Whether on a report participant or onstage, the Miami-based band opens the door inside every of us that holds again each our darkish aspect and a deep longing for bodily enjoyable. Donzii offers audiences an emotional expertise that displays our interior life as we trudge by way of disaster after disaster, however with dancing, music, and a few critical sexual vitality. Its capability to faucet into these emotions landed it on the indie label Grey Market Records and in prime spots at music festivals like III Points, Okeechobee Music & Arts Festival, and South by Southwest.
Front-person, efficiency artist, and activist Jenna Balfe makes use of intelligent, generally humorous lyrics, fabulous fashions, and her genuine dynamism to attract in crowds. Meanwhile, the band creates a fascinating ambiance, with Balfe’s husband, Dennis Fuller, on bass and drums, Danny Heinze on guitar, and Violet de la Guardia and Mauricio Abascal on keys and backup vocals.
Community is an enormous a part of what makes Donzii greater than a band. Friends are sometimes essential to the band’s performances and movies, sharing concepts and contributing choreography, dance, units, costumes, and physique portray.
“Having individuals be a part of the Donzii narrative, folks that I care about, or folks that I meet by way of the expertise of this undertaking, creating that neighborhood, makes the music alive and palpable for me,” Balfe says. “It turns into this particular universe that I’m feeling and seeing and interacting with.”
The band’s music could be very a lot a mirrored image of the Miami surroundings — the glittering Magic City that is additionally a slowly sinking goal of local weather change-fueled superstorms.
“Growing up right here, it is this lovely place, and there is delicate, lovely nature,” Balfe provides, “however there’s one thing that may actually pull you in, one thing magical, swampy, and really grounded.”
Balfe remembers frequently operating away from dwelling when she was youthful and being part of this “darkish thriller, these bushes, the swamp, the air, the bizarre dilapidated buildings.” The extra sinister aspect of the tropical city and the threats of local weather change, she believes, “places us all on this default aggression.” And all of that’s represented in Donzii’s songs.
The dive can also be profound for Fuller, a classically skilled percussionist, and movie scorer.
“I really feel like our music is anti-development,” he says. “It’s about, in essentially the most reactionary sense, the constructing and building and including shit on prime of shit.” And that is mirrored within the resolution to conflict with classical musical constructions. “Thematically and empirically, we’re extra dissonant, and the music enhances that sentiment of anti-development.” They use audio results you would possibly hear in Halloween music to invoke the sensation: “Why do I really feel overvalued however unsettled on the identical time?” Fuller says. “And that is the form of world we reside in.”
But it isn’t all critical. The music is “additionally infused with some factor of pleasure. That’s form of the place my melodies sit on this construction. We love enjoying with that,” Balfe explains. Her phrases, tone, and facial expressions spotlight the comedic irony of those instances and this metropolis. “Yes, there’s lots of tragedy and ache that I personally as an activist work to vary, however there must be a degree for my very own psychological well being that I snicker.”
Donzii simply launched its newest single, “Grave.” It’s Balfe’s favourite music from the band’s upcoming debut album, Fishbowl, set for launch on December 1. Fuller says the album, written and recorded in 2020 in San Francisco with Soft Kill bassist Shaun Durkan, has a extra complicated sound than earlier releases. “Quite a lot of the stuff we have completed has been actually stripped down, post-punk stuff, Fuller explains. “This one has synthesizers and a few strings.”
Balfe says Fishbowl is “like a spread pack of musical kinds. It’s such as you went to the shop and mentioned, ‘I need one in every of each style you’ve gotten at Spec’s’ or no matter. We have been feeling actually rebellious.” That mixture of kinds was completed purposefully. “It simply frustrates me to really feel like I’ve to be a model,” she laments. “The frustration of ‘I’ve to be a marketable factor.’ The algorithm for the market financial system. Having all of those totally different genres and kinds is like, ‘Don’t pin me down!’ Look at who I’m wholly; take a look at this whole undertaking; take a look at all of those individuals. It’s not about promoting this factor; it is about experiencing this factor and opening your thoughts past having a closet of 12 constant items by all the appropriate designers. We’re larger than this.”
Fuller agrees: “You go to a developed neighborhood, and each eff’ing home is similar factor. This album is like going by way of 1,000,000 totally different neighborhoods.”
Haunted House Party Livestream. With Donzii, Mixx Piggy, Angelfire, Nicholas G. Padilla, Club Amnesia, Stranger Cat. 10 p.m. Friday, October 28, by way of instagram.com/_donzii.
Donzii. With Glove, 10 p.m. Saturday, October 29 at Gramps, 176 NW 24 St., Miami; gramps.com. Tickets value $15 to $18 by way of eventbrite.com.