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Violent, abrasive music. It's the kind you’d expect your parents to call satanic, your teachers to deeply frown at, and your gran to disapprovingly tut-tut towards. Surely it couldn't be written by anyone other than crazy axe murderers, hellbent on the destruction of the human race? Death Goals could not be further from that, frankly they're as kind-hearted as they come. On Sunday, they are performing their one and only headline show of the year at Camden’s Black Heart to support Mermaids, the British charity supporting trans/gender and non-binary children and young adults. Both members of the band are very openly queer with both their albums directly dealing with queerness and all sorts of things surrounding it, including gender expectations, toxic masculinity, and pain. Of course, these are things that all too often can be dealt with and felt by those of us in the queer community.
However, this does not stop them being upbeat and bubbly whenever we’ve caught them at a show, and their incessant positivity is a glorious thing to bear witness to. The utterly wonderful queer hardcore duo Death Goals, aka Harry Bailey (he/they) and George 'Grog' Milner (he/they), earlier this year played their first ever European tour in support of Danish hardcore band EYES. Booked to play at the Dutch festival Roadburn in Tilburg this April, there’s arguably no band better suited for our first feature.
Our first time meeting Death Goals was at ArcTanGent 2023. Hearing fom Pupil Slicer that this small hardcore duo were “Cool as hell and queer as fuck” it was only natural we’d want to talk to them.
Chatting about the need for queerness in hardcore, they provided a lot of insight into the way they write and their thought processes around music - and as they said, “queer rights have never been in more jeopardy than they are currently”. Queerness is being persecuted the world over, and in a week where the NHS have just banned puberty blockers for children it is more important than ever to have good queer representation. Death Goals know just how much representation means to people, “We have a lot of trans people come to our shows… they feel like they can mosh and have a good time, they don’t feel like that at some shows… that should be the norm.”
Happy to disregard the status quo musically and personally, the duo wrote album one, ‘The Horrible And The Miserable’, over the COVID period and let it just fall out of themselves and their conversations about queerness. They then focused in on it as not just lyrical content but a band identity for their phenomenal sophomore album, ‘A Garden Of Dead Flowers’. Having played numerous shows with other hardcore bands, they stated that they “play a lot of X, Y and Z in genres and scenes where it can be heavily straight male dominated, and that's not necessarily inherent, but it just happens, and it’s quite nice to come in and kind of kick the door down and be like ‘Hey what’s up, we’re queer as fuck’ you know?”. Hardcore and queerness have always gone hand in hand, and queercore is rapidly starting to define this newest wave of metal. Growing through the cracks of the underground to start flourishing, this nascent style is rapidly gaining traction across the UK and the world - bands like Good Cop, The Callous Daoboys, Pupil Slicer, Cainhurst and more are all queer and hardcore or hardcore adjacent, with more always on the way.
The chaotic duo are gaining plenty of traction themselves as well, with a crushing set at Reality Unfolds Fest in January - read our review here - alongside the aforementioned European support run and coveted Roadburn slot which they are feeling truly privileged to be a part of. Now also booked for NOIZZEFEST and a show with Spaced in Nottingham in April, touring with KNIVES and headlining MAY/HEM day fest in May, playing Second Impact in Italy in June and Burn It Down in Torquay this August. They're building up a head of steam, and the momentum they certainly appear to have created is not going to be easy to stop.
Now chatting to them over Zoom a few days before their sole 2024 headline show, they're passionately saying just why it's so important to support not just trans and non-binary people, not even just queer people, but every single person you can. As people with a platform, they take it, and think it's incredibly important to do so - "if people aren't using their platform for fundraising or spreading awareness, then it makes the idea of being queer completely redundant. First and foremost, the idea of being a queer person is about supporting and celebrating the community that you find yourself a part of". Being a queer band matters so much to them because being a band has given them this very platform they can use to help others, which they feel is fundamental to the idea of anyone with a platform but in particular punk and alt bands, summed up very eloquently by Harry here "If you're a punk band, and you're not addressing the fucking horrendous acts that are going on the world against other people, you're fucking shit."
"If you're a punk band, and you're not addressing the fucking horrendous acts that are going on the world against other people, you're fucking shit."
After the decision taken by the NHS this week, it feels to them even more pertinent than ever to support the community that's given them so much love, saying "if we play one show where we can give a percentage of proceeds that's making a difference to someone's life, if the money that we make via this show benefits one trans youth life, then we've done what we set out to do." By setting their stall so openly, against the tide of the government and public opinion, they have also inadvertently helped expand the scene that has birthed them, whether they would admit it or not. There has been, according to George, "a movement in the dial" where there's now enough queercore bands that they can have tours and shows of just queercore bands without it feeling performative, and yet still fostering that same safe atmosphere.
Asking a horrible question to finish our chat, Harry and George each had a moment to sum up the band's perspective and intent in a few words. Harry gave us a few gems of knowledge as varied as 'Make Metalcore Gay Again' - watch out for the merch - and 'Kiss hard, mosh harder', a brilliant mantra indeed. George managed to make the short sentence into a paragraph describing his position on what he settled with, but the resulting words 'Look out for everyone' have never been so crucial.
If you see Death Goals on one of their already announced shows, or one of the litany they have yet to announce for this year (yes that's a small heads up, get excited), then take that to heart.
Protect queer kids, use your platform for good, and look out for everyone.
Writer's note - Out Of Rage has not existed for very long, and so hasn’t ever released a feature of this size before. We knew that, since the publication was formed around the hardcore community, we wanted to start off with a band from that scene, and that with so many queer people involved we almost knew we’d start with a queer band. With all this in consideration, Death Goals felt like truly the perfect place to start. An enormous thank you goes out to both of them for their time and their efforts, in everything they have done and continue to do.
Words: Jake Longhurst
Photos: Kayleigh Fryer
Editor: Amber Brooks
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