Chicago’s Iris Marlowe is bringing gothic country, horror and a little taste of hell to our first ever LOUD WOMEN Fest Toronto at Baby G on Friday 6 November.
Tickets for LOUD WOMEN Fest Toronto are on sale now via DICE
If your idea of country music could do with more goths, gays, she/theys, horror films and spaghetti westerns, Iris may be exactly what you’ve been waiting for.
Based in Chicago, Iris takes classic country storytelling somewhere considerably darker. Her songs are cinematic, strange and gloriously macabre, full of revenge, death, supernatural goings-on and dusty landscapes where something definitely unpleasant is lurking just out of shot.
Her latest album, Dead By Dawn, arrived appropriately enough on Halloween 2025. Iris describes it as a gothic-country record inspired by horror films and grunge, while her LOUD WOMEN Fest application sums up the mission beautifully: country music for “goths, gays and she/theys” who don’t see themselves represented in the genre.
And yes, the horror goes deep. Iris has spoken about the album’s connection to the Evil Dead films, with songs including ‘Dead By Dawn’ and ‘Swallow Your Soul’ drawing directly on that world.
One of our current favourites is ‘Burn Those Bodies’, which does exactly what you would hope a song with that title would do. Then there’s the magnificently titled ‘Jesus Was a Communist’, released in 2023 and another very good indication that Iris isn’t especially interested in staying inside country music’s more conservative boundaries.
You can dig further into Iris’s world via her official website and Instagram.
LOUD WOMEN Fest Toronto
Friday 6 November 2026
Baby G, Toronto
Chinese Medicine + Enfants Sauvages + I, Doris + Iris Marlowe + Morgan-Paige + SHY FRiEND + Stress Dolls + Sunlust
Eight artists from Toronto, Québec, Calgary, Buffalo, Chicago and London, all together for our first LOUD WOMEN Fest in Toronto.
Read more about LOUD WOMEN Fest Toronto and the full lineup.
Advance tickets are $20 CAD including fees and taxes.
Get tickets for LOUD WOMEN Fest Toronto. 💋
