06/10/2026
Head of Programme and resident expert on the subcultural media of extreme metal, Dr Rosie Overell has published a monograph on Blood Duster and their debut album FI***NG THE DEAD.
“With track titles invoking explicit language and lurid imagery, Fi***ng was deliberately offensive. Drawing on interviews with the band, this book considers the subcultural work of causing offense in a sub-genre of extreme metal where offensiveness is a requirement. Fi***ng's liner notes announced “BLOOD DUSTER DOES NOT CONDONE SEXISM” – apparently at odds with the lyrical material and the band's image. Through a consideration of how Blood Duster mobilized humor and exaggeration, Rosemary Overell considers how Fi***ng might work as a critique of the misogyny it loudly declares.
Blood Duster's debut also indicates other contradictions – their crusty, subcultural, grindcore status was legendary, but they were signed on an art-noise label (Dr Jim's Records), which proffered them to avant-garde music lovers. Further, in the cultural and political context of Prime Minister Paul Keating's progressive government's push for cosmopolitan middle class creative production - the 1990s Australian iteration of the "culture wars" - where does such sordid music fit in? Fi***ng, in its vulgarity and contradictions, offers an insight into the subcultural politics of gender, taste and cultural value.”
Ping Division of Humanities, University of Otago
https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/blood-dusters-fisting-the-dead-9798216382249/
