Biography
The Black Queen formed as a synth-heavy power pop trio that started out informally before evolving into a committed group whose participants regarded it as far more than a side pursuit. Greg Puciato, frontman of the Dillinger Escape Plan, and veteran technician Steven Alexander, whose credits include work with the Dillinger Escape Plan, Nine Inch Nails, and Ke$ha, first began exchanging ideas in 2011 on tracks that moved well outside Puciato’s primary band. Later that same year multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter Joshua Eustis, known for his affiliations with Nine Inch Nails and Puscifer, joined after crossing paths with Puciato at a Puscifer concert. Puciato had long nurtured an affinity for electronic music, reflected in the Dillinger Escape Plan’s covers of Massive Attack, Depeche Mode, and Aphex Twin, and he held particular regard for Eustis’s contributions to Telefon Tel Aviv. The pair also bonded over a mutual appreciation of R&B, a thread audible across Eustis’s catalog. Within a few years the three members were fully immersed in the Black Queen, sharing a home in Los Angeles and providing mutual support through difficult personal circumstances. The group introduced itself in 2015 with the ballad “The End Where We Start,” then swiftly issued the brisker “Ice to Never,” a pair of singles whose architecture recalled Telefon Tel Aviv’s Immolate Yourself more than anything associated with the Dillinger Escape Plan. Both tracks also showcased some of Puciato’s most tuneful and measured vocal work while retaining full emotional weight. Their first album, Fever Daydream, appeared in January 2016. An international tour followed later that year, after which Puciato rejoined the Dillinger Escape Plan to complete its final album, Dissociation, released in October 2016. The Dillinger Escape Plan spent nearly all of 2017 on the road in support before entering a hiatus, allowing Puciato to reconvene with the Black Queen in 2018 and finish the follow-up Infinite Games, which arrived in September 2018.