With their debut EP Textile Waste, out now via Endnote Records, Toronto band dogwhistle drop us into the wreckage.
The release is less a collection of songs than a targeted detonation of everything the band sees rotting beneath the surface: military recruitment in video games, forgotten laborers in global supply chains, colonial policing of Indigenous lands, and the queasy comforts of Western apathy.
Formed in spring 2024 after two members crossed paths at a police station protest, the group blends noise rock, post-hardcore, sludge, and industrial to deliver a sound that’s jagged, forceful, and politically grounded. The EP comes with videos for both “First Person Shooter” (watch below) and the title track, reflecting the same raw convictions found across the release.
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“We didn’t want to just play loud music,” guitarist Mariful Alam notes. “The intention was to use it as a vehicle for raising awareness around a range of socio-political issues.”
What follows is a full track-by-track commentary from vocalist Kenley Meredith Ku (KMK), bassist Hank Ko (HK), and guitarist Mariful Alam (MA), detailing the songs’ inspirations—from DIY hardcore and 90s noise to anti-colonial solidarity and rage at systemic neglect.
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“(-) / “no more tickets to the funeral”
MA: The record opens with a dense, industrial segment. Our objective was to establish an atmosphere. This flows into “no more tickets to the funeral”, where musically, we wanted to emphasize the drum and bass with an almost machine or mechanical-like groove (ala Godflesh, Big Black, Unsane), creating an unsettling experience for the listener, which captures Kenley’s lyrical themes.
KMK: While I’m fortunate enough to be surrounded by other queer and trans people who are active and vocal in standing up against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, I find myself interacting with a lot of queer people who are at best checked out, and at worst deluded into thinking that mass slaughter and violent displacement are productive toward global queer rights. That idea is deeply short-sighted in myriad ways, not least of all in the sense that we as queer people are always living in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We almost lost an entire generation of thinkers, artists, friends, lovers, etc. to this disease, all the while most “Western” states and corporations intentionally underfunded HIV/AIDS-related research and public health initiatives until it was far too late. Like, hundreds of thousands of deaths in the US and Canada alone, most of which were preventable. It was a genocide by neglect, one which was in part abetted by the media’s dehumanization of queer people, sex workers, drug users, and so on. The powers that be saw mass death and suffering and decided that it was, like, God’s revenge on undesirables. That we deserved it.
Thankfully, antiretrovirals like AZT came on the market in the late 80s, safe sex education became relatively commonplace, the public stigma around HIV/AIDS and queerness in general has (at least until recently) abated, people nowadays can fairly easily get on PrEP/PEP or achieve undetectable viral loads, and a lot of the people activated by the epidemic then went on to achieve the legal rights and protections queer people in the Western world enjoy today. And, current threats to those rights aside, thank God it played out like that for us, because we’ve seen how decades of neglect and underdevelopment re: HIV/AIDS has played out in, say, sub-Saharan Africa.
We’re seeing the exact same cycle of neglect, erasure, and unattended-to mass death happening now in Palestine. And it kills me that there are queer people in North America who don’t have anything to say about it. We can’t close the door behind us and ignore other genocides going on in the world. Stand in solidarity, motherfuckers. We cannot sit idly by and let this happen again, even if it’s happening to people on the other side of the world who we may not always see eye to eye with. That’s pretty much the lyrical thesis of the song.
I’m a Diamanda Galas fangirl, and when I conceptualized the song, I realized that no one, least of all myself, can write a better musical critique of HIV/AIDS governance than Plague Mass. In particular, I can’t come up with a more visceral, impactful line than “To all cowards and voyeurs, there are no more tickets to the funeral”—so I just…ripped it off. Oops.
HK: “no more tickets” will always hold a special place in my heart since it was the first song we completed together as a band. I also think that this is the most musically unique one, especially in contrast to what’s popular in the Hardcore scene today, where the sound is often rigidly expressed by 25-40-year-old millennials covered in American traditional tattoos and obsessed with Terror and Trapped Under Ice. The dynamics of the super sludgy bass lines, airy guitar riffs and drums with subdivision parts paired exceptionally well with Kenely’s screamo-like style vocals, which, I think truly defined the sound of dogwhistle —a fusion of hardcore, post-hardcore, screamo, sludge metal, noise rock, you name it.
