PISS – you made me / skin on linen

Since #MeToo, songs about sexual violence have often gravitated towards survival and empowerment. Vancouver punks PISS reject these tidy resolutions. Their debut directs its fury straight at the jugular of a political and social system underpinned by rampant misogyny. i wanted to be a singer sets out the band’s terms plainly: ‘This is not a song, it’s self-harm’, Taylor Zantingh screams against a maelstrom of pile-driver guitars and clattering drums.

Turning grindcore’s macho brutality against the patriarchy is in itself a radical act, but PISS go further, sampling feminist thinkers like Andrea Dworkin, Toni Morrison and Manon Garcia to situate their rage within a wider political conversation. This interplay between the personal and political lends their music intellectual weight, but does little to make the violence it describes any easier to stomach. Nowhere is this clearer than on blocking a scene you can’t remember, in which a harrowing testimony is violently and repeatedly interrupted, evoking the dehumanising ordeal of reporting rape and trauma’s fractured sense of time.

This is a record few listeners will subject themselves to more than once, but PISS refuse to make rape culture palatable. What survives is not hope but anger, unsoftened, unapologetic, and absolutely necessary.

Listen to: i wanted to be a singer, time loop at hot slit, blocking a scene you can’t remember