Want of Sin comprises vocalist Bliss Baubas, guitarists Mark Curda and Xeion Cramer, bassist Jordan Steimke, keyboardist Trisha Peterson and drummer Adam Troyer. Formed in 2019, they are an experimental black metal band who incorporate elements of post-rock and shoegaze. Peterson played her first show with Want of Sin at Last Rites on Saturday evening, which also featured a stacked bill of local antifascist hard hitters It Is Dead and Minneapolis acts Tenant and Nekrotisk.

Baubas and Curda are the two founders of Want of Sin, as well as the two remaining original members. “We really wanted to do something that was black metal, and we had a completely different lineup and sound before having the group of people we’re currently with,” Baubas explains. “I actually wasn’t a musician at the time; I learned how to scream while we were recording our first album (laughs).”

“It started as just four friends hanging out playing video games and deciding to start a band,” Curda adds. “Xeion is a good friend of ours who played in previous bands with me.”

“We had a mutual friend who invited us all to a Halloween party, and Mark and I got talking in the kitchen during the party about jamming,” Troyer recalls. “We had a great time doing that, and then he asked if I wanted to be the new drummer.”

Steimke shares how he joined, “Adam and I used to play in a different band together and we had a whole jam space setup in my basement. These guys needed a place to practice so they started jamming in my basement; their previous bassist was moving away but I was available to play, so I joined from there.”

“I casually met Bliss, Mark and Xeion at X-Ray Arcade at a Priest show,” Peterson said. “The original plan was that I was going to fill in for Bliss on vocals because she was going to Germany, but what ended up happening is we were at practice, and Jordan has a really nice Victorian grand piano in his house. I was upstairs playing it, and Adam runs upstairs freaking out saying that they’ve been looking for a keyboard player for like a year. As soon as Bliss came back, they asked me to play keyboards for the band permanently. I haven’t played keys in a band since 2011 and thought I was never going to do it again…I literally sold all my shit six months ago…and now I’m playing keys in a band again (laughs).”

Want of Sin’s name is a reference to funerary announcements from the Victorian age. Curda describes the band’s songwriting process, “Some of it is stuff I write in my free time, that we then arrange, play and edit at practice. Other times we’ll have half a song and then just keep jamming and throw stuff in.”

“This group has really good chemistry,” Peterson affirms. “Even just from the last two practices, we’re really excited to share what’s been brewing.”

On her lyrics, Baubas shares, “I’m the only one who writes them but now that Trisha is here, I run them by her before I actually implement them because she relates to a lot of them. I grew up between being Catholic and fundamentalist evangelical, and a lot of that kind of plays into our greater themes of the “wanting of sin”; there’s a lot of references to things like baptism and taking the Lord’s name in vain, but they also tie into things like trauma and mental health. I also suffer from borderline personality disorder, and one of our songs “Water Damage” originated from when I was living alone in Germany and was trying to represent what it’s like having BPD by referencing the seasons like spring, winter and decay bleeding into a person.”

Want of Sin’s latest single “Baptism” came out in December. “I got out of a really shitty relationship with an egomaniacal narcissist, and I associate narcissism more or less with the Catholic church,” Baubas discloses about the song. “It puts you in the place of a priest and the whole idea of idolizing a person, but then coming to the realization that someone’s not a God at all. But in that moment, they might as well be, because they’re the only person that exists in your mind at that time.”

The band is currently working on their next album, “Hydrophobic”, which thematically revolves around water. They are collecting field recordings of rainstorms and a water wheel to incorporate into the album. Curda elaborates, “There’s a whole backing theme of how water starts with rain, then it comes down and goes into a lake or pond where the baptism is happening, then it goes down the stream past rapids and water wheel into an ocean, and then finally it evaporates before going through the cycle again. Doing the field recordings has been a trial; catching rain and thunderstorms at just the right day and time is a challenge. We wanted to find an actual water wheel to get sounds from because the album kind of represents the cycle of mental health with how a person can transition or turn into someone with a totally different personality. A lot of the wheels we’ve found around Wisconsin either weren’t running or were broken, and we finally found a working one where we arrived 30 minutes after they closed down the shop. We drove all the way to Augusta, Wisconsin to find another (laughs).”

Want of Sin play Da Bar on May 10 and X-Ray Arcade on May 22.