Intense, enticing and achingly cool, Dead Posey got goth vibes, punk spirit, rock n roll attitude, striking visuals and sick, sinister, stellar tunes. LA based Danyell Souza and Tony Nova are passionate, focused, driven and settle for absolutely nothing but their best – creating absolute beast of an album ‘Are You In A Cult?’. Danyell’s deep dark vox drips with gleeful menace. She plays with words’ enunciation like a cat toying with a mouse.
Jo Wright could fangirl all night, but she’s gotta get a bit serious for a sec here, because Danyell has previously shared an issue that can’t – mustn’t – be ignored.
Dead Posey is a duo. Every single detail, every small sound is worked through together. There is an equal split. So why, oh why, OH WHY, does Danyell not get equal respect??????
She explains, ‘When I really noticed it was when we started playing live. When we would be setting up, it tended to be that some people – not everyone – this is very generalised, but at different venues, they would talk to Tony more. Other bands, their managers, or stage hands, would tend to talk to Tony or our hired musicians and kind of not really engage with me as a person. I was kind of given snarky remarks sometimes and it started making me feel, ‘Oh wow I didn’t realise how much sexism is still alive and well in the music world!’, and you either get angry about it or you try to work through it and force people to accept that it’s not the ‘boys’ club’. I feel like rock especially has been such a ‘boys’ club’ since the beginning of time! There’s been woman through history in rock, from Courtney Love, Shirley Manson, Joan Jett – there’s been plenty – and even more that never got the notoriety of star level success.
‘There’s even some women I see that try to push against it to a fault, where they’re like, ‘Oh there’s no such thing as ‘male’ and ‘female’, it’s just ‘a band’. But at the same time, when female-fronted bands aren’t getting the same amount of festival and tour slots, or even radio play, there’s a disconnect. For every twenty male bands there’ll be one female one on the radio in the rock scene and I think it needs calling out. I feel that when you say, ‘Oh, I’m just one of the guys’, you’re doing a disservice to the big elephant in the room.’
This is serious isn’t it? It’s also sad and flippin’ disappointing that in 2024 this is still happening. ‘Tony never experienced this until he was in a band with me, because in his previous band there were three guys.’ Danyell adds.
She continues, ‘Dead Posey has definitely been an uphill battle in a lot of ways. We’re like, ‘Man, I wonder if we were a band of guys, if we would’ve gotten to another level of notoriety?’.’
Back in 2020, when the world was pretty much shot to Hell with the global Covid pandemic, Danyell and Tony released ‘Malfunction’. Four tracks, thirteen minutes of, according to 2020 Jo Wright, ‘Intelligent compositions that use crushing beats, twisted guitars and delectable vocals’. Seems yer girl knew a good thing when she heard it.
‘It’s interesting that you mention ‘Malfunction’ says Tony, ‘because to us that was kind of the middle ground. We like that EP too, but we could feel that it kind of had one foot in a prior time and one foot starting to push forward. ‘Are You In A Cult?’ is a good realisation of where we’ve been going the last few years.’
‘Tony and I were just talking about this the other day!’ says Danyell. ‘That since 2020 we’ve been on our journey of making an album – which we have always wanted Dead Posey to do. We wanted to make an album that felt great live.’
This meant harnessing energy, vibes and making the most of the drive they both possessed to reach their goal of putting together their first long-player, ‘Are You In A Cult?’. Cool name no? ‘There’s so many different cults in different things. Like the music industry – that’s a cult. Politically, obviously. There’s cults everywhere and we found a fascination in the idea that you are either in or out of a cult. That’s where the inspiration for the album title came from,’ says Danyell.
Let’s go back to that 50/50 split. Tony tells us, ‘Danyell’s got a really good ear. She played piano a lot when she was younger, and even though I play all the instruments and do a lot of the ‘music side of it’, we are very together and we have a meeting of the minds all the time – over every element that goes into every song.’
Danyell adds, ‘Even if there’s a bell or anything, I’m like, ‘Make it different!’. I’m very particular. But I learned from the best.’ Awwww. How nice is that? Tony and Danyell have been together for twelve years and married for almost six, and their devotion to each other, to their relationship, and to their music is heartwarming, lovely to hear and, frankly, inspirational. Especially to Jo, who couldn’t tell you how many years she’s been married, doesn’t wear a wedding ring, and got called ‘an expense’ by her long-suffering husband the other day. ‘I feel like Tony is a very talented musician and producer, and I learned early on from him that I pay great attention to detail, and I know how I want things to sound and be.’
Yer girl struggles to let her writing go, but she has got nothing on Danyell and Tony’s absolute intention to achieve perfection. It’s palpable. Eye-twitchingly so. Danyell uses the metaphor of someone taking their paintbrush away (and hiding it!) when it was time to finally release ‘Are You In A Cult?’.
Dead Posey has been a band for almost nine years, but due to the way the industry works and a set of circumstances beyond their control, this is actually their debut album. ‘For us, it’s kind of a badge of honour to do an album,’ says Tony.
Ten tracks of Danyell’s uniquely sweet yet unsettling vox that sounds like it knows all your secrets. Bliss… ‘I’m not a trained singer by any means. I trained to do acting and I feel that taps you into your emotions, and that every word you say should be meaningful. That’s why singing became natural as far as showing emotion. It can be a very powerful thing if you tap into that emotion and as a singer I am much more interested in character and the tone, and the expression, than if I can hit the perfect high notes like I’m on ‘The Voice’ or ‘American Idol’! I think people that can sing like that are incredible. That’s just not what I aspire to do as a vocalist, so I really key in on my character and what I’m saying, and that’s how I feel good as a singer. I like performing, and that’s why calling myself a singer sometimes is funny, because I don’t think of myself really as a singer.
‘When Tony and I first worked together I could hit some of the higher range notes, but I never felt that great when I was doing it. It wasn’t really resonating with me. But when we found that sweet spot and I was singing more in my comfortable range, then I was really trying to evoke more of the character of what I was saying, that’s when I started having a lot of fun singing.’
Is it fair to say Dead Posey is Danyell and Tony’s baby? More like a rebellious pre-teen according to Tony! It’s clear that as a couple they were destined to make music. ‘We’re best friends. We get along very well,’ Danyell tells us. ‘We’re always laughing with each other. The band is the contention! We’re both so passionate about how we want something to sound or what we want something to look like, and we really have to keep on reminding ourselves to have that respect for each other! That we both want to have something a certain way, but we need to find that middle ground. It’s not about me winning what I want, or Tony getting what he wants!’
‘Are You In A Cult?’ and Dead Posey, on the other hand, will give you everything you want.
Interview by Jo Wright