You should know about Ink & Dagger. Ink & Dagger were special. The Philadelphia band didn't last long, but they seemed like some ancient mythological thing even when they were still around. Ink & Dagger's sound was dark, discordant hardcore. Early in the band's history, they dressed up as vampires, playing in the dark and wearing white makeup and fake blood. Tons of different people cycled through the band over the years, including alt-comedy figurehead Eric Wareheim, who briefly played bass for them. Ink & Dagger ended suddenly in 1999, when frontman Sean McCabe was found dead in an Indiana hotel room at the age of 27. Now, Ink & Dagger are teasing a new album. You might like to know how that could possibly work. Well, so would I.
As the Needledrop points out, a billboard for something called The Philadelphia Society Of Future Vampires recently appeared in Philly. Ink & Dagger's Instagram account posted a picture of that billboard, as well as a graphic showing the same thing. We can only guess that this is an album. It could really be anything. I guess we'll see what the words "Ink & Dagger" might mean a quarter century after McCabe's passing.
The only consistent Ink & Dagger members were Sean McCabe and Don Devore, later of the Icarus Line. Ink & Dagger only released one album, 1998's The Fine Art Of Original Sin, during their lifetime. A self-titled LP also came out posthumously in 2000. In 2010, Ink & Dagger reunited to headline the This Is Hardcore festival and to tour the UK, with Thursday's Geoff Rickly standing in for McCabe.
