This Band Wants to Start a Musical Revolution in Denver

“Denver’s getting eaten alive by money and the questionable people who tend to have it,” says Cursing singer and lyricist Devin James Fry. “And we’re seeing a vibrant creative-art response to that.”

Fry styles himself as part of the pushback against what he characterizes as the Mile High City’s “governing class,” and Cursing, in which he collaborates with hardware experts Alex Anderson and Ryan Halgren, is a powerful weapon of dissent. On October 2025’s black tape, the trio’s debut recording, which Fry portrays as a teaser for subsequent salvos that will explode over the coming months, electronic instrumentation at its most forceful is twinned with expressions of freedom that blend the political (e.g., “Direct Action” and “The Influence”) with the personal (“I Like That We Fuck”).

Even when the subject matter gets heavy, though, the joyfully propulsive beats don’t stop. Or, as Fry puts it, “In the revolution, I want to embolden, enable and teach Denver to shake its ass. We must fucking dance, and making sure that I’m laughing half the time is very important to me.”

The progressive ideology at the core of Fry’s worldview qualifies as a birthright. He grew up in Canon City, where is grandfather, Lynn Boughton, became well-known for speaking out against the Cotter Mill Mine, a uranium operation where he worked as head chemist. “The mill was dumping its tailings into groundwater and polluting the whole watershed,” Fry explains. “It was a massive environmental disaster that’s a Superfund site now, and my grandpa was positioned to be listened to when he blew the whistle.” (For more details, read the Lynn Boughton papers, which are archived at the University of Colorado Boulder.)

Boughton “got cancer as a result of his exposure [he died of the disease in 2001], as did so many workers at the mill,” Fry continues, “and his protracted legal battle, as well as watching his health decline and us family members essentially having no recourse, shaped a lot of my thinking.”

After attending college in Colorado Springs, Fry moved to Austin, Texas, where he spent a dozen years as part of the famed music circuit there, with one stint involving an acclaimed outfit called The Naysayers. But after signing up with the International Workers of the World, a venerable organization shorthanded as the Wobblies, he realized that his songs could be a powerful delivery system for progressive expression. “My work didn’t have the flavor it does now until I joined the IWW,” he says.

He arrived in Denver circa 2020, “just in time to catch COVID,” he says. “But I found a musical community that I’ve connected to so much more deeply than I ever did in Austin. Denver has a phenomenal electronic music scene and such supportive people here.”

An example of this phenomenon is Freq Boutique, a monthly showcase hosted by Anderson, with whom Fry quickly bonded; he met Halgren through the regular events, too. Since the formal launch of Cursing in April 2025, they’ve developed a sound that has its roots in the industrial genre: Fry cites touchstones such as Nine Inch Nails, Nitzer Ebb, The Prodigy and Front 242, as well as “hip-hop and boom bap.” But in his view, the visceral, vital aspects of the resulting sound shred any efforts to apply a retro label.

Lyrically, “I think we’re about the poetry of reading history,” he maintains, adding that “I don’t get my inspiration from other songwriters.”

A case in point is the plan for Cursing’s upcoming April 30 gig at the hi-dive, where the crew will be joined by a special guest, drag icon Lisa Frank 666. Because of the date’s proximity to May 1, annually commemorated as International Workers Day, Fry will lean into topics such as Chicago’s Haymarket Affair, which involved a bombing at an otherwise peaceful demonstration on behalf of the eight-hour workday that prompted the prosecution of eight alleged anarchists, most of whom weren’t even present at the rally.

The group’s interest in sharing such information doesn’t take place on typical platforms. According to Fry, “Cursing sees the participatory structure of social media as corrosive, and we refuse to engage with it.” Instead, the three pass along news by way of a text circle that has more than 300 subscribers. Join by texting the word “CURSE” to 720-572-1312.

“We all deserve better than Meta,” Fry emphasizes. “We deserve better than Instagram. We deserve to be in touch with each other, and it’s been so much more satisfying to work this way.”

Let the revolution begin.

Cursing, with Snakes of Russia, Voight, Vox Mnemonic, and Lisa Frank 666. 7 p.m. Thursday, April 30, hi-dive, 7 South Broadway, $12.