Killer High Life's *Found Dead*: A Goodbye You Can't Quite Trust

The most Milwaukee thing about Killer High Life is the name — a joke about the beer, the city, and dying young, all in three words. The second most Milwaukee thing is that their new EP, Found Dead, out today, might be a breakup record, a concept record, a farewell, or an elaborate bit, and the band is in no hurry to tell you which.

Let's start with what's real. Killer High Life is Brennan Deshotel (singer-guitarist), Adelaide Light White (bass), and Adam Belker (drums), a trio that describes its own music as "gay, midwest emo, gut-wrenching cathartic girl-rage." Found Dead is four songs — "Fisticuffs," "Jerk Chicken Rub," "Kittens And Puppies," and "Vertebrae" — following their 2025 self-titled debut. It's a DIY release in the truest sense: noisy, vulnerable, unpolished in the ways that matter and precise in the ways that count.

Now the lore. On July 11, the band played the Cactus Club with Totally Cashed, Socially Suspect, and Tiny Vamp, and the show was billed as their final performance. Cue the neighborhood group chats. Except — and this is where it gets fun — the "final show" framing dovetails a little too neatly with the mythology baked into Found Dead, a record that is, after all, named for a corpse. Whether Killer High Life has genuinely disbanded or staged a Blair Witch-esque disappearing act to sell the concept is, at press time, an open question. The band isn't clarifying, which is either heartbreaking or brilliant marketing or, in the finest emo tradition, both at once.

What isn't ambiguous is the music. This is the kind of record that could only come out of a specific Milwaukee ecosystem — the Cactus Club release circuit, the DIY basements, the socialist benefit shows, the six-band Tuesdays at MKeUltra. Midwest emo has always been a regional dialect, and Killer High Life speak it with a Wisconsin accent: self-deprecating, a little feral, unafraid to be earnest and ridiculous in the same measure. "Jerk Chicken Rub" and "Kittens And Puppies" sitting on the same tracklist as songs about your own funeral is the whole aesthetic in miniature.

The "girl-rage" self-tag matters here, too. Milwaukee's emo and punk lineage has often been coded male and coded suburban; Killer High Life's queer, cathartic, gleefully messy version of it is a genuine expansion of what the local sound can be. Four songs is a short goodbye, if it's even a goodbye. But it's a loud one.

Here's the thing about a fake-out farewell: it only works if people would actually miss you. Milwaukee scenes are small enough that a band can vanish and no one outside a 40-person room notices. Killer High Life bet that their disappearance would register — that a "final show" at the Cactus Club would sell out the group chat and the room. That bet, at least, has already paid off, regardless of whether the corpse gets up and tours in the fall.

So stream Found Dead, or better, buy it. Play "Vertebrae" loud with the windows down. And if you see a Killer High Life show on a calendar three months from now, don't be surprised — and don't say you weren't warned. In Milwaukee, even the dead play the Cactus Club again eventually.

Sources: Killer High Life says goodbye on Found Dead (Milwaukee Record); Milwaukee Record Recommended Events: July 6-12, 2026