At A Queer Ritual, Bonds Are Built on Blood and Benefit Shows

It’s 9 p.m. on a Friday night, and avant-metal “penis girl music” steward Aki McCullough is screaming from the top of a ladder mounted to the warehouse walls, fake blood dripping down her mouth, her stage makeup as alter ego ameokama somewhere between corpse paint and clown. Within the next 24 hours, frontwoman Megan Osztrosits of noise rockers Couch Slut will smash an empty beer can into her forehead, sending very real blood trickling down her face, as her bandmates persist with their noxious, sludgy riffs.

If you’ve been a heavy musicgoer of the queer/trans persuasion in the Twin Cities in recent years, you’ve come to expect these kinds of sights. But A Queer Ritual, a local gig series that has now birthed a two-day festival in north Minneapolis, offers a space to safely live that sanguine catharsis for a whole weekend. A mini-fest of heavy music made by and for queer freaks, A Queer Ritual is a place to thresh your voice in harmony with those like it, stance up in a pit full of rowdy gay imps, and shed tears at the rawest elements of our existence reverberated back at us.

Though this past October marked the first Queer Ritual festival of its scope, the name has been kicking around for years. Founder and organizer Mirii Landsem, who also plays guitar and provides vocals for post-metal band Eudaemon and indie rock group I Want To Eat Lava And God Cannot Stop Me, has been using “A Queer Ritual” as the title for a series of one-off shows around the greater Twin Cities area since 2022. 

“I was playing metal shows in Eudaemon and I was sick of it always being just a bunch of old white metal dudes,” Landsem says. “They’re nice enough, but I was like, ‘Where are all the gay people? I know they like this stuff.’”

Not content to just wait around for someone else to organize metal shows spotlighting queer-only bands, Landsem spearheaded them herself, with her partner and Eudaemon bandmate Ella Smith suggesting the name “Queer Ritual” and providing flier art. 

“That’s how I jump into most things,” Landsem says. “I guess that’s DIY, but I get impatient and annoyed when something’s not happening that I want to happen.”

The first few iterations of A Queer Ritual exclusively featured local acts like Ice Climber and Strange Frequency and operated out of Caydence Records and now-shuttered house venue Cemetery Ridge. But the enterprise caught on quickly. Landsem noticed how eagerly the intended audience took to the first show, and decided to make it a series, pushing for bigger opportunities whenever she could. Held during Pride month at Palmer’s Bar, 2024’s Queer Ritual was the first to solicit out-of-state bands like Genital Shame and Apophy, and, crucially, ended up being “way bigger” than expected, raising close to $3,000 for the queer community collective TIGERRS.

“There’s a built-in crowd here already,” Landsem says. “The scene is definitely bigger than the population. You wouldn’t expect it from a first glance.”

She points to the growing queer and trans population in Minnesota, with greater numbers of transplants choosing to make the Twin Cities their home as rights become more fraught state to state. As the influx of queer folks has continued to skew artsy, there’s been a kind of domino effect—new faces will come out to DIY shows, get welcomed by the scene, and build lasting bonds from there.

“There’s lots of shitty stuff going on politically,” Landsem adds, “so people want to be together in their community.”

That sense of community shows through in A Queer Ritual’s mutual aid efforts. Each Queer Ritual is a benefit show, and Landsem keeps all operations DIY to allow as much of the ticket sales as possible to go directly to immediate assistance for disenfranchised members of the queer and unhoused communities in the Twin Cities. Once the nonprofit Polyrhythmic Arts got involved in fundraising assistance and grants in 2024, Landsem was able to pay to pay booking fees for any out-of-town acts,, ensuring that the door cuts of the shows themselves would still entirely go to mutual aid. 

The one-off shows of A Queer Ritual’s early years were all building up to something bigger. Inspired in part by Toronto’s New Friends Fest, a single-venue DIY weekender that’s run for six years now, Landsem wanted to put on a festival. With Polyrhythmic in tow, Landsem was encouraged to run with the connections she had made over the years to make the festival happen.

