domesticated incels [17/4/25]

Cringe is a weird word to define, I’d say in the strange context we find ourselves in, it means unwanted honesty. Furries, faggots, and trannys are all called cringe because they show their authentic desire for aesthetic categories they aren’t meant to desire. Domesticated Incels is a band that’s aware they’re cringe, they say as much on shame spiral, “Can you really call me cringe if I'm just unwell?”. I can easily point to the honesty part of their music, on their recently published debut they have beautifully painful songs about being taken advantage of like Sex on TV and Burrow, desperate self berating like on Shame Spiral and Class of NULL. But the unwanted part is hard to argue, it’s hard to make good art, to communicate something well, without being honest.

None of this is to say I dislike Domesticated Incels, I had the pleasure of seeing them a couple nights ago at lazy thinking and went hard enough in the pit to throw up when I made it home. After that show, I spent all the money I had on two shirts from them and their music on bandcamp. I resonated with their work really heavily, I’m a weirdo gross autistic tranny faggot degenerate, this is my shit, to the point where I could've written some of these songs about my own life and I wouldn’t have to change a lyric. Lines like “I'm so gay for your dead body” seem like something I’d beg my ex to say to me while I was pissed. That said a bunch of you probably read that sentence and wrote me off forever, this shit is cringe which is why it’s so good.

There’s a tendency in the scene to leave the lyrics for last, this is at the very least practical, people don’t hear the words you're saying just the melodies, especially at gigs. This leads to pretty tacky empty platitudes being the norm, there’s a lot of railing against the man, a lot of saying the system sucks, but not much beyond those vague statements. In defence of this a lot of expressly political music isn’t very good, when you make a song expressly political you take all the abstract feelings it generates and remove all ambiguity. There’s plenty of songs I agree with politically, but I wouldn’t want to listen to, I mean that’s exactly how destroy boys fell off. That said, there has to be some way to say something without ruining the music, there has to be a third option in between generic and bland.

To circle back, how can honesty in art be unwanted? Well, art doesn’t exist in a vacuum, “I'm so gay for your dead body” makes you cringe because it sounds like necrophile shit. Societally, we separate aesthetics for the sake of making someone horny from aesthetics to make someone feel anything else. It is unwanted because it is viewed as wrong or otherwise deviant, so the depiction of it kind of inherently criticises that ingrained biases in you. If it authentically represents the artist's emotions, then who the fuck cares, why is it always the queer sexualities that get criticised, why can a guy call his gf mommy but two transfemmes can’t call each other sisters.