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Indigenous punks Dead Pioneers would like to have a word with you

By John Moore July 21, 2025 | updated 1 week ago

Dead Pioneers at the Dome

The Dead Pioneers are, from left: Joshua Rivera (guitar), Lee Tesche (bass), Gregg Deal (lead vocalist), Shane Zweygardt (drums) and Abe Brennan (guitar). The Denver Indigenous punk band opens for OKGO at Levitt Pavilion on Sept. 13.

COURTESY GREGG DEAL

EDITOR’S NOTE: This weekend, organizers say, brings the 25th and final Underground Music Showcase “in its current form.” To mark the occasion, Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore – who started The UMS in 2001 – is bringing back the poll that started it all.

In 2001, Moore surveyed local music experts about the underground bands and artists they felt were most worthy of more mainstream recognition. The results became the basis for an annual live showcase of local bands that grew into The UMS, which this weekend will feature 200 bands across 12 indoor venues and four outdoor stages along a 1-mile stretch of Broadway in the Baker neighborhood.

Moore stopped conducting the annual poll in 2010. But with the festival now coming to a probable end, here’s one final introduction to 10 local bands and artists our panel of industry insiders recommend you check out. In all, nearly 100 bands received votes. All this week we are counting down the top 10, two per day.

Artist Gregg Deal

Gregg Deal is prominently featured in the wide-ranging new documentary "The Great Divide."

COURTESY PHOTO

Artist Gregg Deal

Gregg Deal is prominently featured in the wide-ranging new documentary “The Great Divide.”



COURTESY PHOTO


7. DEAD PIONEERS

John Moore Column sig

John Moore Column sig

• At a glance: Gregg Deal – artist, activist and lead singer of the ferocious Denver punk band Dead Pioneers, has a message for all who will listen: The music is for everyone. The Indigenous heritage is not for sale. So: The spirit animals, the windcatchers and the sage burnings?

“Get your own culture!” Deal snarls on the caustically funny single “My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal,” which is just one reason the band is attracting about 100,000 listeners each month on Spotify alone.

It’s a song that opens with the spoken words of a narrator you can almost see shaking his exasperated head in humor and horror: “Stupid (bleeping) White man.”

The band is blowing up.

Deal, member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, moved to Denver from Peyton eight years ago and is arguably now one of the most well-known contemporary visual artists in the state. His national profile has grown right along with his 4-year-old band. In 2022, the married father of five created a 66-foot mural in downtown Colorado Springs called “Take Back the Power” to bring awareness to Indigenous women and others who face a high risk of going missing or being murdered.

Deal is also prominently featured in Tom Donahue’s  2023 documentary “The Great Divide,” which traces Colorado’s 2019 razor-thin passage of a so-called red flag gun law back to the mutilation and massacre of up to 600 surrendered Cheyenne and Arapahoe (about two-thirds of whom were women and children) at Sand Creek in 1864. In between, Colorado’s shamefully violent gun timeline runs from Columbine to Aurora to King Soopers.

Deal can’t disguise his anger when he says in the film, “This country is more committed to protecting guns than the people on the other end of the muzzle.”

The Dead Pioneers are all about Identity. Resistance. Anger. Can there be any better outlet for any of those things than punk music in all its messy, visceral and hilarious forms?

But what those overtly possessed by vapors often get wrong about punk music is that it is, was, and ever shall be enveloped in love. I asked Deal to describe the experience of seeing the Dead Pioneers in person as “an unapologetic politically charged punk show with elements of anger, love, understanding and acceptance – with a healthy dose of Indigenous representation.”

Through Dead Pioneers, Deal continues to assert that “art, in all its forms, can be a powerful vehicle for activism and change.”

Dead Pioneers at the BBC.

The Dead Pioneers pose outside the offices of the BBC in London.

Maida Vale

Dead Pioneers at the BBC.

The Dead Pioneers pose outside the offices of the BBC in London. 



Maida Vale


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Featured Local Savings

7. DEAD PIONEERS

• Web site: deadpioneers.band

• Date started: Aug. 16, 2021

• Members: Gregg Deal (lead vocalist), Joshua Rivera (guitar), Lee Tesche (bass), Abe Brennan (guitar), Shane Zweygardt (drums)

• Roots: All but Lee live in Colorado. “Abe lives in Denver proper. Josh grew up in Denver. Shane lives in Fort Collins – another good connection to the scene there, which, of course, overflows into Denver. We recorded both of our records at The Blasting Room recording studio in Fort Collins. Overall, our crew has a lot of love for Denver and Colorado at large.”

• Seminal single: “‘Bad Indian,’ off our first record, is an important song because it showcases the representation Gregg has created in his lyrical play. That set the stage for how we would move forward. Everything we do comes back to ‘Bad Indian.’”

• Describe your music: “Punk, post-punk and spoken word.”

• Musical influences: Idles, Black Flag, Minutemen, Dead Kennedys, Propagandhi

'My Spirit Animal Ate Your Spirit Animal' by Dead Pioneers. Directed by Lee Tesche. Co-directed by Gregg Deal. Filming by Dan Reis and Gregg Deal.

• Watch it! youtube.com

• One favorite Colorado band: Cheap Perfume. “Forever and always love them.”

• When did you know your band was for real? “Things were pretty casual, but once we saw our streaming numbers and demand for vinyl, it started to get real. We released our first record in September 2023, and five months later we had more than 500,000 original streams. Everything escalated from there.”

• Catch us live: Sept. 13 at the Levitt Pavilion, opening for OKGO

• Next music drop: “We have a single coming out in September. We will be recording material for our third record in October. There might possibly be an EP or two before that comes out.”

Gregg Deal mural

Artist Gregg Deal of Peyton works on the 77-foot-tall mural “Take Back the Power” on the side of an office building at the corner of Tejon Street and Pikes Peak Avenue  in downtown Colorado Springs in 2022. The mural was part of the 22nd annual “Art on the Streets” exhibit. Deal wasrecently awarded an Arts in Society Grant from Colorado Creative Industries for a performance piece that tells the story of Indigenous life.

CHRISTIAN MURDOCK/THE GAZETTE

Gregg Deal mural

Artist Gregg Deal of Peyton works on the 77-foot-tall mural “Take Back the Power” on the side of an office building at the corner of Tejon Street and Pikes Peak Avenue  in downtown Colorado Springs in 2022. The mural was part of the 22nd annual “Art on the Streets” exhibit. Deal wasrecently awarded an Arts in Society Grant from Colorado Creative Industries for a performance piece that tells the story of Indigenous life. 



CHRISTIAN MURDOCK/THE GAZETTE


John Moore is The Denver Gazette’s senior arts journalist. Email him at john.moore@gazette.com

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