Released on June 3, 2022, GWAR’s latest album The New Dark Ages includes a song featuring Lzzy Hale, vocalist and guitarist for rock band Halestorm. The song, “The Cutter,” discusses self harm by personifying the act, creating a character that doesn’t “hurt herself/She hurts you, motherfucker.”
Listen to the song here:
The song resists minimizing the feelings that lead people down the path of self-harm, instead describing it as a rebellion to death: “Feeling anger, feeling pain, feeling every fuckin’ thing/She took the razor off her wrist, made a fist, took a swing/She don’t wanna die, she wants to feel alive.”
In personifying self-harm, it seems as if GWAR is commenting on the separation that happens within a person when they hurt themselves; they become both a victim and an assailant, someone who things happen to and someone who makes things happen. The Cutter is the latter, while the “you” in the song is the victim.
This idea seems to be further explored with the lines Hale sings in the song, where it seems she takes on the role of The Cutter by speaking in the first person rather than the third, as was done earlier in the song. During her part of the song, the tempo slows down and she sings: “It’s not my fault/Your blood will pacify my pain…/My cure is pouring from your vein.”
GWAR removes the topic of morality from the table with the lines: “Who are you to say if it’s right or if it’s wrong/Cut herself up but the pain still remained/Until she turned the knife on the ones who were to blame.” Especially here, another interpretation of the song comes to mind; GWAR’s “The Cutter” could be read more literally, in that “The Cutter” enacts violence on others because of trauma she has lived through that continues to haunt her.
Overall, the new song is ripe with meaning and relevance. It is accompanied by other GWAR songs on the album, including “Ratcatcher” whose video was released today. The band has also been touring recently.
Photo Credit: Brett Padelford
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