BONNIE TRASH • Mourning You • LP

Per lutto, si lascia tutto.

Mourning You – the new record by Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers BONNIE TRASH – is, put bluntly, an album about death. Not death in the macabre, violent, or outrageous sense, but death as you or I might know it. A spectre lurking around the corner. Capricious, indiscriminate, and unexpected. Ordinary and all the more terrifying for it. Real. Fear in the eyes of a loved one about to die, and the fear in your eyes – staring back.

Bonnie Trash is the project of twin sisters Emmalia & Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor, wedding post-punk’s steely-eyed austerity to goth rock’s brooding grandeur.

Mourning You finds Bonnie Trash embracing a newfound sense of urgency. A lifelong project christened in 2017 with the release of Ezzelini’s Dead, the band’s debut EP which found the pair mining the Trevisan dialect and archaic Italian folklore of their heritage to grisly effect. Where their first full length, Malocchio, shrouded Bonnie Trash’s nightmares in dusky dreamlike reverb, Mourning You is vivid and immediate. Emboldened by the addition of Emma Howarth-Withers on bass and Dana Bellamy on drums – whose thunderous rhythms sharpened 2024’s My Love Remains the Same EP into a fine-edged blade – Mourning You is less a post-mortem fantasia than a sudden, swift dagger to the heart. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.

Sarafina, the band’s singer and lyricist, has described the album as being about “losing someone you love. It’s about the horrors of grief, haunting you every day.” Inspired, largely, by the passing of Nonna Maria – who provided interstitial narration across the band’s early work – it’s these intimate details which render Mourning You’s songs so devastating. The record explores love and grief as kindred spirits. Grief as love with nowhere to go. Love determined by the fear of its loss. A blood pact. A life for a life. The gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror. “I see you in my dreams every night,” Sarafina intones on ‘Hellmouth.’ Were it not for Emmalia’s blown-out Stratocaster, you might mistake those words for the chorus of an old doo-wop standard. The track launches off as a woozy siren song, like Slowdive at full tilt, before pummelling you with anthemic power chords for Sarafina’s self lacerating chorus. “Drag me to hell and back I go.”

‘Veil of Greed,’ meanwhile, chugs unyieldingly along with all the icy malice of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine. The song’s gruesome imagery – feasting on hearts with rotten teeth – finds Sarafina worshipping at the altar of her agony. “I bow down before you and I know / You feed.” Perhaps the best embodiment of Mourning You‘s spirit, however, is ‘Your Love is My Revenge,’ a torch song for the dark night of the soul. Beginning with restraint as a forlorn lament – Sarafina bemoaning all the things left unsaid and longing for memories she’ll never relive – the track pushes into the red, building into a cacophonous, funereal dirge a? la Deafheaven. In the end, all that’s left are flowers on a tombstone and the lonely, decaying feedback of Emmalia’s amplifier.

It’s Emmalia’s relentless, thrashing guitar which has made Bonnie Trash’s live shows as legendary as their records. Conducted by Sarafina’s shadowy, stoic presence – howling lamentations in an anguished trance; a leather-clad banshee visiting graves as the night winds wail – it’s no surprise that they’ve become festival standouts across Canada and were natural openers for Toronto underground darlings Dilly Dally’s final show. Where most goth groups have presented themselves as an ethereal apparition, Bonnie Trash is equal parts Stooges and Sisters of Mercy; as much heavy metal as they are shoegaze. There’s plenty of cathedral drama, to be sure, but never without the crushing weight of a proper riff. Grounded by Bellamy’s warlike toms and Howarth-Withers’ earth-shaking bass, crashing and pounding like a storm on the grey horizon, Emmalia smears their power chords with distortion and black ink. A punch to the gut in the abyss.

Though inspired by the shocking iconography of horrorshows, slasher flicks, and psychological thrillers, Bonnie Trash turns cinematic tropes on their head. Rather than fashioning nightmares into reality, the band paints reality as a nightmare, rife with pain, suffering, and gothic theatre. Like their forebears Joy Division, Black Sabbath, or John Carpenter, Bonnie Trash understands that everyday atrocities haunt the periphery of our lives. A black cloud looming on the edge of our vision. Curses abound. You can’t ward them off. You’d best make an unholy racket.

‘Mourning You‘ is out February 28, 2025 on Hand Drawn Dracula. In mourning, all is lost.