Normal Weirds have developed quite a fixation with death. Their latest album, “Frown Time“, has songs called “Bury Me“, “Don’t Fear Death” and “Headstone Engraving“, along with a fair amount of political anger, horror references and the kind of black humour that can make a pretty miserable situation funny.
The San Francisco East Bay band have been pushing further into deathrock and darker post-punk, giving those influences room alongside the aggressive punk that got them started. They’ve settled on a name for the combination: deathpunk.
It’s a pretty good description of where they’ve ended up. There’s still plenty of bite in the playing, but the melodic side has become much stronger, even when the band are going at their hardest. It’s a sound they’ve been working towards across several records, and the ten songs on “Frown Time” find them much more comfortable with the darker parts of their musical tastes.
Drummer Merry Baker-Harlow is happy with the new label, although she’s careful about getting carried away with genre terminology.
โDeathpunk is a term weโve started using to describe our sound as itโs gotten darker. Not to get too carried away with labels (haha), but itโs a convenient way to describe what weโre doing. We havenโt stopped being a punk band; thereโs still that rawness and aggression underneath everything, but now thereโs a lot more deathrock and darker post-punk coming through.โ
She also pinpoints the musical contrast that runs through the record.
โI think that contrast between the melodic and atmospheric side and the more aggressive side is a big part of what makes the term work for us.โ
On “Frown Time“, the band’s interest in darker music has caught up with the frustrations they’ve been writing about for years. Their earlier songs often dealt with real events, personal experiences and the absurd things people do to one another. Here, Justin Harlow, the band’s bassist and principal vocalist, keeps coming back to the exhaustion of living in a world that seems to be getting steadily worse.
“Capsized” takes aim at the American Dream, with Justin impersonating a politician promising money to people who are already trapped in debt. The line “I’ve got the money if you need it” is delivered sarcastically, making a joke out of the assurances people hear from those in power.
The band see the song as a warning about a system that sells people the appearance of prosperity while leaving them owing more and more. Justin’s mock politician sounds generous enough. The joke gets considerably nastier once the lyrics turn to the possibility that the debt will never be repaid.
That anger comes back in “Druidess“, although this time there’s a horror film involved.
Part of the song came from “The Guardian”, the 1990 film featuring a nanny connected to an ancient supernatural tree. Normal Weirds were interested in the disturbing idea of somebody who is supposed to protect others becoming the very person who exploits or sacrifices them.
They took that premise into their own distrust of political power. In the band’s interpretation, the nanny’s role has something in common with authorities who insist they’re acting for everybody’s benefit, even when ordinary people end up paying the price. The lyrics wonder how far things can go before there’s no way back.
The two songs approach political frustration through different characters and situations. “Capsized” has the sneering promise of financial help. “Druidess” goes for the supposedly protective figure whose actions have become dangerous. Both fit naturally with the band’s anarcho-punk background, which Merry still hears most clearly in the guitar writing and the subjects they choose.
โIโm the goth chick of the band, haha,โ she admits when talking about the members’ different musical backgrounds.
“Bury Me” brings the frustration much closer to the feeling of simply being worn down by everything. It starts from the thought that things have become so bad they couldn’t possibly get worse. Justin uses death as an exaggerated response to that exhaustion, but the song also asks what people might actually do to change their situation. There’s a little hope in there, however difficult it is to find.
The same frustration carries into “Swan Dive”, where the problem is having to listen to the same old excuses over and over again. Justin describes those excuses as something dead and decomposing, surrounded by flies. According to the band, the song follows the anger of “Bury Me” into a bleaker question about where all this might be heading.
It also contains one of Justin’s favourite recurring ideas. He’s been saying โI’ll rest when I’m deadโ for years, and “Swan Dive” works that thought into its images of sleep, exhaustion and the grave.
By this point, the other members have apparently had enough of his preferred vocabulary.
โDeath does seem to come up an awful lot in our songs, doesn’t it? Haha… Weโve even had to ban Justin from using the word โgraveโ in any more songs, lol.โ
The humour has a personal history. Justin’s late father was a major influence on his taste for dark jokes, and he appears as the character Mr. Riot on the band’s first album, “Same Difference”. Merry explains that Justin has had an unusual relationship with death since he was young. He understands that dying is inevitable and knows perfectly well that he might be afraid when his own time comes. What he questions is the insistence that death can only be talked about seriously.
Horror has always been an easy source of ideas for him, and the band often use death to express something else entirely.
โSometimes itโs more about being completely sick and tired of life, politics, the state of the world, or whatever happens to be keeping you up at night that you canโt really do anything about except yell about it.โ
That combination of anger, humour and personal experience goes back through the Normal Weirds catalogue, although each release has handled it differently.
Their 2024 debut “Same Difference” was built partly around Justin’s own life, moving backwards through his experiences and looking at how he became the person he is. It’s a fairly unusual way to put together a punk record, especially one that was already difficult to pin to a single style.
The six-song “No Lease On Life”, released in January 2025, took a more direct approach. The songs were shorter, with a stronger hardcore punk pull, and the lyrics drew heavily on true stories. The record included “The Landlord Is Dead”, “Peter Frantic” and a cover of Rudimentary Peni’s “Bubble”, alongside the brief experimental piece “Bancroft Court”.
“Frown Time” keeps the band’s appetite for strange stories and political irritation, but the deathrock influences have come much further forward. They wanted to make room for more melody, darker guitar parts and arrangements that could go in different directions without losing the aggressive side of their earlier playing.
Normal Weirds have been finding their place in the East Bay punk community throughout that development. Based in San Leandro, they’ve played shows around the East Bay and San Francisco, along with occasional trips to Sacramento and Southern California.
Their local history includes gigs at Berkeley’s 924 Gilman, Oakland Secret and Music City SF. They’ve been welcomed by the punk community and made friends through the shows, although their changing sound has sometimes made getting booked a little difficult.
โI donโt know that we fit neatly into one specific scene, which has sometimes been a bit challenging for us. It can make getting our foot in the door a little tricky because we donโt fit perfectly into one genre, but at the same time I think thatโs part of what makes us unique.โ
The band have also been making a point of getting closer to California’s deathrock and goth community, which is where one of their favourite local gigs comes in.
Promoter Bill Pesch invited Normal Weirds to open for Altar De Fey, Egrets on Ergot and Scarlet’s Remains at the Ivy Room in Albany. They’d already been listening to plenty of deathrock, so getting onto that bill was exactly the sort of thing they were hoping for.
โWeโd love to connect with more bands in that community and play on more lineups like that.โ
Altar De Fey also provided the connection that changed how Normal Weirds recorded their new album.
The San Francisco deathrock veterans date back to the early 1980s, and Normal Weirds were already fans when they discovered that Altar De Fey’s Skot Brown worked as a recording engineer. Their first two releases had been made with Ryan Clark, whom they still speak very highly of, but they wanted somebody with direct experience of the darker sound they were moving towards.
Skot recorded, mixed and produced “Frown Time”, working with the members on their guitar and bass tones, drums and vocals. The band wanted the recordings to sound like their actual playing, including the rougher qualities that might disappear if everything were tidied up too much.
โHe wanted to keep everything sounding as natural and organic as possible, capturing the band as we actually sound rather than making everything too polished or perfect. It was important to him to preserve the character of the performances while still achieving the best possible sound quality.โ
Skot also suggested sending the album to Greg Wilkinson at Earhammer Studios for mastering. They already knew Greg’s work and were pleased when he agreed to take it on.
The band hadn’t originally set out to assemble a production team with such strong local ties, though they ended up enjoying that part of the process. Both Skot and Greg had been involved in the Bay Area underground long before “Frown Time” was recorded, and the record now has a direct connection to that history.
There were a few changes within Normal Weirds themselves before the album was completed.
Justin and Merry, who are married, started the band during the pandemic. Their first lineup included their friend Nick on guitar and synths, although he always expected his time as a regular member to be temporary. He stayed close to the band and continued helping with their recordings.
