After the dreamy, atmospheric EP The Age of Men is Over in 2018, vocalist Laura Beach joined multi-intrumentalist Margaret Killjoy for No Dawn For Men, Feminazgûl’s first album, released in spring 2020. Its folk-laced, atmospheric black metal caught the attention of many: both visceral and scenic, mournful and elevating, it’s a celebration of the expressive possibilities of the genre and a breath of fresh air. We reached out to Margaret and Laura for an outlook on the innards of the project, and here are their musings on rot, Tolkien, feminism, and power.

This interview was done by email in November-December 2020 for Stryga, a fanzine published by the enchanting Lia of Absaintes. It’s a stunning thing and you can still buy it here.

Margaret, you’ve been playing music for a while in a bunch of different genres (neofolk with Alsarath, goth/coldwave with Nomadic War Machine…). Laura, you’ve been involved in the metal scene for some time too. How did you both get into black metal? What drew you to it?

Margaret: The first time I heard black metal in a way that really stuck with me (I’d listened mostly to gothic metal as a teenager) was in the mid-aughts, when someone played me Summoning, Wolves in the Throne Room, and Agalloch, and I realized I’d been missing out. I’d been into metal a bit, but not a ton, before that. Because I hadn’t been exposed to the stuff that really woke something up in me.

Laura: I can safely say that I’ve been around in my scenes for a while. I started when I got involved in local scenes pretty much since I was 15 years old. It started when I would go to all ages shows at the now extinct Corner Lounge in Knoxville, Tennessee.

I started getting into black metal in my late teens and I think I had a pretty standard way of getting into black metal. Dimmu Borgir. And then I made my way through things like Behemoth, Mayhem, Bathory, etc. Eventually I came upon Summoning and the like in my early 20s.

How did Feminazgûl form?

Margaret: I started working on some synth metal maybe five years ago, basically on the bones of what later became the song “To the Throat”. I liked it, but it wasn’t complete. I hadn’t learned how to do vocals yet, or figured out the trick where I get synths to sound like guitars. It was just distorted synths and drums at that point. So I let it sit for several years, as I tried to find guitarists, singers, drummers, etc. to turn it into a band. Then, I guess a bunch of stuff happened at once. I came out as trans—which meant I could finally use the name Feminazgûl. I got my heart broken by a straight girl. I was sad alone in my bedroom in an off-grid barn with some spare time and lots of angst, listening to the rain on the steel roof. And I figured out a lot more about music production, including some ideas about how to get synths to sound like guitars. So I wrote that EP, thinking no one would ever hear it. People liked it. Then I met Laura.

Your EP The Age of Men is Over was written by Margaret alone. How involved was Laura in the LP? How did her participation change your creative process?

Laura: welp. I honestly wish I could say that I wrote more but I did a majority of the vocals, especially the harshes. And I wrote some lyrics, especially the ones on “Bury the Antlers”. I would here and there provide critique on certain riffs or phrasing or what have you. I didn’t do a lot of the writing on this album but I’m making an effort to teach myself how to compose and familiarize myself more with compositional programs.

Margaret: Finding Laura really opened up the possibilities for Feminazgûl. At first, it just meant that we could play live. But also… I think Feminazgûl is about harnessing a certain kind of rage and power, and Laura has that. A lot of both, to be honest. Laura’s interest in mythology shifted some of my own thinking about themes, and her influence on my thinking around how the project interacts with feminism has been clear. At the moment, I write most of the lyrics (but not “Antlers”) and then Laura kind of sits over my shoulder and politely is like “no that part sounds bad,” and her taste in music is definitely an influence in how I write the songs.

Margaret, you say that Laura brought some clarity in how the project interacts with feminism, and also that coming out as trans allowed you to use Feminazgûl as a bandname, thus basically labeling the band as feminist. Could you expand on that, on the interaction between black metal and feminism in this project?

