Bonnie Trash

Today Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers Bonnie Trash announce details of their new album, ‘Mourning You’, which is set for release on February 28th on Hand Drawn Dracula. Along with the announcement they have shared the first single and video from the album, entitled “Veil of Greed”.
 
‘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 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 horrorgaze 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’ (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. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.
 
Bonnie Trash unveil their new project with this first single “Veil of Greed”. Emmalia's gripping and unyielding guitar riff with all the icy malice of Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine introduces the urgency of the uncomfortably ordinary horror story that unfurls across the record. 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."
 
“When you lose the one you love so dearly, it’s a cut that’s so deep, it rips your heart out of your chest. You try to continue on, but you suffer and you bleed” the twins comment. “Grief is like an open wound that will never fully heal. It can consume you if you let it. Sometimes, it’s best to let it feed, allowing the pain to exist with the beautiful memories you hold close to your 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.
 
‘Mourning You’  is out February 28, 2025 on Hand Drawn Dracula. In mourning, all is lost.