G.L.O.S.S. - Trans Day of Revenge

Pitchfork 85

Hardcore punk can often seem incapable of nuance; Minor Threat songs, as much as they communicated one person’s choices, were elevated to the dogma of the straight edge movement by their audience. But hardcore is a shapeshifting genre, full of inversions and melted dichotomies. And even as it can act as a conduit for regressive political expression, it can also serve as a metaphor for queer possibility.

Enter G.L.O.S.S., a hardcore band from Olympia, Washington. Their name, an acronym for “Girls Living Outside Society’s Shit,” determines the shape of their music, which resembles Boston hardcore if rerouted through the perspectives and experiences of trans women. (Lead singer Sadie and guitarist Jake are originally from Boston.) Trans Day of Revenge is their second EP; it’s all of seven minutes long, following a demo of about equal length released last year. Revenge, released the day after the mass shooting in the Orlando club Pulse, conveys a violent and severe world, one in which the only reasonable and intelligent responses are anger and aggression.

The EP opens with a swirl of feedback, over which Sadie screams, “When peace is just another word for death, it’s our turn to give violence a chance!” The song describes police brutality and the degree to which this brutality flows from the superstructures that determine who survives in America. “Killer cops aren’t crooked.../they do as they’re told,” she sings. “Black lives don’t matter in the eyes of the law.” Hardcore as a form can often condense language to its most bladed form; Sadie’s lyrics depict queer experience in sharp fractions. “Singing in G.L.O.S.S. is kind of like getting to be a superhero,” Sadie told BitchMedia last year, “like weaponizing a lifetime of anguish and alienation.” “We scream/just to make sense of things,” she sings in “We Live.” “Studs and leather/survivors’ wings.” Her words are precise and rapid-fire but they’re also embedded with sensitive detail that give them the occasional rhythm of poetry.

In the title track she compresses historical and modern indignation into a single verse: “Remember those/Dead and gone/but don’t let the media set us up for harm/HRC, selfish fucks/Yuppie gays threw us under the bus.” In a few seconds, a library shelf’s worth of ideas are touched on: Queer erasure, the particular way in which media tends to flatten the specificities of queer life, the way that even within the queer community, transgender people are treated as inexplicable, illegitimate, politically inconvenient. This is the fragile calculus of hardcore that G.L.O.S.S. maintains, embedding politically complex ideas in emotionally unambiguous music without it flattening into a wave of rhetoric.

G.L.O.S.S.’s music also functions as great hardcore; the songs dazzle for the asymmetry and velocity of their guitar riffs, some of which land so heavily that they resemble columns toppling. The riffs in “Fight” move with such a molecular insecurity it feels as if the song could at any point melt down into shapelessness. G.L.O.S.S.’s songs tend to feel both old and new, the past and the present occurring simultaneously, layered on top of each other so they produce an interesting dissonance located somewhere between noise and precision.

At its best, hardcore is personal; it tends to erase the spatial distinctions between performer and audience, until there is a primordial flow of bodies, ideas, and energy. Growing up, the experience of my own queerness was often unreal and abstract, which combined into a kind of confusion and anger in myself. Trans Day of Revenge takes the anger and confusion one feels in the depths of the margins, and translates them, literalizes them, from a burning abstraction into something almost tangible. “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on the potentiality or concrete possibility for another world,” José Esteban Muñoz wrote in Cruising Utopia. “We’re fucking future girls/living outside society’s shit!” Sadie screamed on the first song on their demo. G.L.O.S.S. advance the possibilities inherent in queerness, even as they depict and reject the present horrors that queerness endures. It is music that is, above all, about survival and survivors. They project a future, both in the genre of hardcore and in the genre of reality.