When we were in the studio recording with Jesse Turnball, we took time to figure out the bass tone. We wanted it to sound like 108’s bass in A New Beat from a Dead Heart (the band that I’ve always loved even before meeting Mariful, and perhaps THE sound that defined our mutual ground). In the end, I was isolated in the recording room with Jesse’s 2×12, and that beast sounded like an absolute war zone, vibrating every single molecule in that studio.
It was definitely also the one I practiced the most when we started jamming. In addition to the sliding at the beginning of the song, the triad chords at the end took me a long time to define the sound. Hope you will like it.
“first person shooter”
MA: “first person shooter” takes a slightly different approach — less abrasive and angular, more melodic and accessible, yet still sonically heavy and atmospheric. The musical inspiration was a combination of ethereal 80’s goth/post-punk (Killing Joke and the Cure) and darker hardcore and industrial tinged post-metal/sludge (Neurosis, Damnation A.D). The juxtaposition of spacey leads and melodies with downtuned riffs also makes this one of my favorites to play live. We wanted the anti-war themes reflected in the music video, which was directed by our drummer Jaeden and edited by his friend Alnaffay Mirza.
KMK: Look: Fortnite is a fun game, and I’m genuinely not trying to scold anyone for committing mass digital violence against random 13 year olds. Like, I’m not fucking Tipper Gore. At the same time, I do think the gamification of war is disturbing. The U.S. military leveraging the gaming industry to advertise itself to children (especially children lured in by the promise of the military’s material benefits) is fucked. The depersonalization inherent to drone warfare is fucked. My first memories of the world are of living in America during the Iraq War, of the dogmatic militarism and glorification of war that, while always present in American society, was at an absolute head in the early 00s. So growing up mired in that, and then years later learning about Abu Ghraib, learning that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs), learning that none of that had anything to do with “protecting my freedoms”—I feel like that broke my brain, in a way. That plus seeing “Collateral Murder” on WikiLeaks at a young age.
Lyrically, this song hews pretty closely to the tone and subject matter of “Support Our Troops OH!” by Xiu Xiu. I didn’t realize until after, which is crazy because at any given moment you can assume I have some Xiu Xiu record in my headphones. The subconscious mind is weird like that, I guess. I was, however, very consciously cribbing some imagery and cadence from “Analog Violence” by Skinwalker, who are these two guys in Alaska (of all places) making absolutely bonkers industrial power electronics-tinged metal. If they ever read this, please come to Toronto.
The chorus is just me screaming “duh-duh-duh-duh”, which was on paper supposed to sound like a machine gun, but in reality was an excuse for me to not wrangle actual words into a chorus.
Anyways, this song is about a girl getting mad at video games, because we are bad at them. Except Stardew Valley. And Balatro. And Crusader Kings II. I fucking love Crusader Kings.
HK: and The Sims.
“white mask”
KMK: I’m very interested in the idea that creative works depicting the apocalypse aren’t just about the future, but also about the past and present. Like, we can imagine the end of the world, but for a lot of the people the world already ended. And, at least from a North American perspective, we brought about the ends of those worlds. Indigenous languages and cultures and families were wiped off the map during colonization, Black people were ripped from their homes and brought to North America on boats en masse to be slaves, people now in Gaza are living under rubble with no surviving family members. All of that is apocalyptic.
That’s what “white mask” was meant to be about. Then it became a groovy little number about some masked Phantom of the Opera-type guy going absolutely feral living in the catacombs under a demolished city. This song lives visually in my head as a composite of a few insane Japanese movies I’ve fallen in love with over my years of being addicted to Letterboxd: The Face of Another (originally a Kobo Abe novel adapted by Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1966), Bullet Ballet (1998, by my personal lord and saviour Shinya Tsukamoto), and Onibaba (Kaneto Shindo, 1964, maybe the best film score of all time). All black-and-white, all very stark and stylized and haunted.
Lyrically, I’m doing my best Raygun Busch impression on this song, especially on the spoken word freakout halfway through the song. That guy is a genius at fitting vivid, disturbing imagery into really catchy alt-metal cadences. I want to be him, or maybe I want to steal his brain and wear his skin, or maybe I just want to grill him about his songwriting process over a cup of coffee.
