deathdotgov Turns Memes Into Post-Genre Mayhem
By Ash Newton
The top comment under deathdotgov's viral TikTok clip reads, "This intro would be so cool for a band that was actually good."
The commenter – who received over a thousand likes – refers to the band's use of a classic online meme, the "So yeah, you're gay" clip of an angry gamer's message that ends with an infamously terrible guitar solo. During performances, deathdotgov pauses while the poorly-recorded sound bite plays. When the speaker would normally begin his solo, a tenor saxophone screeches, and the band erupts into bombastic improvisation.
The top comment may be right – the next ten seconds are loud, discordant, and ugly; the camera whirls erratically to capture nearly a dozen people on stage thrashing their instruments. Yet beyond subjective standards of good or bad, the clip is clearly engaging, as evidenced by its 50,000+ likes.
"We choose them during rehearsal," deathdotgov's guitarist Dylan explained about the band's eclectic and humorous sampling in a Zoom interview. "At our first show, we didn't have many of our bits worked out... we booked the show before we even had Coba as a singer, and we decided to play a Weezer song in between the breakdown for the last song."
The viral performance—only their third show—is now immortalized as a live album on YouTube. From that set, two tracks have emerged as official singles: the explosive opener "Magic Guns" and "Tweak," the latter featuring a sample of South Park's jumpy character screaming, "They've got nuclear missiles! We're all gonna die!" Combined with cryptic lyrics about DNA and a "reinvented man," the song paints an eerily sardonic vision of a radioactive future.
"We want it to actually be fun," Dylan says about their sample choices. "They're more of a live accessory... we actually took the Tweak sample out, and it wasn't in the recording, and then right when we sent it to master we put it back in."
The transition from stage to studio has been a deliberate evolution. "Our main songwriters in the band are Dylan and John," drummer Meghan explains. "Their process is writing something up and showing it to us... we try to write the most bananas, stupid crazy parts we can." This approach yields interesting results: "The songs that we write end up translating live well first, and then we record it and it takes on a whole different life. For Magic Guns there's a lot of extra auxiliary percussion that we can't exactly do live."
Though releasing singles to platforms like Spotify signifies a step forward for the band, they maintain that streaming isn't their core priority.
"Streams are just clout... it's nice to see the number go up, but I'd rather have 500 people show up to our show than have a song with a million streams and no one coming to see us live," said Dylan. Their live recordings are also available on Bandcamp, which offers listeners more options to support them directly.
"We really love Bandcamp, and people actually do buy our stuff there... We record all our shows, and Dylan goes through all the takes of our live shows to decide what to put online. We think it's a really cool, organic tool to use," said Meghan.
The streaming ecosystem presents other challenges, particularly when it comes to genre classification. "When we are going on Spotify and have to pitch a song on a playlist—most bands rely on playlisting now—we have to name what our genre is," Meghan explains. "We're like, 'We're not post-punk, but I guess we're like post-hardcore, but, with sax, and we're not really hardcore but let's put that there too.' The way that you can take in music and find it now is so different."
Looking ahead, the band is working on their debut album, recorded live in a single room (with saxophone tracked separately), aiming for an early 2025 release. "Now we're trying to get the money together to mix the album fully," Dylan notes.
Deathdotgov’s first three singles can be streamed here. Their live recordings are available on YouTube and Bandcamp.