By Scott McLennan

“We want everyone to come and let out a primal scream,” said Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls.

The Dresden Dolls are coming back to town. Photo: Brandon Soder

According to Amanda Palmer who, along with Brian Viglione, is bringing the Dresden Dolls back to Boston for shows on November 1 and 2, it seems the right thing to do: to stage a bacchanal just days ahead of a highly polarized and enormously consequential presidential election.

“We want everyone to come and let out a primal scream,” Palmer said when reached by phone recently.

The Dresden Dolls and Gogol Bordello are teaming for the pair of concerts at Roadrunner in Boston, with Johnny Manchild and the Poor Bastards also playing November 1 and Emperor Norton’s Stationary Marching Band joining on November 2.

These are the Dresden Dolls’ first shows since 2017 in the city where the duo got its start.

Palmer and Viglione formed Dresden Dolls in 2000, developing the act into an underground phenomenon that blended cabaret and rock ’n’ roll for a roving art-bent show that served as a beacon for misfits of all stripes.

“We built a community,” Palmer said. “We were the weird, excluded theater kids. I was a queer arts kid from Lexington looking for a Bohemian scene. You can’t separate Dresden Dolls from the community.”

Palmer had enough faith in that community to eventually become a crowd-funded artist, “unfettered from the corporate maw,” as she describes it.

“I never expected to be a mainstream artist, and I’m big on having control over my work,” she said.

Yet there is a big-tent element to Dresden Dolls; Palmer points to the phenomenon of 71-year-old MIT professors talking to 14-year-old goth kids at the duo’s shows.

And the songs themselves are enticing, full of humor, lust, and defiance (if not a tinge of despair too).

With Palmer at the keyboards and handling vocals and Viglione on drums, Dresden Dolls will draw from three studio albums and a bagful of cover tunes. How songs hit the crowd will inevitably vary. “A song can have triple meanings. It can be silly or sexy or full of trauma, or do a couple of those things. I like to find a mood and lean into it. It’s pretty amazing how songs can be like a reversible coat.”

That multifaceted nature of the troupe’s songs goes back to Palmer’s experiences as a young music fan absorbing the layered works of The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Bjork alongside the militant attacks offered up by The Clash and Sex Pistols: she doesn’t differentiate between expressing brain and brawn when it comes to crafting songs of her own.

Reflecting a wide swath of musical influences brings up the idea of community, specifically what the audiences bring to the songs.

“”Half Jack” is not a song that I intended to make about trans identity, but tons of trans fans have told me that song speaks to them. For me, that song carries a whole other nuance,” she said. “Songs just go out and find their people.”

Following a hiatus from Dresden Dolls that began in 2008, Palmer released a spate of solo albums. She and writer Neil Gaiman married in 2011 and divorced in 2022; Palmer and her son with Gaiman currently live in the Boston area.

Occasional Dresden Dolls reunions have followed, the most recent one being a tour of the US. last year that somehow missed the band’s hometown.

Parenting, she said, has slowed work on a new Dresden Dolls album, but be assured, one is in the works. Palmer remains busy as a solo artist, connecting with fans through field trips, web chats, and online performances arranged through her Patreon platform.

Palmer has also been fundraising and campaigning for presidential candidate Kamala Harris, including a recent stop at Boston’s City Winery with Ani DiFranco, Melissa Ferrick, and Gail Ann Dorsey.

With a consequential election so near, with democracy on the line for many, high anxiety is rampant: “Everyone is losing their minds working through the panic and fear,” Palmer said. So it seemed to be the perfect time to reunite with Viglione, to let off some anarchistic steam in an overheating world.

Scott McLennan covered music for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette from 1993 to 2008. He then contributed music reviews and features to the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, Portland Press Herald, and WGBH, as well as to the Arts Fuse. He also operated the NE Metal blog to provide in-depth coverage of the region’s heavy metal scene.