In August of 2019, the Brooklyn-based punk band Disaffectress were halfway through a tour of the East Coast when guitarist Roxxi Riot was kidnapped from the band’s touring van after a show in Connecticut. She spent five years in a nearby town called Stepford, living under the coercive control of a man who had reconditioned her into a submissive housewife, her mind separated from her body until her eventual bloody escape in October 2024. With her two sons born during her captivity in tow, Roxxi immediately reunited with her bandmates and threw herself into channeling her trauma through music, the result of which was the single Stepford Wife, the first musical release from Disaffectress in five years. But she was far from done telling her story, and neither was the rest of the band.
As Told by Disaffectress, the band’s second album proper, further explores the events that led to their initial five year hiatus beginning in 2019, and the ripple effect it had on the rest of the band; particularly lead singer Hannah Havoc, who has been in a steady relationship with Roxxi for over ten years. Hannah and Roxxi share lead vocals on the album, each of them recounting the events from their own perspective: while Roxxi goes into often uncomfortable detail about the abuse she suffered at the hands of her abductor in Stepford and explores her complicated feelings about having to kill him in order to escape, Hannah vents about the empty platitudes she was offered during her girlfriend and bandmate’s absence, takes the NYPD to account over their inability and unwillingness to investigate Roxxi’s disappearance, and calls out members of the Stepford Men’s Association by name, expressing that she hopes they died painfully in the fire that destroyed the Terhune Mansion.
The band’s musical growth and wide range of influences is on full display here, from the fast-paced punk aggression of the aforementioned lead single Stepford Wife, to the 7-minute dark opus Just A Vessel/Just A Prison which musically recalls Sonic Youth’s Tunic (Song for Karen) and some of the darker tracks on Siouxsie & the Banshees’ 1981 album Juju, all the way through to the gentle acoustic duet Your Arms, My Shelter, which sees Hannah and Roxxi swearing to protect and defend one another from whatever harm may come their way. Indeed, the album’s opener, Madre María, Escucha Mi Oración, an acoustic lament sung entirely in Spanish, is a rarity in the Disaffectress canon, at least until Roxxi’s distorted guitar, Cindy Catalyst’s fuzzed-up bass and Moira Malaise’s pounding drums come crashing through, segueing into Stepford Wife and starting off the album proper, launching the listener headfirst into Disaffectress’s world of defiance and righteous fury.
Despite the heavy subject matter Disaffectress aren’t afraid to crack jokes at their oppressors’ expense, such as on The World of the Heterosexual is a Sick and Boring Life, where Hannah theorises on the inner lives of the Stepford Men’s Association members and how unfulfilling their form of performative heteronormativity must have truly been; she comes to the conclusion that many of them would probably have been genuinely happier if they’d slept with one another, instead of kidnapping free-willed women and brainwashing them into docile and submissive tradwives. Bookended with samples of dialogue from Female Trouble and T2 Trainspotting, and rife with double entendres and expressions of homoerotic yearning and desire, the song provides an insight into the band’s sense of humour, previously only hinted at on their debut along with the self-released singles and EPs that preceded it.
The band’s use of samples doesn’t end there, however; Just A Vessel/Just A Prison incorporates the real-life interview conducted with Roxxi in Stepford by investigative journalist Zach Taylor, whose article The Stepford Wives shed light on the captivity, reconditioning and eventual freedom of countless women just like Roxxi. Since her escape from the small Connecticut town Roxxi and Zach Taylor have remained good friends, to the point where he personally shared the ill-fated interview recording with Roxxi to use on the album on her request. The interview itself, interspersed in snippets throughout the song, is chilling: Roxxi speaks as if she’s in a trance, breathily extolling the virtues of performing the duties of a stay-at-home wife and mother in a traditional heterosexual marriage – yet in the present day Roxxi debunks her own statements in graphic and disturbing detail, describing the repeated emotional and sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her abductor, the unusual reconditioning technique which left her in a constant fugue state, and the pain and distress she experienced in childbirth under his fetishistic gaze. It all comes to a head near the end of the song, with the inclusion of Roxxi’s sudden panic attack as she briefly broke conditioning during the recorded interview, after which the sample itself is cut short, but Roxxi herself completes it with a blood-curdling scream of “My name’s not fucking Rosie”, in reference to the alias she was given in Stepford. “I remember the guy carrying me upstairs to sedate me after he sent Zach out the house,” she explained in a recent interview to BrooklynVegan. “At the time I hadn’t realised that Zach was still recording, so he basically caught the whole thing, except when I was screaming that my name wasn’t Rosie because he was pretty much running out the door by then. I was a little pissed at first that Zach had audio of my panic attack, but I think in the end, all that really matters is that there’s recorded proof out there of what the Men’s Association did to us.” Musically, Roxxi has notably cited Chat Pile as the inspiration for Just A Vessel/Just A Prison, after having been introduced to the Oklahoma City noise rock band by her bandmate Cindy Catalyst.
Disaffectress also takes aim squarely at those in power outside of Stepford, particularly on Curse Your Name (Fuck The NYPD), a searing blast of distortion and feedback, accompanying Hannah Havoc’s scathing indictment of the New York Police Department for what she describes as their reluctance to investigate Roxxi’s disappearance. “I made so many calls to them over the years, basically pleading for updates on her case,” says Hannah about the inspiration behind the song. “It got to a point where they’d just blow me off at every turn – shit, they even threatened to arrest me for wasting their time, when all I wanted to know was if Rachel [Martinez, Roxxi’s given name] was alive.” Hannah channels that frustration into a rallying cry against the NYPD for their documented history of corruption and brutality, alongside their mishandling and eventual abandonment of Roxxi’s missing persons case, with spoken stream-of-consciousness verses and a chant of “Fuck the NYPD” serving as the chorus.
Even after five years of inactivity, the individual members’ musical abilities haven’t stagnated; in fact, the band sounds stronger than ever. While their debut, although promising, mainly consisted of filler tracks to pad out the runtime, As Told By Disaffectress burns white-hot from start to finish, turning trauma into triumph and firmly cementing Disaffectress’ place in the NY queer punk scene to come.
As Told By Disaffectress is available now in all physical and digital formats through idk Ratfuck Records
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