‘Wellness Plan’ LP incoming 10/30 on The Flenser. ​Erin Dawson, the mastermind behind project, describes the upcoming release as “a process of acceptance through images of disappearing.”

The contradiction between the desire to disappear and the body’s impulse to survive runs throughout the record, returning to the question of how much control we have over our own survival. Dawson‘s music exists in a dissociative fog where terror, resignation, and determination become nearly impossible to separate. On album, she widens that world, folding black metal and noise together with fragile moments of stillness. The album’s third and latest single is massive in sound, and its new video, directed by Paul Manganello with camera operator Daniel Weingarten, is iconic and timely. Dawson comments: “I think we all struggle with intrusive thoughts. This song kind of personifies them (the imago) and is really just about feeling terrible about a specific thing and finding comfort in music. The ‘Sorrowful Songs’ line in the lyrics refers to Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 of the same name. I’m basically disgusted by how pretentious that sounds, but what can I say? It’s a beautiful piece/peace.” Dawson‘s approach is informed by a background in music education and classical guitar, which she brings to her own strange iteration of experimental music rooted in black metal. ‘Wellness Plan’ is harmonically dense, with riffs and melodies folding into one another in unexpected ways. It draws from a tradition of weirdo black metal that treats the genre less as a fixed language than as something to pull apart, distort, and reassemble.

‘Wellness Plan’, tracklist:

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)