Deli Girls craft a chaotic soundtrack for these desperate modern times

When not on the road with Deli Girls, Danny Orlowski serves as a social worker – one in a number of professions currently struggling with uncertainty amid the ongoing flurry of executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, a number of which are targeted at the people and communities Orlowski serves.

“In the field in general, there’s a lot more discussion around immigration and how to deal with ICE, which is definitely an immediate thing. As well as how we as workers should talk to or redirect the cops in these situations,” Orlowski said by phone on the eve of Deli Girls’ late-March tour kick-off in Philadelphia. “But honestly, it’s so confusing and there are so many things coming out every day that it’s hard to keep up.”

This combined sense of chaos, dread and overwhelm is frequently mirrored in the trio’s music, a shapeshifting collage of industrial rage that from its inception has been deeply rooted in politics, sexual liberation, and personal trauma, and which has continued to evolve through a 10-year history in which singer/screamer Orlowski has operated as the group’s lone constant, recording and touring alongside a rotating cast of players.

On Deli Girls’ self-titled album, from 2023, Orlowski teamed with more than a dozen contributors to create a pulsating, pulse-quickening series of tracks that hit like a frenzied rave staged amid these damaged times. Witness the throbbing “My Brain Is a Weapon,” on which Orlowski unpacked the ways our country’s cruelties have increasingly over time exhibited themselves in the citizenry. “This country’s abusive, and now we’re all abusers,” they sing in a glitchy, Auto-Tuned yowl, the line calling to mind the tragic recent case of an 11-year-old Texas girl who died by suicide after classmates bullied and taunted her at school over her family’s immigration status – cruelties undoubtedly absorbed from those now wielding power in our government.

When Orlowski first stepped into Deli Girls in 2013, the music served more as an excavation, with the musician embracing the project as a place in which they could untangle their early traumas, their family history, and their questions related to gender identity, in addition to the various political injustices “that make you want to rip your hair out and scream.” And looking back, Orlowski now accepts that the relative minimalism then embraced by the former duo, which tended toward economy in everything from the musical arrangements to the lyrics, helped to introduce needed clarity at a time in which they were in search of steadier ground.

“Because I wanted to write songs so efficiently and really edit things down to their most basic essence – I fucking hate fluff, man – it definitely forced me to process things and say in one sentence what the fucking problem was, you know?” said Orlowski, who will join Deli Girls bandmates Zach Hatechild and John Bemis in concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Friday, April 4. “And that definitely helps with mental health and anything else one might be dealing with.”

This growth has manifested in Deli Girls’ music, which now focuses its rage on comparatively outward targets. “The focus is different, where it’s less about centering myself in it all,” said Orlowski, who allowed that they’re expressing a different type of anger now at age 33 than they were in their early 20s. “I’m not sure what the word is. It’s not quite angst, but maybe more of a mature rage. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, because as you get older … your whole world perspective changes.”

It’s an evolution driven in part by the writing of new material, a process Orlowski said has necessitated a more thorough revisitation of the past, forcing them to take stock of those things they wish to leave behind, as well as those they want to carry forward. This is true of both the music – Orlowski said they intend to discard the more polished, hyperactive sonics of Deli Girls in favor of a grittier, more deliberate sound – and the themes, which have continued to expand outward, taking on increasing global significance.

“I don’t want to make it sound like I’m not a traumatized, fucked up, depressed person, because of course I still am,” Orlowski said, and laughed. “But I do feel like I’ve gotten a way bigger handle on my mental health, which I’m sure I have the music and the scene and everything else to thank for that, as well as therapy and a lot of personal hard work. But what motivates me more now is the political element.”

These include a new song rooted in the ongoing Palestinian genocide (“Give It Back”), and another called “Location” that rails against the transactional nature of social media in which an individual’s existence is mutated into a tailored sales platform for would-be advertisers. “It’s also about working and being a wage slave,” Orlowski added, “which is totally canon Deli Girls content.”

Of course, this more politically engaged direction comes with its own unique hurdles, ranging from the difficulty of sourcing inspiration from naturally deflating events – “Lately I’ve been struggling with writing for that reason,” Orlowski said – to the challenge of finding something new and unique to say about these kinds of world-altering headlines. 

“It’s hard to write about politics or injustice or genocide in a way that doesn’t feel trite or overdone,” said Orlowski, who has attempted to counter this reality by stripping these issues down to their most base form. “I’m going back to that idea of boiling things down to their simplest, most basic parts, because these are certainly things I’m not going to be flowery about, or where I’m going to say something that doesn’t need to be said. With ‘Give It Back,’ it’s just like, ‘Let them live, let us live,’ because what else could you say about it that actually matters? But there’s so much cooking in my head that it’s taking longer to process, let alone crank out a song, because I certainly want to give all of these things the attention and care they deserve.”