Dimber are sharing their new track, “2 Dysphorically Possessed 2 B Stressed,” and you can give it a listen right here at New Noise.
On social media, the band describe their sound as “upbeat music for downbeat people.” Dimber’s Bandcamp page elaborates, “Charged up rainbow sparkles, short and fast, spindles and shards of the Clueless soundtrack aimed against social control. Theme songs of desperation and hope in the modern age.”
Dimber’s CJ Miller says that the track was written before dimber existed as a band as an attempt to distill the feelings that emerged for her around gender and dysphoria. Miller,a trans femme person, says that even now, these are “immensely difficult things to explain in digestible language.” She says dysphoria is a particularly difficult phenomenon to convey the feelings of, especially if the people listening haven’t experienced it in relation to their own gender.
“I never related to descriptions of transness in terms of being ‘trapped in the wrong body,'” Miller says. “I don’t intend to discount anyone’s experience but I believe that way of speaking about transgender bodies is clumsy byproduct of a transphobic world. I don’t believe anyone has a body that is inherently wrong. There are, however, innumerable ways the world teaches us to hate our bodies, depending on the type of body we have and where we exist on the axis of identity. It’s something I felt inspired to write a song about and definitely feels in line with part of our dimber songwriting ethos—to write catchy, upbeat pop songs about supremely upsetting concepts.”
On the new track, Miller wanted to thematically accentuate feelings of disconnect by having two distinct voices alternating in the lead vocal position, enlisting Andy as the alternate role. Nodding to her part, she says that her voice is something that can feel distressing, referencing social expectations around what a femme voice is “supposed” to sound like, especially in a pop context.
“The first chorus hits on those points of pain, confusion, and despair arising from relationship with my body and the sound of my voice,” she says. “But for the second chorus, I also wanted to outline an alternate, trans-specific path of triumph rather than one of despair that occurs in the first chorus where the singer feels harmed by her own voice.”
Miller also nods to the spelling of the song, with capital letters and numbers:
“Yes it’s a Prince reference! Prince is a nonbinary, gender-expansive icon, so it just makes sense. Also we just really LOVE Prince.”
Listen to “2 Dysphorically Possessed 2 B Stressed” here:
