Death Goals: Identity & Community
“When you see trans people moshing, when you’ve got trans girlies taking their boots off and beating the shit out of people, that’s when we’re like, oh the riffs are going hard, it’s a good show!” Harry Bailey, guitarist and vocalist with queercore duo DEATH GOALS is being a little flippant, but they’re not wrong. The duo have forged a devoted following in hardcore and alternative music by being unapologetically themselves; with debut album The Horrible And The Miserable catching the attention of Prosthetic Records and quickly snapping them up, the two-piece found themselves preparing to craft its follow-up in a very different world than they first launched in.
That debut was crafted while the UK was in lockdown; the band may have lived on the same street, but weren’t able to visit each other to write at all, resulting in ideas being traded across WhatsApp, Facebook and swapping voice notes or files with ideas for songs. The end result was a claustrophobic, furious album that railed against the four walls of its creators’ containment, as well as bluntly tackling issues faced by LGBTQ+ people in the UK and mental health. For its follow-up, the duo knew they wanted to push the boat further; “we’ve always been a very determined, hard-working band,” drummer/vocalist George Milner explains, “but signing to Prosthetic made us ask, what can we push ourselves to do next?”
Even better for them was the lifting of lockdowns, allowing them to write together in the same room for the first time, something that left an indelible mark on the creative process and its end result, the beautiful, savage A Garden Of Dead Flowers. “There was much more challenging each other,” Milner begins. “So we could ask, how do we make it something that we do like? Let’s pick up a guitar, I’ll get behind the kit and we’ll hash it out and try new things.” The fact they could finally spend time together outside of the studio helped them immensely, too; Milner recalls evenings spent hanging out, talking about hardcore legends EVERY TIME I DIE (“ETID split up on our second day of pre-production, it was the worst day!”) and spending the day of the split talking about the band and being inspired to try something they did in one of their own songs. “You can’t do that [in lockdown], it gets lost behind the screen. We can say, ‘I don’t literally mean I want it to sound like that, I want to take this aspect of it’.”
This newfound freedom and ability to spend time with each other also meant they did something they hadn’t done before – discussing what their lyrics meant and having honest conversations about their own identities. DEATH GOALS are often described as a queercore band, and with A Garden Of Dead Flowers, they opted to adopt the moniker for themselves and truly step into it as a band that not only talks about problems, but celebrates queer identity in all its forms. “We did it so our friend Eddie would stop yelling at us and put us on his UK queercore spreadsheet,” laughs Bailey. The rather more sobering answer is that their new album not only tackles feelings of dysmorphia or dysphoria (Genderless Clones of Game Show Hosts), queer, bi and trans erasure (Year of the Guillotine) but also queer love; “P.A.N.S.Y. is about kissing boys in the woods,” Bailey smiles. “We’re queercore, and it’s as much a part of our identity as our name being DEATH GOALS.”
“We’ve always written lyrics separate from each other,” Milner begins, “there was an awful lot of us writing things and not wanting to talk about what it’s about, because that’s a difficult conversation to have, especially when it’s over Messenger and you can’t go to see each other.” They began to truly talk to each other about their own identities, in part because the pressure cooker of the lockdowns had meant the enforced downtime left them with the time to self-reflect. “I wouldn’t have described myself as non-binary before COVID,” Bailey explains, “but I was sat in my room, reading a lot of content and realised it works much better for me.”
Milner had his own realisation; before, with The Horrible and the Miserable, the track Gender Traitor had been one he hadn’t necessarily felt he could speak on but the time to reflect and then open up to each other led him down a new path. “I always had a reluctance to talk about my side of things. I felt like my place had always been to take a step back and let people who are maybe more affected about things to have that conversation, and it always had a detriment to me really enjoying, expressing and feeling who I am. Harry and I might have the exact same experience, but also a completely different one is good, and that’s how it should be.”
Having embraced the moniker of queercore, not as some gimmick but to truly claim their own identities and place in a burgeoning scene, one in which they work so hard to provide a safe space at their shows, to ensure anyone feels welcome and can celebrate their own identity there, has been instrumental. And that also informs A Garden Of Dead Flowers; not only railing against injustices, but being somewhere they, and their fans, can be truly, unapologetically themselves.
A Garden Of Dead Flowers is out now via Prosthetic Records.
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