DOGWHISTLE || TEXTILE WASTE
Photo Cred 📸: @sbdepiction
Lately it feels like everytime I turn around there’s a new hardcore band starting up in Ontario. Which is beautiful, don’t get me wrong, I don’t think the province has ever had this much hardcore popping off before. We are truly living some bright and historical times for our Canadian provincial scene. Yet as our hardcore music scene flourishes in Ontario, the rest of our world withers. Dogwhistle have taken their disdain for our current world turmoil and the political climate and forged it into hostile compositions of sludgy and abrasively-noisy hardcore.
Aside from the immediate and urgent needs for critical grassroots praxis to resist fascism around the world, most members in dogwhistle share very similar ontological beliefs rooted in deconstructivism, decolonization and various forms of anarchism, like critical thinkers Foucault and Fanon. Their rage and their message is as loud as their music and their message is simple, “Fascism is at our doorsteps. If you haven’t noticed it, you really ought to interrogate why. If you’re not currently subject to state violence, you’re most likely inundated with images and headlines of someone else’s persecution. That’s the reality we live in, so that’s what we made the record about,” vocalist Kenley tells us..
“THAT’S THE ANGLE THROUGH WHICH I WANTED TO ATTACK WRITING SONGS ABOUT REAL-WORLD VIOLENCE LIKE THE ONGOING GENOCIDE OF PALESTINIANS, THE EGREGIOUS ABUSE OF WORKERS IN GARMENT FACTORIES AROUND THE WORLD, THE MYRIAD INCIDENTS OF POLICE BRUTALITY AGAINST INDEGINOUS PEOPLE HERE IN CANADA, AND SO ON.
LIKE, I COULD JUST SCREAM A SLOGAN REPEATEDLY, AND IT COULD STILL MAKE FOR A GREAT POLITICALLY EFFECTIVE SONG. AND NO SHADE TO ANYONE WHO DOES THAT BUT I WANTED TO FIND MORE EVOCATIVE WAYS OF FRAMING THESE ATROCITIES.”
- KENLEY, @DOGWHISTLEHC
Rather than focusing on “being cool” and “getting clout” bassist Hank Ko encourages bands to reserve their energy and emotion to “utilize your creations as vehicles to invigorate your political beliefs and messages and build communities. And by saying building communities, I don’t mean the ‘hardcore is for everyone’ bullshit cliché: I mean the one by calling out abusers, transphobes, racists, unapologetic colonizers, neo-nazis’ dog whistles, and those that make the scene unsafe for people of all shapes and kinds. For me, that’s what this band is about, and I’m glad to do it with some of the sweetest but also most principled people I've met in the scene in dogwhistle.”
Although dogwhistle might be a new name on the scene, they feature members of four other Ontario acts. Their guitarist Nate plays in Wrought and Mace, while their drummer Jaden also plays in Juliens Donkey Boys and To Be Continued.
When asked of their aspirations for the future of this band, vocalist Kenley tells us they’re all just living in the moment and having fun playing the EP live for our community in Southern Ontario. “We haven’t thought too hard about what’s next. That being said, getting some new music out early next year would be cool! I think the absolute dream would be to hop over to Southeast Asia and play with some of the crazy hardcore and screamo bands out there: Fuse, Veils, TNG, Piri Reis, to name just a few.”
Bringing context to an album when our lives are filled with unending, tantalizing fictions of unearthly horrors and atrocities, Kenley says it best: “I like a lot of bizarro horror writers like B.R. Yeager, Charlene Elsby, Thomas Ligotti, etc., all of whom excel at creating and depicting psychologically disturbing nightmare worlds. The writing almost became akin to a mindfulness exercise, in the sense that I had to re-sensitize myself to the fact that enduring violence and grief and state oppression is its own horror story.”
Textile Waste was engineered by Jesse Turnbull at Taurus Recordings and mastered by Nick Zampiello at New Alliance East (Massachusetts). Nick has worked on some incredible records and legendary bands like Unsane, Converge, Old Man Gloom, Have Heart, among many others. The record release show for Textile Waste is scheduled for July 26th at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Church in Toronto. The gig is a benefit show to raise funds for the church, who has been heavily involved in doing outreach to the community with harm reduction resources and support for the unhoused.
Dogwhistle guitarist, Nate, has recently started a label with his friend Richard, Endnote Records, who released the bands Textile Waste EP on cassette a few weeks ago. They’ve also released other Ontario hardcore acts like Dambe and Wrought and we’ve been told more is on the way. Keep an eye out for the label and dogwhistle since they’ll both be making moves and fighting for change in a world that’s gone complacent.
dogwhistle is Kenley Meredith Ku on vocals, Mariful Alam and Nate Hobor on guitars, Hank Ko on bass, and Jaeden Noel on drums.
Checkout dogwhistle on Instagram: @dogwhistelhc
Writer : @just_reidz
Editor : @garevthistle
07/02/25
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