The Flenser has signed GENITAL SHAME, the solo project of musician Erin Dawson, and will release her second full-length, "Wellness Plan", on October 30.
The album circles one question and refuses to let go of it. What keeps you alive — your will, your conscious mind, your choice to stay open and present? Or is it something outside your reach entirely: an obscure automatic process that quietly carries you forward until, one day, it doesn't?
Dawson's music has always lived in a dissociative fog where terror, resignation and determination are nearly impossible to prise apart. On "Wellness Plan" she widens that world, folding black metal and noise together with passages of fragile stillness.
Her route into the genre is unusual. Dawson's background is in music education and classical guitar, and she brings that training to a strange, self-built strain of experimental music rooted in black metal. "Wellness Plan" is harmonically dense, with riffs and melodies folding into each other in ways that rarely resolve where you expect. It belongs to the tradition of weirdo black metal that treats the genre less as a fixed language than as raw material to pull apart, distort and reassemble.
The record's central image arrived by accident. While working on the album, Dawson came across old microscopic footage of white blood cells hunting viruses. "I love the idea that even if you struggle with and mask a deep self-hate, there's something microscopic inside you voting for your continued, healthy existence — even if you feel like you don't deserve it," she says. "It's also about the idea that as beautiful as that image is, it's still not quite enough."
That footage feeds directly into first single "I Want to Die Before You", whose video is out now. "The 'You' in the title refers to both a literal person and a metaphor: the white blood cell," Dawson explains.
She describes the album as "a process of acceptance through images of disappearing" — and the contradiction between the wish to vanish and the body's stubborn impulse to keep going runs through all ten tracks, returning again and again to the question of how much say any of us have in our own survival.
"Wellness Plan" track listing:
- Replace What I'm After
- Down Titration Strategies
- Spiced Loam
- I Want to Die Before You
- Suicide Wellness Plan
- Nucleus Accumbens Atrophy
- Punished by Rewards
- Górecki Peace
- Gratitude Meditation
- Goodbye (I've Left It Open)
GENITAL SHAME live:
- October 3, 2026 — Oblivion, Los Angeles, CA (with SLOW MASS and DISHEVELED CUSS)
Pre-order "Wellness Plan" at GENITAL SHAME's Bandcamp.