The first-ever Queer Ritual festival brought together everything the organization has been striving toward these past few years in full brutal force, at a bigger scale than ever. Over the span of two days, you could witness the pummeling-in-record-time of the local beatdown band Chemsexx, Malamiko’s crashing waves of shoegaze, and the dynamic push-and-pull mathcore of Denton’s Godot. 

The mosh pits hit hard and fast and unrelenting, in the most egalitarian sense, as Minneapolis DIY pits tend to do. Those throwing down moves straight out of a fighting game combo are typically the same trans concertgoers who might otherwise feel unsafe or outnumbered at a cis-majority gig. Like all the best DIY shows in town, A Queer Ritual is a space where those on the margins can unleash their most feral state with abandon, knowing that they’ll be flailing and clawing and spin-kicking with kindred company.

Though the weekend brought more acts from across the country than any prior Queer Ritual, most performers were from right here in Minnesota. This gave the whole affair a “best of the Twin Cities queer heavy music” vibe, offering an opportunity to put our scene in conversation with the who's who of underground metal artists nationally. 

Filling out the bill with locals came fairly naturally to Landsem. Working at DIY venues around the city and playing so many bills herself, she’s gotten to know a large swath of the queer and trans artists in the Cities personally. “I want to put Minneapolis on the map a little bit,” Landsem says. “Bands that come here usually come back, because it’s awesome.”

That sense of hometown pride helped make the festival especially thrilling—as I’ve mentioned in past writing on this site and beyond, the Minneapolis DIY scene is overflowing with queer excellence at the moment. The Twin Cities side of the lineup hit some of our current finest in screamo (lovergirl), hardcore (I Owe This Land A Body), post-metal (Lungs), and doomgaze (Haze Gazer). 

When the genre-hopping Anita Velveeta ended the first night of the fest, it felt like the only fitting culmination for what the city’s underground music offers right now. What better way to cap a night than with an artist who can seemingly generate and command any hundred-plus trans women in a room to mosh at a moment’s notice, in Minneapolis and beyond?

Though Landsem says it’s become “kind of my job to know all the gay bands” in Minnesota for her work in A Queer Ritual, she’s still running across new ones. For her, the Twin Cities have officially achieved the mark of a truly thriving subculture: The queer bands are popping up with such volume and speed that no one can keep up with every single one of them. “I keep finding bands where I’m like, ‘How did I not know about this already?’” she says. 

Landsem singles out Melpomene, the Minneapolis instrumental emotional post-death duo who balance sprawling, sidewinder riffs with a marathon runner’s pace, whom she hadn’t even been aware of until last year. But when she discovered them, she immediately started adding them to bills where she could. “They were so in line with everything I was doing already and what I like,” she says. “And trans.”

But one of the strongest virtues of the weekend was the number of acts beyond Minnesota who also fit that bill. The aforementioned ameokama (with both Landsem and Smith in the live band) and Godot balanced assbeater riffs with intermittent dance-punk shoegaze, echoing doom passages, and spoken word, wringing an array of emotions across both sets. Midwest screamo represented both Chicago (The World In Broken Glass) and Iowa City (thisworldisnotkind, also ending a set with screams atop a completely different ladder). And Chicago group Blood Nymph, who ascribe themselves as “anguish” genre tag, covered the spectrum between doom and punk.

Perhaps the biggest outlier from the fest came from Hayley Elizabeth, formerly of the Illinois cybergrind group Thotcrime, who swerved away from her industrial witch house-inspired solo material for 15 minutes of harsh noise, punctuating readings of diaristic passages on familial trauma like serrated stabs—a decision she came to shortly before the performance itself. 

“I wasn't actually sure what I was going to say,” Elizabeth says. “I recently had a very intense therapy session where I discussed my childhood, and it felt important to vent about it.”

For Elizabeth, playing the festival, and choosing to perform such visceral material, was an imperative use of her voice in the current political moment. “Right now, with the way reactionary politicians are actively pushing for silencing and removing queer people as a whole, it’s important for us to be visible, loud, and angry,” she says. “It’s important to be as transgressive as possible, especially as tastemakers that dominate our media push mainstream sensibilities more conservative and regressive. Neurodivergent kids deserve better, trans kids deserve better, and trans women especially deserve better.”