Margaret: So… I’ve been interested in feminism and LGBT issues my entire life. Those were absolutely my first interactions with politics. It always felt a bit weird to me, because here I was, this “straight guy” who pretty much spent all “his” time hanging out with girls, painting his nails with girls, letting girls do his makeup, being involved in LGBT and feminist politics, etc. but I didn’t have the courage to come out to myself as a teenager. By my 20s, when I was more involved with anarchism, I was afraid of coming out because I didn’t want to take up space. I’d switched my name to a woman’s name, I was wearing dresses in public, etc. but I was still “a cis straight guy.” Well, until I started dating boys. And then when I finally came out as trans in my 30s.

The first EP, I tagged it as “misandrist” on bandcamp. It was, frankly, a bit of an edgelord move. I don’t believe that being a misandrist is in any way comparable to being a misogynist, since men are positioned at the top of the patriarchal system, but there are ways in which misandry goes too far. I’m honestly not trying to shame anyone who identifies as a misandrist and I’m not embarrassed about using the word. It was Laura, a cis woman, who actually kind of tempered that. Laura is friends with a lot more cis men than I am, and basically she was like “if I’m in this band, it’s feminist, not misandrist” and I went along with that and I’m glad I did. An awful lot of our friends and fans are cis men (and misandrist rhetoric can also hurt trans men and trans women and nonbinary folks as well) and it’s been useful to talk about patriarchy and gender roles as hurtful to all people, including cis men.

Black metal is such a natural feminist space, even if it hasn’t become that yet. It’s saturated with cis men, and I do think the first priority is to hold open the doors for more people other than cis men to get in. But for the folks who are already here, black metal could be such an amazing place of healing and deconstruction of the toxic aspects of masculinity. Because it’s just not a bro-y art form. I feel like if we were a death metal band we’d have an even harder time.

Laura: it would probably be so much harder if we were a death metal band. There’s so much overlooked misogyny within death metal and also deathcore. When I got into Feminazgul, I did feel that the misandrist label was a bit much when I saw that. in fact, I thought it was kind of hilarious at first just like the name. Just a silly edgelord joke. I even saw it once on a show flyer that we were misandrist. But upon further inspection of the music, lyrics, ourselves, and our values, etc., we aren’t really projecting any sort of the true misandry out into the world that we often get accused of spewing by these metal chuds. A lot of our lyrics and themes are about reclaiming power, healing our past traumas, finding the untapped strength within ourselves, and the reverence of the true neutrality of nature in its various states. We certainly don’t hate cis men either. Even the ones that hate us. We do however hope that they seek help however. I personally have many of them for friends and their outpouring of support for what we do which is amazing. I know we keep bringing this up in interviews but we’re still and always blown away by how many cis males want to play for us whenever we’re allowed to play shows and tour again.

But I’ve definitely had cis men (and surprisingly a few cis women too) that I’ve known for years turn on me after joining this project. Just because of the name. Rarely do these people actually do their homework about what they hope to target. Not that this really means anything and it’s just something I noticed, but I just kind of thought it was hilarious but basically within the first week of me joining, I had maybe like 40 unfriendings on Facebook. Haha. Even one of these men went so far to try to write a hit piece a week after the album came out. Basically it should have been titled I Feel Nothing: A Novella. Oh well. It’s great when the trash takes itself out.

Margaret: Yeah this odd thing happens where someone sends us hate mail, or accuses us of hating men or whatever, and then… sometimes they actually talk to us, or listen to what we’re saying, and realize we (and women and feminists more generally) aren’t the enemy.

No Dawn For Men starts with an invocation of death as Illa and death runs like a thread through the whole album, mostly in its most tangible, material form: rot and decay. What does Illa mean to you, and what role does death play in your music—or in your life in general?

Margaret: Illa is a concept that some friends and I have been working with for awhile… about 10 years ago I was in a short-lived metal band called The Illawen that really built up a lot of this mythology. I’m really interested in how we can come to find and define our own concepts of divinity—a fancy way of saying “I made up my own god to worship” which is of course a bit odd. As is, arguably, worshipping a goddess of death. But I wonder… how can any god be powerful if she is not also a god of death? What is it that defines life but its own ability to end? I venerate death so I can celebrate life. I want to do everything, explore everything, have as much of a life as I can before it ends. Because it will end.

Black metal, atmospheric black metal especially, draws inspiration from its surroundings, especially from nature. Margaret, I think you actually live in the forest, so is that your case? How does that work for you? (Laura, I’m not sure where you live, but the question is totally relevant to you too!)

Laura: to answer that last statement, I do live within about 30 minutes of Margaret’s residence.

I feel like there has to be a correlation between living alone (or limited human contact) amongst grandiose nature and the production of gut-wrenching atmospheric music. That isolation certainly manifests in the music and it can certainly be felt.

Admittedly I’m living within Asheville proper, but I’m still surrounded by the majesty of the Blue Ridge in all directions. Honestly my time here within the mountains has been mostly a tumultuous one and I feel like I can put that sorrowful energy into the music that Margaret creates.

Margaret: I do live in the forest. I’ve been doing my own field recordings here that will end up in future songs, and the very opening of the first EP is the sound of rain on a tin roof because at the time I was in the barn in the field, not the cabin in the woods, and I was listening to that rain on the tin roof a lot. I’ve found that listening to the land is essential to my creative process. It’s hard to put into words (which is annoying, I’m a professional writer) but there’s something about… how our thoughts and ideas echo off of the hills around us. This is true in cities too… the line between “natural” and “unnatural” isn’t as well-defined as people would like to believe it is. Cities are also places of rot and decay and rebirth, and they can be listened to as well.

Margaret, how do your work as a writer and your work as a musician compare? Do you feel like playing music is a way to express things that are too complex or too ineffable for words? Is it two different ways of saying something similar, or does it feel like two completely different things?

Margaret: Alright so I’m really into art as magic, my work as spells. Yeah, I know how pretentious that sounds, but I really can’t find any other framework half as good. And different mediums work for different spells. You can create different effects. And… to draw this metaphor out to absurdity… I’ve been focusing a bit more on music because frankly it has a shorter casting time. Writing a novel takes months or years, and then my agent has to sell it, and then the publisher has to put it out, and then the reader has to read it, and I love my books but their impact doesn’t hit for years after I first sit down to write. A couple years ago I realized… fuck I literally don’t know if we have years. Especially as an antifascist in the US right now, and as an out trans woman in the South, and now with a fucking pandemic on… I’m still writing and going to keep writing, but some of what I want to say, if I want a higher chance to live to see its effects, better get it done now.

I do focus on pretty different things in my writing and my music, for sure. With writing… okay so if “brevity is the soul of wit” then I think “clarity is the body of wit.” If you want what you say to have an impact, in words, people have to know what the fuck you’re saying. I’m not personally into writing shit that’s so clouded under metaphor that people have to interpret it themselves and they might get something totally different out of it. There are good writers who can do that kind of shit, but me I’m a simple girl—when I write, I have an idea, and I want to convey that idea as clearly as possible. Music, though, yeah. Too ineffable, I like that way of putting it. I’m not really trying to get the listeners to worship Illa, and like we don’t have a position on whether or not you should actually bury the antlers with the stag. (I’m pretty into rot, personally, though, as a holy process, so things that delay that process are questionable. But again, that’s my own weird shit. I don’t need the listener to know something, I just want to help them feel something.)

Obviously, Tolkien is a big inspiration—it’s also been a big inspiration in black metal since the Norwegian second wave. Could you explain what his work means to you as a musician (and a writer, Margaret)? And why do you think he seems to work so well with black metal?

Margaret: Tolkien really is one of the great archetypical world builders. Like… hey, I want to create my own sense of purpose and meaning. Not just “who is the king of the following castle” but actually creating a moral system, or multiple moral systems, that different people practice within his fiction. I think a lot of us grow up in a system of morality that doesn’t suit us—hate your neighbor, strive for power, don’t be gay, every man for himself, etc—and we’re fascinated by societies and systems outside of that morality. We draw from historical examples but we can also build our own. Now, Tolkien was real complicated—he was adamantly antifascist, but he was also probably the most influential subconsciously racist writer of the 20th century. (I dunno, or someone else was. Whatever.) But for me the moral core of Lord of the Rings is: you don’t take and wield power, you fucking destroy it. I love that. He built an entire world, an entire cosmology, to support that core idea. As for why it works so well with black metal, black metal is all about mythology and meaning and power. It’s all about how stories matter… like, they really fucking matter. Our sense of selves and who we are come from stories, from mythology. Black metal explores those things, which is glorious.

