DEAD & DISCARDED GIRLS, the gripping final track on BEAR, the fourth album from Nashville duo Friendship Commanders, brings the record to a powerful close.
The song was inspired in part by the tragic death of Reena Virk, a fourteen-year-old who was murdered by her peers in 1997, and in part by the broader question about why people need to personally relate to someone’s suffering in order to feel empathy.
The band's own Buick Audra says: “I learned of Reena’s story through the work of Rebecca Godfrey, who wrote a book about this horrific event, and I was struck by this tale of exclusion, violence, and ultimately death that befell a kid who just wanted to fit in. I know it well, and I also know how little empathy women and girls are sometimes able to extend to their own kind. I’ve felt it all my life. In this track, I’m trying to say, look at what we do to each other. I recorded the vocals for ‘DEAD & DISCARDED GIRLS’ last year on November 14, in tribute to her. The track spans the broadest dynamics on the whole record, going from an intimate opening to a crushing middle section, audibly reflecting the track’s message: care about someone else; care about her. Reena was drowned, so the song and video are both centered around water.”
Friendship Commanders' Jerry Roe comments: “I tend to see visuals and work off my gut instinct to begin with when it's time to make a video for a song, but I leaned harder on that than anything else this time. Rather than get overly specific or directly reference what this song was about, I wanted to involve water and the type of foliage that lives around bodies of water. Contrasted against the dark black and blue predominantly slow-motion performance footage that's made to look as if we're underwater ourselves, my goal was to sort of present souls that have been lost to the water as living on underneath and in the earth forever. Not trapped, but there to remind us always of what should be and wasn't.”
The band is releasing the video for DEAD & DISCARDED GIRLS directed by Jerry Roe on November 14th, 2025, the anniversary of Virk’s death.
Photo by Jamie Goodsell
ZR