HK: Sonically speaking, “white mask” is a perfect song for those who miss the good ol’ fast beats in songs that no longer exist in the space of overly-saturated-metallic-capital-H-Hardcore, as opposed to Crust Punk and other Hardcore punk communities that have maintained the sacred tradition of speed. In addition, shout out to all the folks who came to me after our set and/or dm’d me about how catchy and heavy the half-step scale riff in the first half of the song is to them. That seems to be a big selling point for many who have seen us live and/or seen our video footage.
MA: Yet, the second half takes a very different direction, making it more dynamic, even though the entire song is less than two minutes. We always seem to have an amazing crowd reaction when we play it live. Musically, it was definitely inspired by a melting pot of bands and genres —old school fast hardcore meets Orange 9MM, My Bloody Valentine, and Prong. I like the loud-quiet dynamics, where the bridge pulls back the speed and intensity, but builds back up to a loud, groovy yet dissonant ending.
HK: On that note, my favourite part of the song is indeed the bouncy “du-du dada – du – du da” drum riffs in the second half of the song. I still remember how excited I was when I heard Jaeden learn to play it during our first few rehearsals. Nicely done, Mariful and Jaeden.
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“textile waste”
MA: “textile waste” is arguably the EP’s most accessible and anthemic song. The riffs and melodies were inspired by a combination of melodic punk and (post)hardcore, (Jawbox, Failure, Naked Raygun) and groovy noise (Helmet, Deadguy, Shallow North Dakota)..
KMK: A medium-embarrassing fact about me is that, despite being a lousy singer, I did a lot of musical theatre as a child. Look: sometimes the only creative outlets accessible to queer kids in small towns are tap dancing and obnoxious show tunes.
I’ve always been amused by that part in the finale number of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat where the entire ensemble spends five minutes breathlessly listing colours. It’s such a weird and unique conceit, and when I began brainstorming how a song that was a critique of global industry and waste and labour exploitation might go, I was just like, ”What if the verses were just me listing different types of fabric?”
“textile waste” was inspired by the absolute cruelty and excess of the garment industry, and under global capitalism on the whole. Like, fashion companies either operate outright or contract out to factories in the Global South that hold thousands of workers under conditions of indentured servitude, luring them across borders then confiscating their passports, physically torturing them day in and day out—it’s dementedly evil, and it’s all in the service of providing heaps of cheap shit to consumers living in rich countries an ocean away. And then in the middle of that ocean floats a million square kilometre-wide vortex of garbage, a vortex of excess shit made with the primary intention of making a line go up. Or you can look at the textile waste crisis in Kenya, where piles of unwanted or defective garments are rotting in broad daylight poisoning the water supply. The juxtaposition there is revolting. It’s horrifying.
At the same time, low-quality garments made under abusive conditions are often the only choices available to people. Like, I first started transitioning when I was lucky to have $100 in my chequing account. I had to rebuild how I exist in the world with what was available to me. Even now, I feel stuck in a quagmire being in a band who relies on merch profits to fund our creative endeavours, and we’re often selling merch to punks and kids who only have $20 to spend.
In our dream world everyone would be wearing sustainably-made, durable clothes made by people in unionized factories, but the mechanisms of global capital have made that dream world very hard to reach. Which isn’t to say we shouldn’t fight like hell for it, but it’s worth holding ourselves to palliative standards (buying second hand, buying less, boycotting, etc) in the meantime.
HK: Side note – the interlude we usually perform before textile waste live is a poem, “我咽下了一枚鐵做的月亮” (English: I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron) by the Chinese poet, 許立志 (Xu Lizhi), in which details the disgraceful and dehumanizing treatments workers received in China.
Kenley sent it to me to read out during the live set to commemorate those suffering in the exploitative working conditions at Foxconn and other sweatshops in China. Foxconn, as a global supplier for Apple’s iPhones, Nintendo’s consoles, Google Pixel, Xiaomi phones, Playstations, and Xbox, is the prime example of how international conglomerates and global capitalists work hand in hand with the red aesthetic state that is supposed to “protect” its workers from abuses, exploit and extract surplus values from the workers together for the state elites’ interests and goals. As a Taiwanese person, I acknowledge that the founder of Foxconn is originally from Taiwan, and I am always looking for ways to organize against the inhumane treatment of Foxconn, as global exploitation in late capitalism transcends geopolitical conflicts in many contexts. As I believe in the self-determination of Taiwanese folks, I also stand firmly in solidarity with all workers and marginalized communities in China and beyond. I encourage everyone who has an Apple, Nintendo and/or other products with parts manufactured in Foxconn to look up the dehumanizing brutality happening in the factories and organize and spread words accordingly, as the blood is on your hands, too.
