Escaping The Cult Mindset

“Burn burn it down to hell, America she’s unwell, Welcome to the nightmare tonight, Where leaders lie and freedom dies”. These are the lyrics to Welcome To The Nightmare, taken from the debut album from DEAD POSEY, Are You In A Cult?, and poignant given the current state of affairs in the world. The hard rock duo, consisting of Danyell Souza and Tony Fagenson, have continuously shown their forward-thinking lyricism accompanied by their foot-stomping beats and heavy riffs, even more so after they began to release music independently. With their debut out and a successful release party show in Los Angeles, we chatted with them about playing the songs live, going independent, and the inspiration for the album around them in their city.

“It came at the end of 2020,” Danyell explains when asked about where the title of the album came from. “I was on a walk, and I was thinking about how many different kinds of cults come about in society. Then we had some conversations about it, and we’d also watched a lot of cult documentaries when everyone was stuck at home. There was the NXIVM Cult, then, of course, Charles Manson, the Manson family and the list goes on. Like the whole thing with LIL NAS X and the Nike shoes, drinking the Kool-Aid, let alone any cultish things in politics, even culture, certain fandoms and things within the rock scene. There are little mini cliques that we like to call little mini cults that you’re either in or you’re out of. Over that time, it just kept on popping into our heads, the question of ‘Are you in a cult?’ and we thought that it’s pretty fun to have a question as the album title, and it could be thought-provoking, as well as tie into what that can mean to you. Because it could mean something different for every person.”

“We do see it popping up around where we are in LA,” Tony continues. “There’s obviously the high-level actual cults, but then also any kind of situation where people are blindly following something, or an idea or a or a figure. You know, they’re not fully thinking for themselves, yeah, or on social media, even if it happens in this era where there’s so much information travelling around so fast. It’s worth asking the question because I think all of us at some point probably have been in a cult without maybe realising it. All these songs on the album exemplify that. Even though some of them are just coming out now, they were written a couple of years ago in a few cases, and they do feel very ‘of an era’ to us. So it’s really good to get everything out in one place, and the fans seem to be really digging it, and like listening to it as a whole, which is nice to hear, that’s how it was intended.”

Whilst Are You In A Cult? Is the band’s debut album, DEAD POSEY have released two EPs beforehand; Freak Show in 2018 and Malfunction in 2020, both whilst the band were with Sumerian Records. The band opened up about this time with the label, with Danyell stating “the end of 2019, we were working on Malfunction, and then released in June of 2020, crazy times for the whole world, with COVID, the civil unrest that was going on, it was, it was a mad time. Then a little bit after that was when we had our US elections over here, too, so that’s why Tony and I started going back in the studio and writing this album at the end of 2020 so we were set to put out the next full-length album with Sumerian and unfortunately it just didn’t work out. There are different personalities that work well together, and then there’s not, you know, business is business.”

“I don’t feel like a lot of record labels are in the business to develop artists anymore,” she continues, “so unless you’re just 100% ready to go at that right time, they do not want to develop you and be on a journey with you anymore. They’re more in the business of picking up the thing after you go viral, or you’re already bigger and more. I find it disgusting that a record label can own 80% of your royalties from your work, but then they don’t put enough energy in to develop you as an artist and they get to pocket 1000s and 1000s of dollars from your work, whereas back in the day, they would develop an artist.”

So what’s the plan for the new year? Tony explains as DEAD POSEY wrapped up the interview by saying, “we’ve gotten the luxury of seeing how people have reacted to these songs live already. Because usually, most bands will play their songs before they’re even recorded, or when they’re in the early stages, and you can work out some kinks and then go back to the studio and be like, ‘oh, that actually would work better live if the song was more doing this thing’. So we have had the luxury of playing these songs live, and it’ll be really cool to play the songs now that they’ve all come out, and people really get to know the music and hopefully, it’ll captivate more people when we play in front of them.”

Are You In A Cult? is out now via self-release. View this interview, alongside dozens of other killer bands, in glorious print magazine fashion in DS115 here: