{"id":28518,"date":"2026-05-28T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rpmonline.co.uk\/?p=28518"},"modified":"2026-05-27T20:09:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T19:09:12","slug":"dead-pioneers-announce-wagon-burner-to-be-released-june-26th-via-hassle-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rpmonline.co.uk\/?p=28518","title":{"rendered":"DEAD PIONEERS ANNOUNCE \u2018WAGON BURNER\u2019 TO BE RELEASED JUNE 26TH VIA HASSLE RECORDS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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PRE-ORDER <\/strong>HERE<\/strong><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNo kings, No masters \/ Kick against fascist bastards\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s moral, social and political degradation, especially in the era of the orange despot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018birth\u2019 of a nation that existed and was populated for millennia before Columbus \u2018discovered\u2019 it. It\u2019s been the very text of all the work he did before Dead Pioneers began to form in 2020, motivating the activism he\u2019s undertaken and the art he\u2019s created, tackling the centuries-old culture wars against Indigenous people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201c\u2018pioneer heritage\u2019 is a big thing in Utah, meaning our band name is very pointedly irreverent\u201d. 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<\/em>, a performance piece confronting the racism behind how white US society perceives Indigenous people; Redskin<\/em>, an installation tackling the Washington NFL team\u2019s racist name; and Supreme Law Of The Land<\/em> \u2013 which Deal performed at the Denver Art Museum in 2016, shortly after moving to Colorado \u2013 exploring how Trump\u2019s enabling of the Keystone oil pipeline in North Dakota, in the face of protest by Indigenous campaigners, contradicted treaties signed centuries earlier. \u201cThe 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\u2019s engaged both socially but also through power structures managing these things, like the federal government,\u201d Deal explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dead Pioneers is rooted in a 2020 piece called The Punk Pan-Indian Romantic Comedy<\/em>, a deeply personal work that dealt with Deal\u2019s upbringing. Following an embryonic performance of the piece, Deal secured a grant to expand it to include music created especially for the work. \u201cThe idea was to mix spoken word with punk music,\u201d explains Deal, who hooked up with drummer Shane Zweygardt and guitarist Joshua Rivera during lockdown and began kicking the concept around. \u201cJosh is Mexican-American,\u201d says Deal. \u201cHe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what became Dead Pioneers didn\u2019t 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\u2019s now three albums deep; the arrival of guitarist Abe Brennan made the quintet quorate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 (\u201cWe approached it like I approach my visual art: execute quickly, first thought is best thought,\u201d Deal says), but they didn\u2019t necessarily take it seriously until, unexpectedly, the outside world did. \u201cI was like, we\u2019ve made this record \u2013 what should I do with it? Put it online?\u201d 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. \u201cSo then we pressed another thousand,\u201d he adds, still marveling at it all. \u201cAnd then they were gone, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cComing from bands that typically don\u2019t make money,\u201d grins Tesche, \u201cI was like, \u2018Gregg \u2013 what have you started??\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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