Credit: Kennedy Cottrell ed. Vinny Malave
Local horror-punk four-piece Won’t Stay Dead purge their demons through breakneck riffs and passionate harmonies. Bassist Saffron Lair (aka Saffron Lehrer) and guitarist Violet Staley, who share vocals, forged their bond over years in the Chicagoland punk scene. They met as teenagers in a Girls Rock! Chicago camp and played in several bands, including hardcore punk group When Flying Feels Like Falling and punk-ska outfit Ultrahazard, before forming Won’t Stay Dead in 2017. Onstage, where they’re joined by guitarist and vocalist Tyler Wright and drummer Sloane Fitzgerald, the two women carry themselves like the protagonists of cult films such as Jennifer’s Body or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me—young women confronting the violence of everyday relationships with supernatural determination.
Won’t Stay Dead’s brand-new second album, Vindication (Red Scare), showcases their no-frills songwriting while broadening their horizons beyond punk rippers played at super speeds. It also leans into the cult-film thing: In a recent interview with New Noise, Lair cites Heathers and The Craft as direct influences. Album opener “River’s Edge,” named for the 1986 thriller, is a prototypical Won’t Stay Dead tune. The narrator rejoices in committing a murder as an act of self-fulfillment, and then both vocalists transform quotes from the movie into a glorious chorus: “Bury her so she is never found / Nobody has to find out.” The song ends in less than 75 seconds, leaving no time for dread to settle in. “Let It Go” forgoes drums completely. Instead, the band builds tension through spacious, watery strummed guitar—and on the next track, “Drag,” that tension explodes into a medley of double-time drums and slow, lighters-up tempos whose sing-along quality recalls Green Day’s pop-punk opera American Idiot.Lair and Staley revel in breaking out of bad situations—romantic, musical, or otherwise—with the joy and confidence of survivors at the end of a horror movie. If you’re looking for an antidote to the cheer of peak holiday season, swap your ugly Christmas sweater for an all-black outfit and celebrate Vindication’s release at reliable Chicago punk dive Liar’s Club.