© 2010 Stella Dawes, All Rights Reserved

We have made an album called Contrasts and it is now ready to buy from us by following the link to the right. We are selling it on a sliding scale so pay what you can.

If we sold each copy at £5 then we would just about break even. So for anyone who wants to pay a little extra we would hugely appreciate it, and for those of you who are strapped for cash then you can slide under by a pound or two. We just want people to hear our music at the end of the day, and if that means losing a little then we'll just have to work some more shifts!

We did pretty much the entire process ourselves and the cd ships in recycled chipboard packaging, hand numbered and filled with our blood and sweat*

We've put 12 tracks on there and it's 52 minutes long so that works out at about £1 for every ten minutes, what a bargain! If you're not from the rainy island that we live on and don't deal in the faltering sterling currency, don't worry, it will get converted from pounds for you. Please let us know if for some reason the link doesn't work. Thanks.

*blood and sweat metaphorical only, please do not ask us for our fluids as refusal often offends

1. Mouth

2. Happy Ever Afternoon

3. Dichotomy

4. Investment Intercourse: A Deposit

5. Everything Happens to Eeyore

6. Investment Intercourse: A Return

7. Gut

8. Sleep is for the Week

9. Fifteen Hour Drive

10. When the Tiger Lost his Voice

11. The Unspeakable

12. Decay

“Overall, this album is superb: it’s intellectual hardcore. It’s brutal, yet subtle; artistic, yet emotional. It is the embodiment of the DIY ethic through its production method: all of the mastering was done internally. Buy it. Listen to it. See them live. You’ll love it.”

- A Distorted Reality

“Lyrically this band are also on top of their game and the hand-crafted lyric sheet inside the home-made packaging is a nice touch. It kind of sums the band up rather well - one that seeks perfection in everything they do and isn't far off achieving it.”

- Punktastic

“When you expose yourself to enough music, you learn to expect the unexpected. Though to say that this release is a nice surprise would be one hell of an understatement. It’s a dose of progressive post-hardcore, as experimental and creative as it is pure and unadulterated loudness. The album in its entirety is beautifully calculated - every track flows seamlessly into the next without an ounce of repetition, the individual songs themselves being perfectly structured, striking balances between melding thrashing drums with surging guitars and fanatic vocals, while instrumental interludes footstep their way between bursts of controlled noise. Not a second of this album has been compromised in terms of originality and perfection; genuinely an exciting release and a success that begs to be continued.”

- Push To Fire

“Take a deep fucking breath before you listen to this album. You’ll need it. There’s only a few points in this album where the heart-grinding post-hardcore riffs and screams let up. The passion in the vocals is blindingly evident, each word of each sentence clearly and fervently articulated. Heavy guitars and bass pound away dissonantly with random, syncopated stabs that are perfectly attuned to the drum lines. The detail in this music is pretty mind-blowing; your common and garden hardcore band wouldn’t produce this amount of complexity within their entire discography.”

- Punkscene

“This is an astounding album for a self-funded, self released full-length debut… It is definitely rough around the edges, for sure, it has moments where it threatens to all fall apart and lose itself in it’s self loathing… however, by the grace of god, you come out the other side intact and thankful that such a band exists…”

- Subba-Cultcha

“If I were a music journalist I would probably call Stella Dawes "The new Beecher" or something equally effusive. Thankfully I'm not, but it's certainly a comparison I would make if I had to make one. To be honest though, there's too much depth to this music to really make such comparisons. The thing that is most striking about this album is just how powerful I found it; there is more raw emotion in this album than most people will feel in a year. There's no bullshit behind this album, no label, no underlying motives and no generic boundaries which makes for some heartfelt, honest music. A rare treat.”

- Death Death Death

Lyrically i found these songs speak clearly. Backed up by strong delivery, epic guitars and drums which at times start and stop – leaving you feeling as though somebody/something has just hit you...This band is a definite to keep an eye on. With this being an early release, I’m sure Stella Dawes can only grow as people and as a band – which in return can only make their drive more determined.... I have to mention the packaging of this cd as well: made from 100% recycled chipboard. This not only suprised but impressed me. Who ever thought of this idea for packaging rules!

- We Make Stuff Good

For me though, it’s the very lyrics I mentioned earlier that make this record for me. Furious wrath and hardcore go hand-in-hand, and that’s all well and good, but I like my lyrical spice to take a more intelligent twist than your average ‘argh, I’m so misunderstood!’. Mike knows what he doesn’t like about the world, but he expresses it intelligently and, above all, poetically. Lines like ‘we polish shit, but like it or not, nobody here is perfection’ ring true, as well as being delivered with consistent gusto and conviction.

- Segue87

“How can you describe their sound you might ask? Well, it’s quite diverse, raging from intense screamo not unlike Pg. 99 to post-hardcore somewhere in between Envy and Burst. In other moments like in “The Unspeakable” Stella Dawes opts for a hectic atmosphere reminding me a bit of the now defunct Beecher.”

- Asice.net

“This album, CONTRASTS, is discordant anger and frustration all blended together with euphoric and orgasmic release upon every pluck of the strings, every slap of the bass, every spat lyric and every beat of the drums…
It has a sense of catharsis and expended hate in every note and it is full of righteous bile…”

- Subba-Cultcha

Website by Mike Shakespeare