What comes to mind when you hear of a band called Rectal Wench, and that they are from China? For most people, the answer comes in two layers. The first is the name itself. “Rectal Wench” triggers a reaction before any context has time to form. It sounds provocative, even confrontational, in a way that suggests parody or shock value. For some listeners, that is enough to file the band away as a joke, or at least as something not meant to be taken seriously. The second layer is the country. China carries its own set of assumptions that sit on top of the music before anyone has heard it. For many outside observers, China is not automatically associated with underground metal scenes in the same way that parts of Europe or North America might be. Instead, it is often imagined through broader political and cultural frameworks first, and artistic subcultures second.
Now, pretend you are me, first arriving in China in 2013 after a long flight from Canada. Alone, suffering from major culture shock, I searched for a sense of familiarity–punk and metal shows. At a nearby venue, 13 Club, I scanned the upcoming shows on their website. I saw the name then for the first time, “Rectal Wench.” It instantly excited me. I knew of some bands in China. Torturing Nurse–the noise artist from Shanghai who wore a strange mask. Suffocated, the thrash band who played Wacken. Ritual Day – black metal. I knew these things could exist here. So what was Rectal Wench? Something gory. Something sexual. Maybe goregrind, pornogrind. Who knows? The band was playing something called the Gore Feast. I got more excited. This was my sphere of interest–gore, possibly metal, rectums, wenches. My imagination went crazy thinking of what would happen.
Backed by an inhuman drum machine, men in ski masks and butcher outfits took the stage at the Gore Feast. The songs were as I had expected: goregrind. They, along with the band Cave Have Rod (who also appeared on the Gore Feast and organized it with Rectal Wench), became representative of true underground metal to me in China. It wasn’t that these bands were heavy and had strange, sexual names and wore dresses or maxi pads on their faces on stage. It’s that they created, organized, and brought together bands and fans for this mini-festival, which in its small way, represented a form of artistic freedom. You didn’t need a VPN to see Rectal Wench. It came uncensored and explicitly in your face.
Even though I hadn’t seen Torturing Nurse yet, I imagined the scene at his shows would be similar: the performance itself being an expression of musical freedom through noise with the crowd being like-minded individuals. I would eventually investigate the Shanghai scene, and these Torturing Nurse shows at a later time.
After the Gore Feast, I contacted Rectal Wench and Cave Have Rod, along with The Dark Prison Massacre, who also played the show, doing interviews with all three of them. I used these interviews and the show as a real basis for what would eventually become The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise (2013-2021). The event and these bands pried open my perception and expectations about the Chinese underground music scene, and I couldn’t have asked for a better set of ushers than the Rod, the Wench and the Massacre.
Within the interviews, I learned that the name Rectal Wench came from the Lividity song of the same name. Rex (guitar) explained how he first encountered pornogrind after reading an article describing Lividity as “the most niubi (Chinese word for fucking awesome) brutal death/pornogrind band on the planet.” The first song he heard, “Pussy Lover,” became a reference point in itself, “which made me aware of the many colors of pussy.” The name “Rectal Wench” arose directly from that early listening: “Rectal Wench was my favorite song. This name is very appropriate – the implications, style, everything that we want to represent, so we took the name.” At the time, I wanted to understand whether this kind of extreme sexual imagery was simply part of the aesthetic of the genre, or whether it connected in any way to the environment these bands were actually living in. I also wanted to know if pornography itself played any role in how these ideas circulated.
Linkfy (vocals) and Rex (guitar) both spoke about pornography in the same matter-of-fact register as the music. Linkfy described interests in “fetish, rape, foreign addiction and Bang Bros.” Rex described having to look across different countries’ sites depending on access, preferring “the United States or Russia or South America, where the women are more wild.” Rex also described his influences in the same direct way, naming German goregrind bands like Gut and Cock and Ball Torture, and stating simply: “Impetigo is our God.”
Across the interview, nothing is softened for an outside reader. Even when the conversation shifts away from porn or gore, the tone stays the same: “I don’t care. Human nature. Working every day is torture.” What came through is the consistency of how they speak. There is a bluntness, a passion for the bands and style that influenced Rectal Wench, and an awareness of the rather absurd concoction that the band is. With Rex himself being a teacher, there is also the notion of living a double life – working during the day and putting on a butcher’s apron to perform goregrind at night.
