At the end of Shrew’s street, in an old mill town north of Worcester, sits a house he passes on every dog walk. Out front: a RAM pickup and a Cadillac SUV, both wrapped in American flag and constitution graphics, with a Trump decal stuck over one driver’s window so the former president looks, in Shrew’s words, “as if he’s driving.” The rear windows carry messages written in white ink, usually opening with “dear liberals.”
The week Charlie Kirk died, a new one went up every day. Lately they have started folding the no kings protests into scripture, asking why nobody wants Jesus as king.
The neighborhood itself is built on a hill where the ground keeps creeping forward, slowly wrecking everything people put on top of it. Shrew walks his dog, Hank, past that house every day. That is the song “Hank.”
“Hank” is one of six tracks on “Dead Civilians,” the second EP from Worcester post-hardcore band Body Eviction, out May 29 across streaming platforms. Shrew has called the record one continuous reaction to a particular moment, and the songs hold to it.
The EP was mixed and mastered in Worcester by Matt Marcel. The video for “Hank,” directed by Steve Karantzoulidis, is up now.
“Who Isn’t” starts close to home. The lyrics were sparked by a relationship that fell apart, in large part over political leanings, and from there the song widens out into a plea aimed at the cultural temperature as a whole. Shrew works a blue collar job, and the people around him voice the same complaints about the country that he does. They just land on different culprits. “They miss the larger picture and instead blame scapegoats such as DEI or immigrants for their own, and the country’s, problems,” he says. The song points at the historical danger of pinning a country’s problems on specific groups of people.
That pressure carries straight into “Burn Out.” Between coworkers who say heinous things and the grind of customer service, Shrew describes reaching a point where he feels like he is about to snap. Rather than go off on someone, he boxed the feeling up in a song. It closes on the line “everything’s so fucked up it’s easy to forget that good exists.” Good exists, he adds, it just tends to get outperformed by the bad.
“The Boulder” turns inward. Shrew is telling the listener, and himself, to embrace the absurdity, since at the end of it all there is nothing anyway. He knows how that reads. The obvious response is that if everything is pointless, why bother. He takes it the other way: “you can just as easily flip that sentiment and embrace your absurd-ass life.” The pessimism comes from trying to find meaning and failing, he says, when the meaning was in the struggle the whole time. The boulder does the rest of the work.
The title track is the one that turned abstract dread into something local. “Dead Civilians” is about the buildup of ICE and the current administration’s immigration policy, and Shrew is blunt about what made it land. “Seeing what happened in Massachusetts definitely made what was going on more real.”
Around that time, ICE spent roughly a week in his small town rounding people up. What he wants out of the song is a piece of self reflection from an American on the pride they take in their own lineage. This is Massachusetts, he points out, where Irish and Italian immigrants are in the DNA of the state, and he hopes more people see the hypocrisy in how they treat or talk about immigrants now.
“Save the Children” reads like a list read off the news. Send the children to the front lines. Roe v. Wade repealed. Senators and pundits turning people against schools and teachers for supposedly “turning” their kids gay and trans. Christofascism alive. The president named more than 38,000 times in the Epstein files.
Back at war with Iran. “What more can be said?” Shrew asks. The song partly answers that through what it withholds. Its lyrics are stripped down on purpose. “The sparseness is 100% deliberate,” he says. “While coming up with verses it felt more impactful to leave the chaotic riffs open and repeat the same thing on the chorus as a chant.”
“Dead Civilians” is out May 29.
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