[Cover photo credit to Jonathon Marin]

Queer Rock band The Dead Betties are a NYC-based trio of lead singer/bassist Joshua Ackley, guitarist Eric Shepherd, and drummer Derek Pippin. They’ve recently announced their new Whitey EP due out November 21, 2025 via Rotten Princess Records.

Whitey channels “the righteous fury that anyone with a pulse and a conscience has felt in the last decade” into passionate music.

Lead single “Whatever, Anyway” is out now, alongside an official video. The song draws on Ackley’s disdain for what he calls “cowboy cosplay” in U.S. popular culture.

He says:

We’re seeing it a lot in popular culture and music, and you even see a lot of queer white artists putting on cowboy drag. I find that very offensive, because I’m from the Four Corners in New Mexico—a border town on the Navajo Reservation—and the Navajo people are incredibly beautiful, resilient, and have dealt with racism on a scale that I don’t think anyone else in the country has dealt with historically. Cowboys stole land and carried out genocide, so cowboy culture is actually nostalgia-washing as well as a really dark appropriation and a bad gimmick.

The Dead Betties self-produced the new EP to give it their own personal stamp.

Ackley says of the Production and their goals:

We’re ready to keep doing what we set out to do when we all moved to New York at 19 and we set out to push angry queer music into the public domain. I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to pull off in our career—and now we’re sitting back and looking at what’s happening in the world and realizing that, not only is it really time for us to do what we set out to do, but it’s our responsibility, because we’re the adults now. It’s on us as a society to do better and actually put out the art that we want to hear, instead of sitting back and complaining about not hearing it. 

They invite NYC fans to “join the Punk Rock revolution” at their EP release party at Union Pool on November 21, 2025.