Chicago multi-instrumentalist Mae Shults began self-releasing heavy rock laced with doom metal under the name Everson Poe in 2009. In the ensuing years, she’s moved deeper into metal, amplifying her ambitious, cinematic vision with its grim cacophony and outsize theatricality. Last year’s Grief, for example, closes with “Acceptance,” whose oceanically distorted guitars and minimal, thundering drums maintain their murky mood for long enough that it’ll seep into the rest of your week. In 2020, Shults contributed to Hope in the Face of Fear, a 58-track compilation organized by Scottish antifascist black-metal project Order of the Wolf that raised funds for Amnesty International and doubled as a showcase for left-leaning metal acts (the first song is “TERF Crisis” by antifascist black-metal trolls Neckbeard Deathcamp, and Damián Antón Ojeda also appears with two of his projects). Hope in the Face of Fear helped link Shults, who’s queer and trans, to a loose network of like-minded metal musicians deliberately rooting out the genre’s worst elements. As she told the extreme-music site Growls and Shrieks last year, the compilation helped “lefty metal Twitter” discover her work, which in turn led her to connect with UK underground label Trepanation Recordings.
On her new album, The Night Country, Shults confronts insecurity and powerlessness with unsparing fury. Even in the album’s sidewinding, proggy passages, when chaos threatens to blot out the road ahead, her confident strength of purpose makes the way feel clear. Many years of making music alone have taught Shults to express complex emotions so effectively that it barely matters if you can understand her lyrics—I can’t make out most of what she’s saying over the dense barrage of drums that cannonballs through the second half of “I Am the Maker of My Own Evil,” but the agonized desperation in her shriek does what language can’t.
Everson Poe’s The Night Country is available through Bandcamp.
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