GENITAL SHAME has shared "Down Titration Strategies", the second single from "Wellness Plan", the album Erin Dawson releases through The Flenser on October 30. We covered the signing and the album announcement in August; this is the follow-up to first single "I Want to Die Before You".
The title is borrowed from medicine — down-titration is the controlled reduction of a drug dose — and Dawson uses that vocabulary to describe a process that has nothing to do with prescriptions.
"I think all the time about how little upstream things (events, lingering thoughts) can have large downstream effects," she says. "This song plays with vaguely medical language to describe that snowballing effect — adjusting measurements of attachment, life-affirming positions, and self destructive tendencies."
That is the record in miniature. Dawson has described "Wellness Plan" as "a process of acceptance through images of disappearing", and the contradiction at its centre — the wish to vanish set against 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. Her music lives in a dissociative fog where terror, resignation and determination are nearly impossible to prise apart; on this album she widens that world, folding black metal and noise together with passages of fragile stillness.
Her route into the genre remains an unusual one. Dawson's background is in music education and classical guitar, and she brings that training to a 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 — 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.
GENITAL SHAME live in California:
- October 2, 2026 — The Vine, Long Beach, CA (with HAND MODEL, JENNY HANIVER and TIRED EYES)
- October 3, 2026 — Oblivion, Los Angeles, CA (with SLOW MASS and DISHEVELED CUSS)
Pre-order "Wellness Plan" at GENITAL SHAME's Bandcamp.