Cave Have Rod, whom have a more absurd, friendly, often stupid aesthetic compared to the other bands, performed at Obscene Extreme in 2013, which spotlighted China in the extreme music world somewhat. I caught the bands once again at another Gore Feast on New Year’s Eve that year. Both Wench and Rod would go in and out of hiatuses in the years thereafter, though the return of this scene became official in 2019 with Rectal Wench making a huge return with an updated form of the Gore Feast, the Filthy Party. Their album Judgement Of Whore Labia From The Sewer Throne was announced as a 73-minute goregrind record, described by the band as an extreme step even within their own genre. “We all knew that doing a 73-minute album was so fucking extreme for goregrind music, because goregrind songs are usually short,” says guitarist Rex.“It’s like a toilet–it’s only exciting when the shit overflows.”
Alongside the album came a continuation of the live format they had built years earlier, now referred to as the Filthy Party. The same visual language remained in place — lucha masks, inflatable dolls, gore imagery–but it was now attached to a more defined release and touring cycle. What surprised me in this later phase was not just the scale of the release, but the way Rex began to describe the band’s intent. In earlier interviews, Rectal Wench spoke almost entirely in the language of goregrind, porn, humour, and influence. “We want to use music to save humanity. We want to be the heroes of mankind. For humanity!” In the same material, the album’s story frames the band as figures inside its own fiction, fighting against inflatable beings in a world overtaken by them. The imagery is consistent with what had already been established on stage and in earlier Gore Feast performances, but it now extends into a kind of internal mythology where the band occupies a central role. Even the production process is described with the same mix of absurdity and seriousness. Recorded at S.A.G. Studio in Beijing with producer Zhao Xiaodong, the band describe sending reference material from groups like GUT and Satan’s Revenge On Mankind in order to shape the sound. “Then we attempted to imitate their production effects from a professional perspective.”
What felt, in 2013, like a shock-value entry point into a small underground scene now appeared again in a more structured form–still extreme, but also more self-defined, with its own mythology, scale, and way of describing what it was doing. The string of Filthy Party shows saw Rectal Wench team up with Impure Injection, a one-man grindcore unit started by Gore Geng, the “Godfather of Chinese Grind.” These shows saw a toilet on stage, those blow up dolls as described in their album being tossed around the audience along with various toys and objects. The crowd dressed or undressed as they pleased, making these shows feel like mini Obscene Extreme concerts within China.
In 2024, Rex described a further continuation of the project with the album Alliance of Anal Surfers, recorded largely live and framed as part of an ongoing series that began with Judgement Of Whore Labia From The Sewer Throne. The title, he explained, carried a personal cultural residue rather than a direct musical reference. “When we were young in China, around 2002… there was a book that almost every kid who liked rock and roll had read, and this book was called the Rock Bible.” He recalled seeing references to bands like Slayer, but being struck by the name Butthole Surfers: “The name was very impressive… Maybe when I grew up I wanted to be a Butthole Surfer, but I had never heard the band’s music.” He described the album title as something shaped by that early impression rather than actual influence: “Of course we’re a little more fucked up…it is likely that it is a memory of not escaping the shadow of childhood.”
He also reiterated that the releases now exist within a continuous narrative framework, extending the fictional world introduced in earlier albums. In his description, the story has moved deeper into the sewer concept: “This album is the official entry of humanity into the world of the sewer, and the human sewer is the asshole.” Alongside this fictional continuity, Rex repeatedly returned to the physical reality of performance as the central motivation. Recording in a studio, he said, often felt detached from the energy of live music: “I really like the feeling of playing with passion… recording is like doing fucking homework or going to work.” The album, in that sense, becomes less a fixed object than an excuse to generate the conditions for performance. He also reflects more directly on the structure of his working life outside the band. “Of course, you may know that I am a lecturer. My job is to give lectures every day, but I have no chance to perform music. People pay to see me perform, so I have to perform well. Thank you so much for paying to see our shit.”
The communal feeling brought by the Gore Feast and refined through the Filthy Party remains in the world of Rectal Wench. In recent years, fellow anal surfer Andrew Lee, with his Houkago Grind Time project, played with the band across China, further bridging the connection to potential sewer throne sitters in the West. Rectal Wench doesn’t really resolve into a clean conclusion. The shock is obvious at first, but what stays is the fact that they built something that people actually gathered around. Rex being a lecturer during the week and a guitarist at night isn’t framed as a contradiction in his own words, it’s just how things are. The Filthy Party, the sewer mythology, even the talk of “saving humanity,” all sit inside the same ongoing structure: a reason to keep playing, keep performing, keep pulling people into the same room. And that’s where the phrase starts to mean something beyond irony. In a scene this small and this specific, “saving humanity” reads less like a statement and more like what happens when people who think the same way finally meet.
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Purchase Ryan Dyer’s book, The Underground in China: Metal, Punk, Hardcore and Noise 2013-2021, here.
