Premiere: Knife Pact depict sexual trauma with venomous song, ‘The Carrion King Lays an Egg’
Alternative duo reflect upon a formative trauma from their youth.
Content Warning: This song premiere contains discussion around abuse and sexual assault
Trauma often manifests in ways you may not realize at first, and it might spring upon you as a viper does. Puncture wounds leave deep, bloody scars, forever reminders on your skin. With their new song, titled “The Carrion King Lays an Egg,” alternative duo Knife Pact — composed of Deandra Warrick and Ten Backe — depict the gruesomeness of sexual assault in a savagely grinding way, a nightmarish conjuring of the brutality and the lingering effects. “I am a receptacle / I am a trash chute / You fill me up with nightmares / You slide down my throat,” their words burn to the bone.
Their visceral lyrics are like a serrated blade, slicing and tearing the flesh. The truth can be ugly. “Carrion King,” twisting metallic sounds in frantic motions, keenly captures “the way trauma colonizes a person’s body. It’s parasitic. It turns your brain and body into a factory for reproducing itself,” Warrick tells B-Sides & Badlands. “When I was a teenager, and still struggling with a bunch of stuff, I mistook my dysphoria for a kind of casual bisexuality. I liked when men paid attention to me because it made me feel like a woman, although I could never have said that out loud back then.”
“And I was too naïve to recognize that sometimes the attention men paid to me as a twinky 16-year-old was predatory. So, I got myself into a bad situation with an older guy. And it changed me,” she continues. “It scared me off of exploring my own identity for years afterward, and even today, I still have nightmares about it pretty regularly. [This song] is about that super formative trauma, and how in some way, every trauma I’ve absorbed since then feels like it’s part of a chain stretching back to it.”
The duo continue unraveling the misery with the second verse: “Swallow the sky / Make of your belly a coffin / Make of your teeth headstones / Bury the seed / The floor is metastasizing.” It’s the sort of electric performance that crawls under the skin — no one said talking about sexual trauma would be comfortable. To destroy poisonous trees, you have to decimate the roots.
Listen to “The Carrion King Lays an Egg” below.
Follow Knife Pact on their socials: Twitter