Laura: Margaret nailed it. Haha.

If I’m not mistaken, on the artwork of No Dawn For Men are harpies. In mythology, they would stand for revenge and devastation, later on, it became almost synonymous with witches (and any kind of unpleasant women). How important are those menacing feminine figures for you?

Laura: When we were figuring out lyrical themes, we had written down a bunch of ideas about women in various mythologies. We obviously wanted to go something fierce and powerful and also something that traditionally struck fear into the hearts of men. Harpies in various mythologies (and let’s face it, nowadays, franchises) have always lived on the edges of society, being all mysterious, fierce, and independent, so it was extremely natural to pick the harpy.

Margaret: Yeah, and there’s this “shrill” aspect, you know? Like it’s the insult people use against women all the time about our voices, so fuck it. I like powerful women who devour their enemies, that works for me.

Black metal aesthetics do draw from femininity in many ways in the first place, from the witchy vocals to the goddess worship and the death-as-a-woman trope—although many guys may be in some sort of denial when it comes to that. What is your take on it?

Laura: Metal certainly is about rebellion and challenging the status quo. But I feel like with a fair amount of the male population (and maybe some self-hating women as well) within metal, they have a hard time letting go of some of the rigidly traditional institutions and social mores that they have been brought up with. But I also think that part of it has to do with power. And not wanting to let go of some of the institutions that benefit them. And now with our social mores changing to become more accepting of some of the minority populations that aren’t cishet, white, and/or male, they might now feel like it’s the true rebellion to be those things, not challenge the status quo like before, and support ideas that support their oppression. Attitudes are certainly changing within metal but it has been a slow change. I hope that with our presence we can potentially change the social landscape within metal.

Margaret: I really like the concept of black metal as somewhat feminine. It’s screeching and angry but in this… god it’s so hard to divide shit into masculine and feminine without falling into essentializing, isn’t it? But I do think there’s something feminine in black metal and always has been. I think it’s part of why some cis men defend the space so rigidly… they want to be able to wear makeup and have long hair and scream about their feelings without it meaning that they’re queer or whatever. But guess what? The structure that says you can’t have long hair and makeup and scream about your feelings… that’s patriarchy. That’s 100% patriarchy talking. If you get over your shit, you can do whatever you want.

A couple of years ago, you released a video that caused a bit of outrage in the local news where they blamed anarchists for being Satanists (or vice versa, you never know with these people). I don’t think I’ve ever seen any of you mention Satan anywhere, but does it mean anything to you?

Margaret: ooh, yeah. That was for my electronica project, Nomadic War Machine. I got my very own satanic panic! Personally, I’m an anarchist, and not a satanist (though many people are both), but I don’t have any problem being called a satanist. Satanism is cool, in that it explores an alternative moral system and values freedom and responsibility. Ironically, just the other day, instead of Christians yelling at us, it was some so-called satanists who wanted to declare war on Feminazgûl because we’re uh… degenerates I guess? I mean, they’re fascistic satanists, which is idiotic, but they’re mad at us in the same way that Christians usually are. Anyway, I think satanism is totally fine it’s just not for me. I always gotta make up my own shit, personally.

A lot of what I’ve mentioned so far—black metal, neofolk, Tolkien, Romanticism (of which black metal could be one of the latest manifestations), longing for nature, death worship (maybe not the word you’d chose, feel free to correct it)—have been sort of co-opted by the far right, although they all emerged as means to emancipation which we all could use. How do we take it back?

Margaret: The main thing for me is to not let them have it. Nazis don’t get nice things, like folk music, black metal, romanticism. We won’t let them. Personally, I find the best way to do this is to be adamantly and openly antifascist and to take up space. It’s hard to explain, but basically, just staking a claim. Like, no matter what anyone says, black metal isn’t fascist music. There are fascists who make black metal, but there are as many antifascists, and of course the vast majority of black metal fans haven’t really taken sides one way or the other (though as the world suffers a resurgence of fascism, I think people are falling off the fence pretty fast).

In the meantime, Meredith Yayanos joined the band and Feminazgûl is now a trio. See what they are up to here or there.