More accurately, Emma Wilkes' essay for Drowned in Sound just won a journalism award!
Yesterday, at The International Music Journalism Awards, which takes place at Reeperbahn Festival, the winner for the Best Work Of Music Journalism Text was... "Deftones is for the Girls" by Emma Wilkes (Drowned In Sound)
In the year since Emma became our newsletter editor, she's published a great piece every week. This one was a bit different and I couldn't resist submitting it to the awards. It's such a brilliant essay, bringing together Emma's unique perspective as both a feminist deconstructing misogyny in metal and as someone who is "Drowned in Sound years old" seeing Deftones for the first time, surrounded by more women than the heavy shows she usually covers for publications like Kerrang!.
The piece goes deep but also has Emma's personality and wit, like the pay-off on this paragraph:
One of the significant things about Deftones is that they have always gone beyond metal’s basic aggressive tropes. The aggression is still present, conveyed in their mountainous riff work and low tunings, but it’s often suffused with something softer. Sometimes it’s with elements of shoegaze or the sultry tones of their influences like Prince or Sade, maybe it simply pours through in a gentle melody or the mere coolness of Moreno’s sensitive tenor. There’s something more sensitive about it, both in melody and lyrics. He’s mysterious and abstract but with a burning emotional core. And, infamously, he’s often quite horny.
It's a generous piece of writing too, shouting out the book Under My Thumb: Songs That Hate Women & The Women Who Love Them edited by Rhian E. Jones and Eli Davies (order it from your local Bookshop here), and a range of artists including Lorna Shore, Babymetal, Halestorm, and Spiritbox.
If you missed the piece when we published it or fancy a re-read, here's Deftones is for the girls by the now award-winning music journalist Emma Wilkes.
Emma Wilkes
The judges chose Emma's piece over a shortlist that included articles from The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and Eliza McLamb's viral Substack essay about fake fans.
- Spencer Kornhaber: How Lizzo Became One of Pop Culture's Great Flops - The Atlantic
- Eliza Mclamb: Fake Fans - Substack
- Kelefa Sanneh: How Music Criticism Lost its Edge - New Yorker
- Alexander Vladimirov: Let the Underground Club Scene Go Under - Times
Movement
Learn more about the awards and see the full list of winners.
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