Dream Nails: Striving For A Safe Haven
For many, starting a band is about making the best music they can, having something to pour themselves into and lose themselves, but for DREAM NAILS, it’s all the more synonymous with their activism.
As they gear up for a show in Copenhagen, guitarist Anya Pearson who’s poised and ready for Copenhagen tells us, “we’ve been laying low, working on album two together and now that it’s finished now we’re starting to do some interviews for the first time with the new lineup which is really exciting.” But laying low and recording their new album isn’t all, since the departure of previous vocalist Janey Starling they’ve welcomed “absolutely fabulous, multi-talented drag artist; poet, singer, performer Ishmael Kirby who uses he/they pronouns.”
Delving into that transition of welcoming Kirby into the mix, we come to the topic of single Femme Boi, Pearson says, “the song is very personal to Ishmael and it’s written about their personal experiences only. It’s their story and identity, but as with many co-writing relationships there’s a lot of trust there.” Continuing she says, “I remember they had a lot of lyrics already but we ended up improvising a lot of lyrics together and bouncing off each other. Even though it’s not my story I was helping Ishmael to tell theirs. It was a really fun afternoon of knocking ideas around, and came up with the lyrics of ‘I’m a butch, I’m a dyke, I’ve got what you like. Check out my Docs, black socks, strapping on for the ride’.”
In 2023 there’s a massive war on gender identity and transgender people, it’s very much an unsafe world for trans people to exist in with the sheer amount of transphobia that is present in Britain alone. But as activists, DREAM NAILS aren’t willing to back down and Kirby being a part of the band certainly won’t change that. “It’s a very dangerous world out there, there’s a lot of people that want to do harm to the trans community and are doing harm to the trans and queer community. In terms of will it stop us, and I know you’re not suggesting this, but dutifully we won’t stop, we’re proud and out here trying to make change and help people. Do we sometimes worry about safety? Yeah all the time, I know that Ishmael as a black trans person especially worries about safety and as a queer band with women in it as well we’re all worried about safety. It’s a constant problem but we won’t let it stop us,” Pearson admits with conviction.
It’s a sentiment that many need to take onboard, adapting such a value can and will save lives, which may seem dramatic at first but as cisgender people it’s vital that we set a standard to which we hold other cisgendered people and how we treat trans people. It’s the same with queerness in general, especially for people who are still discovering the fact about themselves, after a long time you can discover your queer self and realise that you don’t really know anything about that part of your identity yet. Pearson has some thought on the matter, trying to concoct something natural as we put her slightly on the spot.
“I think probably we’d all like to know the answer to that on a bad day, on a good day finding the courage to be who you are as a queer person, whatever that looks, feels or sounds like to you remember that every act of visibility that you carry out in the world that another queer person will see that and feel more emboldened to be their authentic queer self. It can spread a ripple of authentic queer identities and I think that ripple never really stops. Remember that queerness is beautiful and that we all hold each other up.” She comes to this realisation of perpetual and commutative help which is eerily related to the concept of DREAM NAILS’ new album Doom Loop.
Doom Loop is out now via Marshall Records.
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