Ultimately, it was A Queer Ritual’s capacity for such unfiltered rawness, much of which would need to be overexplained to a cis audience, that made the headliners’ vulnerability even more striking. New York’s Couch Slut, who refuse to shy away from the vicious realities of sexual assault and self-harm, trudged with an arduous patience that few others that weekend matched—you felt the weight of every thundering note and every distressed word of Osztrosits’s narratives. And that was well before she cut her own head open.

Olympia esoteric doom duo Ragana closed out the weekend with just as much command over the crowd in their spareness, their methodical tempos and impassioned bellows bringing the room to a captive stillness. The instrumental and vocal trade-offs between Maria Stocke and Noel Gilson embrace collectivism as versatility, where a stalwart companion with a steady backbeat is all you need to bolster your songwriting. In perhaps the most poignant moment of the weekend, Stocke took note of the particular power that the song “You Take Nothing”—what she refers to as a kind of mantra of resilience as a queer person—holds in a crowd like this, where everyone could intimately recognize the weight and range of emotions behind those three words.

Though both headliners are among the more prominent names that A Queer Ritual has ever booked, Landsem says they were game for a festival so adamantly queer-focused and DIY-operated. “In these kinds of genres,” she explains, “even if people are bigger, they still kind of have a DIY attitude.” She says guitarist Amy Rose Mills of Couch Slut had voiced excitement for returning to Minneapolis after a past set at Caterwaul, but was especially eager to play a show for an explicitly LGBT audience.

“I like that everyone is still in it for the love of the game,” Landsem adds. “Everybody is just some guy—gender-neutral. It’s okay to talk to them like you’re their peer, and not like they’re some crazy famous person you have to suck up to. We’re all just trying to do stuff together.”

But the weekend was about more than just bringing likeminded people in queerness and music together physically. As with past Queer Rituals, the festival doubled as a benefit show, and this time all admissions went to Autonomous Yurt Union, directly helping unhoused members of the community. For Landsem and so many others in the DIY scene, it’s not enough just to congregate and share a moving experience—it’s about using that act of gathering to make a tangible difference for those who need it most in our very city. (When it comes to other freedoms that DIY spaces have in actively looking out for the community, Landsem is also adamant about prioritizing accessibility and masking. “You can actually make spaces inclusive to your audience, instead of trying to cater to a bar crowd,” she says.)

Landsem already has her sights set on what the future of AQR may someday hold—as a weekender and an organization overall. She intends to keep setting up regular local bills and prioritizing the series as a community-bolstering space, but has her eyes on tangible bigger-picture goals as well. 

Some of the dream ventures Landsem has include a practice/screenprinting space for independent artists, a zine to shift promotional focus away from social media, and an expanded network of DIY venues in town that can devote their work toward improving artists’ experiences.

Landsem is also very vocal about how she wants AQR’s future shows to address some local gig diversity issues. “The Minneapolis DIY scene is way too white,” she says. “I love all queer people, but it’s something I definitely notice about this scene, and I want to make shows cool for non-white queer/trans people.”

Landsem’s biggest aspiration is expanding the team that makes it all happen. By the time of  next year’s fest, she hopes to turn A Queer Ritual into a nonprofit and bring more people on in officially delegated roles. 

“Lots of people help out in many different ways,” she says of how things currently operate, “but it’s mainly just me, and I would rather it be a team.” Her objective is to eventually make A Queer Ritual commensurate with New Friends Fest, which boasts three full days of acts and garners sponsorships from nearly a dozen other organizations. To make it happen, A Queer Ritual needs that kind of dedicated workforce.

But Landsem isn’t just looking for the help of seasoned DIY veterans: “Whoever wants to be involved and make something happen, that’s exactly how I started,” she says. “Please just hit my line if you want to do something. You can just start doing it.”

“I always try to think of it like I’m one of these people who wants cool things to happen,” Landsem says. “I’m not so special for making it happen. I’m just the one to do it.”