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“brokenwindowsbloodyhands.”
KMK: “brokenwindowsbloodyhands” was written because, well, you can’t be in a band with anarchists and not write a Fuck 12 song.
HK: When I first met Mariful at the police station and decided to jam together, I was actually thinking of a groovy New York Style hardcore project similar to the Swedish band, Side Step, in my head, but Mariful was on a completely different sludgy journey as he was working on his Turmoil and Nailbomb-inspired side project. I’d say brokenwindowbloodyhands was a perfect sonic compromise at the end as it encapsulated something both of us wanted at the time, and it was, in fact, also the first song that kickstarted our jamming sessions in May 2024. Several months later, the killing of Sonya Massey and the never-ending police brutalities around the world encouraged me to advocate the idea of writing this song to raise critical awareness of the issue of law enforcement from an abolitionist’s angle, and it was also a great homage to how this band started in the first place. Kenley soon joined the band. I shared the broader idea with her, and she delivered the wonderful lyrics.
After Jaeden and Nate joined the band, we incorporated elements like the beatdown and two steps into a total of eight bars at the end of the songs—something that is much more familiar and intimate to the hardcore kids today. It was also another primary reason we kept it as the last song on our setlists – it was something easier for the primary demographic of hardcore showgoers today to digest and chew on.
It is also essential to note that in parallel with the history of police violence around the world (in the United States and European colonies – in places where the occupation of “police” was historically intertwined in the patrolling, controlling and brutalization of chattel salves and marginalized communities), in Canada, the Indigenous nations’ blood has always been on Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)’s hands. Today, the RCMP and local police forces still disproportionately target and kill Indigenous folks to maintain the same colonial social order and unjust laws. brokenwindowsbloodyhands is about shedding light on colonial and capitalist violence through the hands of law enforcement as systematic racism, colonialism, and global capitalism are materially and ontologically indivisible.
KMK: What I can’t get over is the cruel irony of Indigenous people being brutalized or murdered by the police force of a state that is functionally occupying their land. The same police force that for decades threw their hands up hundreds of Indigenous women were going missing.
I wrote this song last fall, a few weeks after Tammy Bateman and Iggy Dedam and Hoss Lightning were all killed by RCMP. I initially wanted to write about their murders in a more metaphorical or elliptical way, but I realized that nothing hits harder than just describing what happened to them.
I know it’s en vogue right now to be all cynical or post-“woke” or completely checked out or whatever. And fine, you can sit there and think that you’re above all this stupid social justice warrior (SJW) pronoun snowflake bullshit while you jerk off and watch AI TikTok slop all day, but none of that will change the fact that the scale of state violence and indifference toward Indigenous people going on in this country is abominable. It’s a disgrace, and it’s an emergency. Get it the fuck together and do something about it.
HK: As this commentary section comes to an end, I want to mention that I believe hardcore musicians should NOT take themselves seriously but rather their underlying convictions and principles (this is also one the major reasons I decided to introduce our engineer, Jesse Turnbull, to the band at first because I think we all share a similar perspective on the idea of “not taking oneself too seriously, but their underlying beliefs.” S/o to “Bleed the Blue” by Klokwise). Rather than focusing on being “cool” and getting clouts, reserve your energy and emotion to utilize your creations as vehicles to invigorate your political beliefs and messages (e.g., emancipations, equity, anti-capitalism, DIY) and build communities. And by saying building communities, I don’t mean the “hardcore is for everyone” cliché; I mean the one by calling out abusers, transphobes, racists, unapologetic colonizers, neo-nazis’ dog whistles, and those that make the scene unsafe for people of all shapes and kinds. For me, it is what this band is about, and I’m glad to do it with some of the sweetest but also most principled people I’ve met in the scene in dogwhistle.
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