Secret Shame Explores Breaking the Cycle of Self-Harm as Self-Defense on “Color Drain”

Secret Shame, photo courtesy the artists

Secret Shame’s new album Autonomy releases on October 28, 2022 and the single “Color Drain” reveals new dimensions to the group’s songwriting. It’s material for the 2019 album Dark Synthetics were well within the realm of the death rock wing of post-punk with songs that shed great insight into the nature of trauma, addiction and mental illness and the struggles in coping with aspects of human behavior that are often fairly normal reactions to the pressures of living in a dysfunctional society. “Color Drain” finds the group in a more warmly melodic phase of its songwriting but one whose tenderness is not used to cover over the raw emotions expressed. It is a vivid portrait of living with the instincts of having suffered prolonged abuse, emotional and likely physical, and how those ways of surviving the experience can cause you to shy away from things that might be good for you suspicious of the motivations of everyone around you because you’ve had to live with the possibility that any act of kindness or tenderness might be the prelude to getting in deeper into your mind to elicit responses long lost to the emotional calluses built up from becoming accustomed to abuse. But the song dares to ask after the ways in which one might come to see this level of toughness, of learning to survive as romantic and how that pain becomes the way in which you know you can still feel in recalling it as a source of dignity when real dignity can be found beyond that dynamic. And that clinging to that dynamic even after you’ve somehow left the abusive situation can be a way to reinforce the pattern in anticipation of its recurrence. When your mind is focused on that pain to the near exclusion of experiences that can better define your life can be a difficult prospect to face and maybe that method of coping served its purpose. This song questions the boundaries of that way of being and living and in the end suggests the possibility of being open to help from those who don’t have a selfish agenda in a path of disrupting this circle of self-oppression. Listen to “Color Drain” on YouTube and connect with Secret Shame at the links below.