Nick, also known as Motherboard, produced “Copium” from “Same Difference” and “Bancroft Court” from “No Lease On Life”. Both are short experimental tracks, and he contributed noise and samples to “Frown Time” as well. He also inspired its brief “Crystal Palace” piece.
Trey came into the band through the brother of one of Justin’s friends and former co-workers. He was interested in rehearsing with them, and they soon discovered how much punk, deathrock and other darker music they had in common.
He later left to pursue other interests, leaving Justin and Merry to carry on with different guitarists. Eventually Trey returned, and they finished the new record together.
The band have always enjoyed the fuller sound of having two guitars, and the additional parts helped them work on more varied arrangements as the music developed. Trey handles guitars, noise and backing vocals on “Frown Time“, as well as the lead vocal on the title track.
Emma, Trey’s wife, had also been involved in earlier recordings. Her contributions are more extensive here. She plays bass on “Don’t Fear Death“, sings lead on “Headstone Engraving” and adds backing vocals and synth. Justin handles lead vocals and bass, Merry is on drums, and Nick contributes noise and samples.
The band itself has a history that goes back to Justin and Merry’s first date.
Merry told Justin she liked the fact that he was โweird, but like normal weirdโ. They started joking about what that might mean, and Normal Weirds sounded like a pretty good name for a band. When they eventually formed one during the pandemic, they remembered the conversation.
The two also came up with their own rough measurement of acceptable weirdness. Normal Weirds, they decided, should be 80% weird and 20% normal.
โYeah, Iโd say 80% weird, 20% normal is still pretty accurate, although admittedly itโs also kind of stupid, lol.โ
Merry reckons that’s about as far as the balance can go before things start getting genuinely uncomfortable.
โIโd say 80/20 is probably the extreme end of the acceptable range. Any more weird than that and you start tipping the scales into bad-weird territory, haha.โ
“Frown Time” got its name through another of Merry’s slightly odd experiences.
She dreamed that the band and some friends were hanging out when Justin informed her that Trey wouldn’t be coming to practice the following week. She asked why. Apparently, Trey needed some “Frown Time”.
โWhen I told everyone about the dream, we all started cracking up because it made perfect sense. The phrase stuck, and we all agreed it would make a perfect album title.โ
It became one of those jokes that everybody in the band immediately understood. By the time they were putting together the record, it also suited the songs they’d written, with their mix of anger, exhaustion and morbid humour.
The artwork follows a similarly strange line of thinking.
Its centrepiece is an Associated Press photograph taken by Vincent Thian in March 1975. The woman pictured is Crystal Palace, a member of the Manson Family, being brought into federal court for arraignment on charges connected to an alleged plot to kidnap the Mexican consul general. The alleged plan was intended to secure the release of two prisoners from the Los Angeles County Jail.
Normal Weirds were struck by the smile on her face in such serious circumstances. They wondered what might have been going on behind that expression and whether it could have concealed something completely different. It was a possibility they found interesting, with no claim to knowing what Crystal Palace was actually thinking or feeling.
โWe liked the idea of choosing an image that played on the same idea with the album’s title, but we also felt there was something deeper beneath the surface.โ
Justin found the photograph and drew the border and surrounding artwork by hand. Trey designed both the Normal Weirds logo and the “Frown Time” logo, then worked with Justin and Emma to assemble the finished cover.
Their band photograph came from a much more ordinary setting, although it has an equally odd little detail.
Their friend Hayden Sidun photographed the musicians in Merry and Justin’s backyard, using Trey’s camera. Behind them stood an old plum tree that’s apparently close to dying, yet continues producing fruit at a ridiculous rate.
โThat poor tree is on its last legs, but somehow still produces fruit like it’s on steroids.โ
Trey and Emma added the filter to the photograph afterwards.
“Frown Time” came out on Bandcamp on 2 October 2026, with the wider digital release following on 16 October. The ten-song album is available through Normal Weirds’ Bandcamp, alongside “Same Difference” and “No Lease On Life”. Both earlier records help explain how the band arrived at this combination of punk aggression, dark melody and the sort of humour that makes a title like “Frown Time” sound perfectly reasonable.
