Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers Bonnie Trash have released their new album, Mourning You via Hand Drawn Dracula. Alongside the album release, they have also shared a new video for “Poison Kiss.”
Mourning You 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 specter 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. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.
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. 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 (2022), 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.
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 the songs on Mourning You 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.
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. 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.
DANA BELLAMY
