Los Angeles-based musician Adrian Acosta was trained as a mariachi singer by his father, an established noreeńo musician, but after finding his older brother’s electric guitar, wound up getting into indie rock and shoegaze. Acosta started the rising electro shoegaze outfit Draag as a solo recording project, but the project expanded into a full-fledged band when he brought together local musicians — Jessica Huang, Ray Montes, Nick Kelley and Eric Fabbro — from the disparate musical worlds of underground punk, experimental jazz, no wave and classical to flesh out the project’s sound.  

The band initially set about reviving songs from a karaoke tape deck that Acosta recorded when he was 10. They quickly became a buzz-worthy local act, playing shows with Wednesday, Reggie Watts, Mint Field and a lengthy list of others. Then the Los Angeles-based shoegazers released two critically applauded EPs, 2018’s Nontoxic Process and 2020’s Clara Luz. 

Building upon a rapidly growing profile, Draag’s full-length debut, Dark Fire Heresy is slated for an April 28, 2023 release. Featuring arrangements built around Nintendo-era synths, lush guitars and warped tape samples played in reverse, the album thematically is reportedly a cathartic portrayal and release of religious trauma informed by Haung’s experience of using therapy to process her upbringing in a religious cult. Some songs act as vessels of healing and forgiveness and others became a revenge fantasy. Ultimately, the album holds space for a deeply familiar sentiment — the things you could have said, done or knew, while acknowledging a bittersweet nostalgia. 

Built around dense layers of scorching guitar fuzz paired with relentless, staccato thrash punk-styled drumming paired with ethereal vocal harmonies mosh pit friendly hooks and tape hiss Dark Fire Hersey‘s latest single “Demonbird” sees the Los Angeles-based shoegazers adding their name to a growing list of acts boldly pushing the genre’s sonic boundaries as far as humanly possible — while ripping extremely hard. 

Directed by Tyler Bradberry and shot at LIMINAL Space warehouse, the accompanying video for “Demondbird” features the band playing the song in front of projections of the band’s Haung as the titular demonbird seeking revenge for those abused and silenced while in a corrupt, hypocritical cult that she uncovered when she left it. “Becoming the Demonbird character in the video was a way for me to find some sort of justice for the women who were silenced and discarded in the purity culture of my particular religious upbringing,” Huang says.