Mrs. Piss is a new musical project featuring:
JOVM mainstay Chelsea Wolfe. Over the course of this site’s ten year history, I’ve spilled quite a bit of virtual ink covering the Northern California-born and-based singer/songwriter and guitarist. And throughout that time, Wolfe has developed an honed a reputation for channeling somber and eerily haunting beauty in a variety of forms, including gothic rock, doom metal, folk and others.
Jess Gowrie, a multi-instrumentalist, who played drums during the JOVM mainstay’s tour to support her 2017 effort Hiss Spun — and was Wolfe’s bandmate in their previous band together.
The project can trace its origins back to Wolfe’s Hiss Spun tour — and the material they’ve created together are much more urgent, forceful and visceral than anything they’ve previously created before: heaviness that channels a punk rock spirit.
“Working on this project brought Jess and I so much closer as songwriters and production partners, after reuniting as friends and bandmates,” Chelsea Wolfe says in press notes. “It was freeing and fun to channel some wild energies that I don’t typically put into my own music. We tried not to overthink the songs as we were writing them, but at the same time we did consciously put a lot into crafting them into our own weird sonic vision. This project was a chance for us to do things our own way, on our own terms, and we plan to invite more womxn musicians along for future Mrs. Piss recordings.”
“To me, Mrs. Piss represents a musical chemistry cut short long ago that now gets a second chance,” Jess Gowrie adds. “Creating with Chelsea has always been very liberating for me, and we both push each other to try new things: anything and everything. Both of us have grown so much as writers and musicians since our first band together (Red Host), and with the journeys we had to take separately to get there, we both have so much more to say; so much more pain and anger to express. That said, we also had a lot of fun doing it, not to mention how freeing it is to not give a f-k and to just create.”
Recorded at Sacramento’s The Dock Studio and Wolfe’s home studio, The Canyon, the duo’s full length debut Self-Surgery is slated for a May 29, 2020 release through Sargent House — and to commemorate the announcement of their debut effort as Mrs, Piss, the duo released two singles. The first single is the breakneck, mosh pit friendly “Downer Surrounded by Uppers.” Centered around thunderous and forceful drumming, grungy power chords and Wolfe’s howled vocals with the end result arguably being one of the most seductive songs they’ve released to date. The second single is the slow-burning, power chord-driven dirge “Knelt,” a track that brings Soundgarden, Alice in Chains and JOVM mainstays Blackwater Holylight to mind. Simply put, these two singles are among the heaviest bit of material I’ve come across this year.