The Toronto noise-pop duo specialize in harsh music and heavy topics. Their latest record can be lighthearted, but the resentment at its heart feels more outwardly pointed than ever.
As Black Dresses, Ada Rook and Devi McCallion took an unfortunately typical trajectory for trans women online: Rising out of the Bandcamp trenches to cult success and media attention, they broke up under an onslaught of harassment and misinterpretation from fans. But they kept releasing music anyway, continuing their streak of nuanced, heartfelt, and brutally inaccessible industrial noise-pop. “U_u2,” the opener of their new album Forget Your Own Face, feels more disorienting than usual, trading their increasingly effective hooks for brutal screaming and disses like, “You got this record deal but you’re so ugly!” It’s a lighter, less introspective affair from a duo that came to prominence with songs about surviving childhood abuse and living with transphobia. Forget Your Own Face is both their slightest album to date, and maybe the most essential to understanding why Black Dresses keep making music.
There’s distortion as always, but the production feels cleaner, with less emphasis on speaker-destroying bass. It leaves more room to hear the camaraderie between the two members, particularly when McCallion’s tender vocal fry and Rook’s screams go head-to-head on “Let’s Be.” “No Normal” is another standout in this regard, with call-and-response vocals and frantic drums that make good on the group’s stated Linkin Park influence—it’s like “Faint” combined with the stimulant of your choice. Songs like “No Normal” and “Money Makes You Stupid” prove Black Dresses can do nostalgia and goofiness as well as anyone, but they incorporate it seamlessly into their own aggressively blown-out sound.
For a band that often writes about internalized shame and self-loathing, the resentment at the heart of this record feels more outwardly pointed. The delivery is as furious as ever, preoccupied with the frustration of not being properly seen, and the futility of being recognized in a world rife with backlash against trans people. “Try to hope/Try to bear your soul/No choice but degenerate faggot mode,” Rook barks on “Let’s Be”; “T-shirt slogan/I’m a T-shirt slogan/I’m a meme, I know it,” McCallion cries on “No Normal.” On top of online stress, there’s the lingering trauma they’ve spent their time as Black Dresses dissecting. McCallion sounds exhausted when, at the close of “u_u2,” she admits she fails to see a future where she isn’t “fucked up by the past.”
The album’s second half puts that anger to good use. On “Money Makes You Stupid” and “Gay Ugly and Hard to Understand,” Black Dresses take aim at the pandering attitude and self-conscious zaniness of so much current pop culture. On “Hard to Understand,” McCallion makes a deadpan dedication to “New York City drag balls in the ’90s before RuPaul made being gay uncool,” then launches into a diatribe that imagines her early punk demos landing her a Roadrunner Records contract, complete with a Travis Barker feature. The petty antagonism towards Barker-endorsed modern pop-punk is based in a genuine fear: that the same commodification that defanged punk rock will come for hyperpop, while the genre’s actual progenitors get bullied offline. Yet it’s ultimately not the fame or credit Black Dresses want, just the support and comfort: “I want the gentleness that only you were offered/I want a peaceful life.”
Closing track “Nightwish” explores this desire more fully, returning to the softer pop sound heard on “Creep U” and “Bloom” as Rook laments that “people never see the side of you you want to be.” Together, Black Dresses discuss what to do with this project of theirs and decide to carry on creating for its own sake: “Let’s meet back here again/We can do a little show/We can sing a couple songs/We can fight over how the songs go.” “Let’s just have—,” McCallion begins, and then, as if remembering the countless trolls and TikTok kids watching, she corrects herself: “Let’s just still try to have fun.” With the distortion stripped away, the heart of the group is laid bare: just two trans women trading verses and finding solace in one another when it feels like there’s no escape, online or off.
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