Dark Pop Duo Fetters Believes "We Deserve To Die"

November 5, 2021

I don’t branch out from metal like I used to on Invisible Oranges — part of an initiative former Editor-in-Chief Andrew Rothmund and I started to help re-center this website to be more within the scope of founder Cosmo Lee’s vision. We are “The Metal Blog,” after all, and yet… I find myself not listening to as much new metal like I used to. I don’t feel that ravenous desire to find recent or upcoming metal: a side effect of simply being overwhelmed with the weight of so much mediocre “quarantine metal” that I simply do not care as much as I used to. Now other things excite me beyond the scope of “just metal,” but I still look for similar qualities in new music: heaviness, emotive weight, quality songwriting, an entrancing character, all of which manifest in the new release from Coastal Californian duo Fetters, titled We Deserve to Die.

When I was first introduced to the Fetters project however many years ago, vocalist and synthesizer player W Ross Major, also of Nemorensis, At Dusk, and dungeon synth darlings MalFet, described it to me as “lighter death industrial.” For the uninitiated, death industrial is a style of music which calls upon intense textures and harrowing vocals, most notably played by artists like Brighter Death Now, Trepaneringsritualen (which I spelled from memory, nice), and Ramleh, but Fetters is incredibly different from these genre champions. Calling upon elements of dark electronica, darkwave, and other elements of gothic music, the duo of Major and fellow synthesizer player Maya Bayhan take death industrial’s pulsing, pitch-dark negativity and filter it through this goth pop catalyst in favor of crafting something catchier and more accessible than their own influences, all the while maintaining death industrial’s incredible levels of negativity.

We Deserve to Die, the duo’s long-awaited and long-composed debut full-length, positions itself in a unique point on a musical spectrum thought not to exist: somewhere between power electronics’ horror and post-punk’s dark pop sensibilities. Featuring notable guest spots from members of Some Ember and Kælan Mikla, Fetters’ own stance as a gothic project is certainly tangible, but Major’s harsh vocal performance and some of We Deserve to Die‘s noisier elements show that this duo is something else. Not quite death industrial, not quite post-punk, and definitely not metal, Fetters seems to be an odd choice for Invisible Oranges, and yet the intensity brought forth on this album places Major and Bayhan right alongside the extreme metal we present to the reading public.

Listen to an exclusive full-album stream of We Deserve To Die below.

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