On April 12th, Black Dresses hosted a livestream listening party for Peaceful as Hell that doubled as a two-year anniversary celebration of their debut album, Wasteisolation. In a blue and purple-lit room, Devi McCallion and Ada Rook, the duo who make up this Canadian noise-pop project, were grinning and headbanging and throwing up the sign of the horns as their fervid fans (the kind that inspire Sauron memes) wrote messages like “go off microbiology queen,” “TRANS RIGHTS BABY,” and “this is the cutest thing that’s ever happened” in the sidebar. It’s all very fitting: Devi and Rook’s collaboration started via Twitter DM, sending loops and beats back and forth from Vancouver and Toronto; they live in the same city now, but the Black Dresses origin story, and their intimate online connection with fans, is something of a beacon in this hyper-isolated time. As Devi put it in a 2018 interview, “It’s very friend-oriented music, even though it’s about isolation.” (Their music is a reminder of the ways in which people have always been marginalized and alienated from each other—even pre-pandemic.)
Peaceful as Hell is softer and more accessible than Black Dresses’ previous output, but "accessible” is relative: The music still teems with metallic riffs, industrial noise, pop-punk that got stuffed into garbage disposal, and a good amount of digital caterwauling. It’s fun and loud as hell, as per usual; a psychotic slumber party, a Second Life rave. But the crackly, jabbing sounds are toned down here, and you can hear Devi and Rook more clearly than ever.
In this new space, they stretch and shapeshift, making the most of their hybrid angel-demon powers. “CREEP U,” a coolly anthemic track which imagines a body as a haunted house, is not only the most straightforward pop song Devi and Rook have ever written, it might be one of their best (it’s also their longest to date). It’s filled with their characteristic questions about self-knowledge, and singular humor: “Empty windows shine so strange/Like there's someone behind the pain/Of glass,” Devi sings, over a simple guitar line before saying, “That's my idea of a joke, did it make you laugh?” “MAYBE THIS WORLD IS ANOTHER PLANETS HELL?” a track about making the best of a shitty situation (Earth, society), wouldn’t sound too out of place on Miss Anthropocene—that’s new for them, and the languidness is welcome.
As always, even when they’re imagining themselves as angels, like on the fiery “SHARP HALO,” or as a “bloody worm goddess” on “SCARED 2 DEATH,” it’s all so human. It is decidedly music about being trans; it is music about being alive. It is music about the ways in which pain and joy swim together, the frustrations of trying to connect with others when even self-knowledge is elusive and chaotic. There is so much packed into Peaceful as Hell—complexity of inner life, dissociation, climate disaster, biblical imagery, the future—and yet it ultimately feels simple and unmistakable, as though it has fallen out of Devi and Rook. “So once again/Here we go again/It’s all we have/Okay,” Rook mutters on “BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP” before Devi joins her in shouting: “Beautiful friendship/Burning up in this/Tiny little moment of time/We will always try our best/To shine bright!” Especially with the world’s hellishness currently blaring at us, every social disparity spotlighted and exacerbated, loneliness and doubt deepened to an extreme degree, Peaceful as Hell is perfect medicine.
