Dark Chisme Finds Solidarity on the Dance Floor

Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder)

There are bands making darkwave as aesthetic, and then there are bands like Dark Chisme, who treat it as something more porous: a meeting point for confrontation and collective release. The Seattle duo of Chicago-raised Latina DJ Christine Gutiérrez and multi-instrumentalist that goes by the moniker ‘E’, weave industrial textures, synth-pop, freestyle, house, even flashes of Cumbia into a sound that refuses fixed boundaries. Just as importantly, they approach scene-building with the same refusal.

Speaking with them at Boise’s Record Exchange ahead of Treefort, conversation drifted as naturally toward mutual aid, gatekeeping and inclusivity as it did drum machines and basslines. That felt fitting. For Dark Chisme, those things are inseparable. “We kind of stay primarily on the darkwave side,” Gutiérrez explains, “but we add elements of industrial… we like house music so we kind of add that in… even Latin beats too. We plan to do more of that — just blend and have this fusion of sounds.”

That openness extends beyond genre into how they imagine community itself. Though immersed in darkwave, they light up talking about psychedelic garage bands like Monsterwatch, metal bills, and genre-crossing local peers helping dissolve scene boundaries. “You bring all these people that otherwise wouldn’t maybe be together into one room,” Gutiérrez says. “It’s pretty cool.”

E adds that what draws them to collaborators often has less to do with aesthetics than intention. “It’s not necessarily about image to them. They just really care about making music and the art. Those are the people we bond with.”

That distinction — substance before style — feels central to Dark Chisme’s project, even as style radiates from every corner of it. The band’s name itself carries layered meaning. Gutiérrez first adopted ‘Gold Chisme’ as a DJ alias, reclaiming gossip directed at her as an outsider navigating Seattle’s scenes. Dark Chisme became an alter ego built from that friction.

Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder)

“Chisme is gossip in Spanish,” she says. “People were talking about me… so I was like, I guess they’re gossiping. It evolved into something I loved.” Later, she laughs that songwriting itself can be another form of gossip. “If somebody crosses me, I write a song about them.”

But beneath the humour is something more vulnerable. Music, for Gutiérrez, became a way through alienation and self-doubt.“I’m doing this for myself first,” she says. “The right people will follow.”

That ethos surges through their performances, which intentionally sit between club culture and an equally energetic live band performance. Though some electronic acts lean on backing tracks or minimal setups, Dark Chisme are moving in the opposite direction — adding live bass, synths and drums to make the project feel increasingly embodied. “We want it to be like 95 percent live set,” Gutiérrez says. “I want to show people how we make the music.”

That tactile quality feels connected to her roots as a DJ, where curation is emotional architecture. “I think dance is a form of freedom and expression,” she says. “When I’m DJing and dancing and I see other people digging it… that control is just so good.”

That idea — dancing as liberation rather than escapism — becomes a thread running through the band’s recent single “Dominance of Truth,” which leans harder into aggression and political unease.

“There’s too much shit going on right now,” Gutiérrez says. “A lot of people are not 100 percent okay.”

Photo credit: Shannon Johnston (@me_onlylouder)

The track emerged, she explains, from wrestling with fear and isolation, but also from touring and witnessing alternative communities persist under pressure. “It made me think — why am I isolating myself? … We’re not alone.”

That realization seems to animate the band’s broader politics of inclusivity. Their community work isn’t framed as branding or activism-as-accessory; it feels lived, rooted in who gets invited into the room and what energies are made possible there. Even E’s masked performance persona folds into that ethos — anonymity not as mystique, but as a way of centring Gutiérrez’s voice and building a larger mythology around shared expression.

And yet for all the heaviness they engage, there’s joy threaded throughout. It surfaces in Christine’s love of Italo disco, in stories about dancing through DJ sets for hours, in her delight discussing the symbolic pull of orange — the colour splashed across her hair, home and artwork.

“There’s something about it that makes me feel really happy and free,” she says.

Dark Chisme may be framed through darkwave, but what they’re building feels less about darkness than movement through fear, through genre, through the artificial separations that scenes and systems impose.

As our conversation drifted toward music’s ability to resist those divisions, Gutiérrez put it simply: “Music is a healing force.”

Dark Chisme make that feel less like metaphor than method. On record and in community, they’re proving the dance floor can still be a site of connection and unity.