Today Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers Bonnie Trash share a new single and video, taken from their forthcoming new album, Mourning You, which is set for release on February 28th on Hand Drawn Dracula.
Mourning You finds Bonnie Trash, twins Emmalia & Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor, embracing a newfound sense of urgency. The album is, put bluntly, an album about death. Not death in the macabre, violent, or outrageous sense, but death as you or I might know it. A spectre lurking around the corner. Capricious, indiscriminate, and unexpected. Ordinary and all the more terrifying for it. Real. Fear in the eyes of a loved one about to die, and the fear in your eyes – staring back. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.
Following previous single, “Veil of Greed”, today they share the howling, urgent new track “Hellmouth“ – a song that evokes the gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror. “I see you in my dreams every night,” Sarafina intones. Were it not for Emmalia’s blown-out Stratocaster, you might mistake those words for the chorus of an old doo-wop standard. The track launches off as a woozy siren song, before pummeling you with anthemic power chords for Sarafina’s self lacerating chorus: “Drag me to hell and back I go.”
“Every reminder of what once was, feels like a sharp sword” the band comment. “But, even in the darkest moments, there’s always a path towards love. Remembering the warmth of their smile, as you scrape your nails towards the surface…”
“Hellmouth” video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEPFUHNzbrk
‘Mourning You’ album pre-order/pre-save links: https://ffm.to/mourningyou
A lifelong project christened in 2017 with the release of Ezzelini’s Dead, the band’s debut EP which found the pair mining the Trevisan dialect and archaic Italian folklore of their heritage to grisly effect. Where their first full length, Malocchio (2022), shrouded Bonnie Trash’s nightmares in dusky dreamlike reverb, ‘Mourning You’ is vivid and immediate. Emboldened by the addition of Emma Howarth-Withers on bass and Dana Bellamy on drums – whose thunderous rhythms sharpened 2024’s My Love Remains the Same EP into a fine-edged blade – Mourning You is less a post-mortem fantasia than a sudden, swift dagger to the heart.
Sarafina, the band’s singer and lyricist, has described the album as being about “losing someone you love. It’s about the horrors of grief, haunting you every day.” Inspired, largely, by the passing of Nonna Maria – who provided interstitial narration across the band’s early work – it’s these intimate details which render the songs on Mourning You so devastating. The record explores love and grief as kindred spirits. Grief as love with nowhere to go. Love determined by the fear of its loss. A blood pact. A life for a life. The gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror.
Though inspired by the shocking iconography of horror shows, slasher flicks, and psychological thrillers, Bonnie Trash turns cinematic tropes on their head. Rather than fashioning nightmares into reality, the band paints reality as a nightmare, rife with pain, suffering, and gothic theatre. Bonnie Trash understands that everyday atrocities haunt the periphery of our lives. A black cloud looming on the edge of our vision. Curses abound. You can’t ward them off. You’d best make an unholy racket.
Mourning You is out February 28, 2025 on Hand Drawn Dracula. In mourning, all is lost.
Bonnie Trash live dates:
Feb 27 – Toronto, ON – Wavelength Winter Fest w/ The OBGMs, pHoenix Pagliacci, Cadence Weapon
Mar 01 – Guelph, ON – ArtBar
Mar 08 – Kitchener, ON – The Union
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Kate at Stereo Sanctity.]
