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“No kings, No masters / Kick against fascist bastards”

“We write a song, a year later it’s more relevant than the day we wrote it. That keeps happening, and to be honest, it fills me with dismay.”

Backstage at the Camden Underworld, minutes before his band Dead Pioneers take the stage and devastate a capacity crowd with all the pain, power and primal energy of a classic punk-rock show, Gregg Deal exhales slowly. He’s been warming to his theme for almost an hour now, in much the same way an acetylene torch warms to the metal it must burn through. That theme is America, and there are few voices in punk-rock so uniquely qualified to speak on the country’s moral, social and political degradation, especially in the era of the orange despot.

Being Native American, however, Deal knows the systems he fights against, the history of injustice he chronicles, stretch back further than the Trump era, back past Nixon and segregation and the KKK and all those other white stains on the canvas of American history, to the very ‘birth’ of a nation that existed and was populated for millennia before Columbus ‘discovered’ it. It’s been the very text of all the work he did before Dead Pioneers began to form in 2020, motivating the activism he’s undertaken and the art he’s created, tackling the centuries-old culture wars against Indigenous people.

Deal was born in Tennessee, where his father grew up, but landed in Utah when he was two years old and grew up there; he says that “‘pioneer heritage’ is a big thing in Utah, meaning our band name is very pointedly irreverent”. He later relocated to Washington, DC and studied art, going on to work as a graphic designer. Throughout those years, he began another, parallel career as a visual and conceptual artist, creating powerful, political works like The Last Indian On Earth, a performance piece confronting the racism behind how white US society perceives Indigenous people; Redskin, an installation tackling the Washington NFL team’s racist name; and Supreme Law Of The Land – which Deal performed at the Denver Art Museum in 2016, shortly after moving to Colorado – exploring how Trump’s enabling of the Keystone oil pipeline in North Dakota, in the face of protest by Indigenous campaigners, contradicted treaties signed centuries earlier. “The line of work and its social awareness goes from racism, stereotypes and cultural appropriation, all in a socially aware lens, to the more specific politics of Native people as a whole and the way it’s engaged both socially but also through power structures managing these things, like the federal government,” Deal explains.

Dead Pioneers is rooted in a 2020 piece called The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy, a deeply personal work that dealt with Deal’s upbringing. Following an embryonic performance of the piece, Deal secured a grant to expand it to include music created especially for the work. “The idea was to mix spoken word with punk music,” explains Deal, who hooked up with drummer Shane Zweygardt and guitarist Joshua Rivera during lockdown and began kicking the concept around. “Josh is Mexican-American,” says Deal. “He is also inherently Indigenous, under a different set of circumstances within colonialism. But I consider him to be my Indigenous brother. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how all of this fits together.”

But what became Dead Pioneers didn’t truly take shape until Deal connected with bassist Lee Tesche, who you may know from righteous Atlantan post-punks Algiers. Unlikely as it sounds, a wide-ranging conversation between Tesche and Deal about music (with Tesche clueing Deal into the righteous noise of future Dead Pioneers collaborators Sleaford Mods) evolved into a creative connection that’s now three albums deep; the arrival of guitarist Abe Brennan made the quintet quorate.

A miraculous, natural chemistry made this supposed one-off project an actual band almost as soon as they cut what became their 2023 eponymous debut album (“We approached it like I approach my visual art: execute quickly, first thought is best thought,” Deal says), but they didn’t necessarily take it seriously until, unexpectedly, the outside world did. “I was like, we’ve made this record – what should I do with it? Put it online?” Deal remembers. The response was vigorously positive, and soon came demands to commit this noise to vinyl. A first thousand-copy pressing sold out in minutes. “So then we pressed another thousand,” he adds, still marveling at it all. “And then they were gone, too.”

“Coming from bands that typically don’t make money,” grins Tesche, “I was like, ‘Gregg – what have you started??’”

What followed was “a series of strange accidents” that led to the group signing to Hassle, befriending Jello Biafra and touring with kindred spirits like Pennywise, Propaghandi, even Pearl Jam. “Punk-rock had made everything seem so accessible when I was a kid,” says Deal. “Like, simply having the balls to get up on stage and stage dive and then be carried off by people that become your best friends once they get your feet back on the ground.” Now, punk-rock was reaching out its hands to Dead Pioneers and pulling them onto larger and larger stages. The group returned that favour by simply getting better and better: their second album, 2025’s PO$T AMERICAN, was sharper, angrier, funnier than the debut, a riot riveted with punch-a-Nazi thrills.

And now, Wagon Burner, their fearsome third album. Described by Deal as “more collaborative”, it’s a heavier, harder but also more accessible set, vicious hooks scattered among the punk-rock melee and guest appearances by kindred spirits Cheap Perfume (on the righteous ‘Nazi Teeth’), The Interrupters (on the shout-a-long anthem ‘Never Alone’) and, bringing it back to the group’s beginnings, Sleaford Mods (on the searing slow-burn of ‘The Worst Among Us’). The world might be darkening by the day, but Dead Pioneers are rising to that miserable occasion, casting their empowering light into the gloom.

“The record was influenced by watching the political climate become more and more exacerbated, and feeling the responsibility that comes along with that,” says Deal. But of course, he’s under no illusion that the horrorshow of America in 2026 is anything new. “Reagan set the stage; Trump is the star of the show, the encore,” Deal says. “He’s a really terrible person. But the stage was set for him.”

What’s happening now, then, is a culmination of centuries of the same bullshit. “As a Native person, the past and the present and the future all exist in the same space,” Deal says. “My kids can probably school just about anyone on all the historical narratives, because we understand, as Indigenous people, that education and knowledge are tools of survival. Every Native person understands you might actually save your skin if you express and articulate something that helps people understand enough to shut their mouths. 40% of Americans believe that Native people no longer exist, that we’re completely extinct. We’re fighting to make sure that people know we are not foreigners in our own homelands, that we are here despite what history has told you. We speak our language, and white people need to hear it, because then you’re hearing the power of our words on our homelands, where our people have existed for thousands and thousands of years. It’s a responsibility that I understand.”

Their battle is our battle, on a landscape where, as Deal bellows on ‘Circle Jerk The Wagons’, “bootlicking cucks for billionaire bastards” and “fascist fucks abound”. On our side, we have Dead Pioneers, as fearsome, whip-smart and beautiful a noise as punk-rock ever mustered. The fascists and the Nazis and the white supremacists don’t stand a chance.

Pre-order ‘Wagon Burner’ HERE

Co-produced by Dead Pioneers and Chris Beeble.

Recorded at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, Colorado.

See Dead Pioneers at the following dates in the UK and EU.

July

8 – IE Róisín Dubh, Galway

9 – IE The Workman’s Club, Dublin

11 – UK 2000 Trees Festival

16 – DE Back To The Future Festival

17 – DE Adieu Tristesse Festival

18 – DE Seepogo Festival 

Find Dead Pioneers online HERE: