Tati Salazar wanted to make scary bitch music—music that’s loud and confrontational and holds nothing back, music that helps itself to the blood in your ears with full fists, music that takes all the world’s the pain and violence and despair and spits it right back with a devious, fanged grin. This description is lightyears away from Salazar’s soft-spoken folk solo music as Le Siren. Having only been familiar with Salazar’s vocals and songwriting as the lead vocalist in Commitment after hearing the band’s 2025 demo tape, I was shocked by how angelic their non-screaming singing voice is: lush against curtains of violin, banjo, and cello. While 2019’s Take Care of Yourself was certainly no stranger to grief and sorrow, something else was bubbling underneath the record’s placid confessionals—a storm that could no longer be suppressed or turned inward, a building rage that needed somewhere to explode.
Enter Pierce Jordan, veteran of the Philadelphia hardcore scene and frontman of one of the city and genre’s most singular contemporary bands. When forming Commitment, Jordan took a backseat—behind the drum kit, that is—and recruited guitarist Jake Smith and bassist Zach “Zeeb” Bailey. Salazar joined Commitment as lead vocalist and co-songwriter with no prior experience performing heavy music, a fact that’d come as a shock to any listener. The way they scream on the group’s perfectly-titled debut, Fear Of, that shit sounds like second nature.
There’s a muscle memory to Salazar’s vocals that almost eschews performance, to the point that their delivery often sounds involuntary, truly tortured. Their arid howl of “draining me of my liiiiiiiiife” on opener “Thirsty” sounds forced out of Salazar by the boot on their neck, and you hear it press down harder each time the line gets repeated. “Hellraiser” is Salazar at their most instinctual-sounding—their repeated refrain of “I’m on your ass, bitch” never comes out the same way twice, while the instrumentals sound like a cartoon fight, a whirling electron cloud of punches and kicks. Guttural “ha ha ha”s on “Pluto in Aquarius” tumble from their throat somewhere between a villainous cartoon chuckle and the bark of a wounded animal. “STD” (which here, stands for “Send The Deposit”) flips between faux-flirty interjections feigning deference to a client and Salazar’s desperate internal monologue (“I need a / quick buck / quick fuck”).
Salazar’s own experiences with sex work serve as inspiration for much of their songwriting on Fear Of, and they sing about it with the bluntness of someone who doesn’t have time to worry about succumbing to its stigmas or dressing it up as something glamorous and sensationalized. “Every time you see someone on a pole in a music video, it’s not a stripper,” Salazar said in an interview with Raeghan Buchanan. “It’s a famous fucking pop star that has never had to dance on in their fucking life for survival.” There is no luxury here, only basic need. Chainsaw riffs meet Salazar’s snarl exactly where it’s at on “Bukkakracy,” a minute-long ripper that tears into hypocrites who hold more contempt for sex workers trying to survive a dangerous, oppressive system than for the billionaire traffickers whose pockets are lined with their tax dollars.
On Fear Of, violence and vulgarity are for the people. Singles “DOG POUND” and “Hard Candy” play out revenge fantasies through scenes of domination. Salazar motor-mouthing “he likes to watch, he’s such a fucking cuck / lock him in his cage, rub it in his face” on “Hard Candy” is, to put it plainly, hard as fuck—as is their morphing the last syllable of “denial” into the word “yell.” “DOG POUND” is even more vicious, with its cutting cymbal crashes. “Castration ain’t working / I gotta put him down!” Salazar shrieks, at precisely the moment on Fear Of where I decided I’ve gotta see Commitment live, if only to find out what kinds of mosh calls Salazar’s shouting out. There’s a complete lack of inhibition and judgment on these songs, a freedom that comes from realizing that as someone who already exists on the margins of society— in Salazar’s case, as a Black person, a queer person, a feminine person, an anticapitalist, and a sex worker—the powers that be will vilify you no matter what. You might as well do whatever the fuck you want, they’ll find something to hate about you regardless. “If you can’t be a good example,” they roar at the breakdown, “be a horrible one.”
“Affirmative Action” skewers white entitlement with a barrage of blast beats building to an electric affirmation: “I know my purpose / I’m not here by mistake.” The chant that follows—“I want it / I want it / I claim it / I got it” is both an indictment of those allowed to grow up believing everything is theirs for the taking and a victory cry for those who have to fight for it—and get ridiculed when they do. The twisted hierarchies of capitalism and colonialism are designed to protect those who sit on empires of theft and make criminals of the people they steal from. “Pluto In Aquarius” bludgeons for two minutes straight; Salazar’s throat sounds like it’s getting ripped right out when they scream “I’M DONE,” reminding us that it’s far from over—both the anguish of a life under the boot and the collective struggle for something better. You can’t opt out of oppression, but when they’ve taken everything, there’s nothing left to lose and nothing to do but fight back. [Get Better Records]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
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