With Coachella in the rear view, the vast expanse of music festival season stretches out before us. Thus it’s time for Band Name Bureau’s annual look at some of the bands sweating for your attention over the next few months. This edition sets a new standard, as I reviewed lineups of 60 festivals both famous (Lollapalooza, Bonnaroo) and less so (Rage of Armageddon, Lawnyavawnya). Guess which ones had better names?

Él Mató a un Policía Motorizado

Where: Kilby Block Party

First, the name for this Argentine band translates to “He killed a motorcycle policeman.”1 Second, it comes from Spanish subtitles to the 1987 B-movie R.O.T.O.R., which is both terrible and worth your time. (I suggest the Rifftrax version, available on Tubi.) Third, numbers one and two made me like this band before I heard a note of music.

I’m very late to the game, as El Mató formed more than 20 years ago. When the band went to a party where R.O.T.O.R. was playing, they were understandably transfixed. These days they’re much better known than their inspiration—El Mató is mentioned at the top of the movie’s Wikipedia.

The Floor is Not Lava

Where: Capitol Hill Block Party

Baby bands have a tendency to do a couple things. First, they overdo their bios by going too long and too flowery. The Floor is Not Lava simply inverted the name of a children’s game, but their bio aims for grandiosity. There’s a long preamble about finding solid ground,2 then it tosses some metaphors into the mixer.

Like magma, they take sonic elements from a wide breadth of genres, from Grunge to RnB, through Funk and Indie Sleaze, and cast them in a crucible of Pop sensibilities.

Second, baby bands have a peculiar habit of asserting they’re doing something unprecedented.

The Floor Is Not Lava creates music that can toss aside the expectations of the past, using only the raw substance of what remains to build something new.

That’s a tall order for any band, particularly a relative newcomer. Maybe they can settle for having catchy songs?

Meryl Streek

Where: Manchester Punk Festival, Bearded Theory

Ritt Momney

Where: Kilby Block Party

Taylor More Swiftly

Where: Bearded Theory

Moe.Organ Fairchild

Where: Borderland

Celebrities and public figures are a perennial inspiration, and you’ll find plenty of them at festivals this year. Let’s start with Ireland’s Meryl Streek. The name has a typical origin story: “I just smoked a lot of weed, and I came up with that name, and I just stuck with it,” Streek told Far Out Magazine.

Less expected is Streek’s antagonistic electro-punk, or that security concerns inspired his nom de guerre. “Basically, because I’m hitting some serious topics in Ireland and I live [with] my mam, I want to keep the house safe,” he told Far Out. “That was always the idea, even though everyone in Ireland knows who the fuck I am. It was a safety precaution.”

Not to diminish said “serious topics,” but the crooked politicians, self-destructive vices, and greedy landlords on 2024’s Songs for the Deceased are pretty typical punk fodder. I don’t think he has to worry about getting the Pussy Riot treatment.

Meanwhile in Utah, where a spoonerism of Mitt Romney counts as sticking it to the man, we have Ritt Momney. High school friends started the group in the time between Romney’s failed presidential bid and his successful election to the senate. Deseret News interviewed founder Jack Rutter about it in 2021:

The story behind the name is more dull than you might think. “There’s no reason, man,” he told me as we sat at a coffee shop in Sugarhouse. “We were high school kids. It was sort of a subversion — a ‘stick-it-to-the-man’ sort of thing,” he said. “At this point, it’s whatever.”

Oh Deseret News, that’s exactly as dull as I expected. Rutter’s bandmates eventually left for their church missions, while he stuck around and went viral on TikTok for his cover of Corinne Bailey Rae’s “Put Your Records On.” And isn’t TikTok, like, a new religion? ::clears bong chamber::

If you’re going to play “much, much faster” pop-punk covers of Taylor Swift songs, Taylor More Swiftly is an excellent and grammatically pleasing name.

Readers may remember Organ Fairchild from last year’s festival preview. The band, named after ’70s/’80s sexpot Morgan Fairchild, originally met while playing in a Grateful Dead tribute group decades ago. Those threads unite at this year’s Borderland, where they’re joining long-running jam band moe. to pay tribute to the Dead’s Bob Weir. It’s a portmantastic union that was written in the stars.

999999999

Where: Movement

I’m in the process of laboriously organizing the 4,000+ names I’ve written about over the years. It involves a massive spreadsheet, multiple tags, and a little voice in my head asking, “Is this pointless?”

999999999 has me considering an “Oh fuck off” tag to the spreadsheet, because that was my reaction to the name. Elephant-memoried BNB readers will recall I had the same reaction to ¥///0 $#£[[ \/\/&$ #£>3 in 2023’s festival preview.

¥///0 $#£[[ \/\/&$ #£>3 deserved it, 999999999 less so. These kinds of names are common in electronic music—or, in this case, “techno from outer space”—and I’m just salty because issue #118 is 10+ days late. The mysterious Italian duo pronounces it “nine times nine,” has a label called NineTimesNine, and a whole spiel about what it means.

“999999999 is an abstract concept coming from the minds of two people who don’t feel the need to define it; it is spontaneous, random, and without limits,” they said in one interview. In another, “999999999 comes from the need to not define our project as something clear and ‘bounded.’ We just want the people to be focused on our music, not on who we are behind the project.”

Their song titles are similarly opaque: “000000002,” “000000003,” “X0001000X,” “X0002000X,” “XXXX1XXXX,” “XXXX2XXXX,” etc. Any song titles with actual words tend to be collabs with other artists, like “Acid Blood” (with FLKN) or “Acid World” (with Rian Wood and Angel Cannon). Still waiting for that Lords of Acid collaboration, though.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Where: Manchester Punk Festival

This is a supremely metal name for a metal band, with decidedly non-metal origins: a line in William Blake’s 18th century poem “Proverbs of Hell.” The actual line, “Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead,” is considered an allegory about freeing yourself from devotion to the past.

“Proverbs of Hell” also has a line that goes, “The busy bee has no time for sorrow,” but that’s not metal.

The specific wording “Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead” mimics a 2009 mystery novel by Olga Tokarczuk, originally published in Polish under the title Prowadź Swój Pług Przez Kości Umarłych. All those strong consonants and accents? Metal.

Healer of Bastards

Where: Manchester Punk Festival

While it’s not cool that your “Rock & Roll hardcore thrash skate punk” band takes its name from a Facebook Game of Thrones quiz, it’s fitting nevertheless. Says vocalist/drummer Paul Healer (real name): “You simply typed your full name in, and it would put your name in graphics and included a description for you that sounded Game of Thrones-esque. It described me as a ‘Healer of Bastards.’ It seemed fitting, because I am always writing about social injustice and wanting a better world. Healing this world of all the bastards that ruin it appealed to me, so that was that.”

And thus, “Holy Shitballs.”

Lightning Round

• From the Cradle to the Rave (Capitol Hill Block Party) No.

• Fleetwood Snack (Capitol Hill Block Party) Two groups claim this obvious-in-retrospect name: one, seemingly dormant, specialized in “food-based covers of Fleetwood Mac songs” (i.e., “Gold Crust Woman”). The other is an electronic artist from Seattle who’s also gone by Monet Maker and, woof, Timothy McVape.

• Complete Fucker (Skull Fest) 10/10, no notes.

• Bossanova Frankenstein (Taverne Tour) Winner, Most Literal Album Cover.

  

• Condition Oakland (Pouzza) Naming yourself after an excellent Jawbreaker song is basically Kyle Ryan Entrapment. More peculiar is the self-description of “the harbor freight of Orgcore.” Orgcore generally means gravelly vocals with melodic punk, but my brain read it as orccore, which led me to this video. I apologize.

POST-SCRIPTS

• So much for my streak of publishing on the 10th of the month. It’s been a busy April. Apologies!

• A line from R.O.T.O.R.: “Let me tell you something, mister. You fire me, and I’ll make more noise than two skeletons making love in a tin coffin, brother.” I guess “Dos Esqueletos Haciendo el Amor en un Ataúd de Hojalata” is too long for a name.

• How many people have told Bossanova Frankenstein, “Actually, Frankenstein is the doctor’s name”?

• Caveat emptor: Next month’s BNB may be a “best of” kinda thing, because I have a bunch of behind-the-scenes work, like the previously mentioned database, switching platforms, and other tedium. We’ll see how it goes.

Bev Rage & the Drinks

A lot of what I call “Such and Such & the So and Sos” names are just jokes, not actually based on the frontman: Pontius Pilate & the Naildrivers, Lyin’ Bitch & the Restraining Orders, Mel Gibson & the Pants, Marvin Berry & the New Sound, etc. Not so with this Chicago punk band, whose singer-guitarist is a larger-than-life drag queen named Bev Rage.

Granted, “larger than life” and “drag queen” are redundant, but Bev stands a good 7 feet tall in her full drag regalia. The group’s music started out campier—like “Wrap Your Legs (Around My Heart)”—but then Trump got elected, and ::waves arms:: As Bev told the Chicago Reader:

This band is my passion project, and I feel like there are people who really need something like this: to see an unapologetically queer drag queen screaming about politics and the danger of religion and how queer joy is really needed in a music industry that is inherently straight. I’ve tried to balance being very political with having a lighthearted approach and making accessible music that anyone can enjoy.

Too many people can probably relate to “I’m Having a Tryst With a Narcissist.”

Crippling Alcoholism

During my tenure at The A.V. Club, I pitched an Inventory tied to St. Patrick’s Day around depressing depictions of Irish life, because I’m a fun person. Crippling Alcoholism shares that spirit, because the name comes from the experience of singer Tony Castrati. He formed the group in 2022 “in the aftermath of a particularly destructive episode of alcoholism,” according to their bio.

The name is not metaphor or provocation but a plain statement of origin, marking sobriety not as redemption, but as an ongoing confrontation with damage already done. The project emerged as a way to externalize that experience without sanitizing it, allowing shame, desire, and self destruction to remain visible rather than resolved.

So…who’s ready to party for St. Patty’s, bros?! River Shannon opens at 9am, so I figure we get there by 8:45 at the late—wait, there’s more?

Yup. The group’s latest, Camgirl, is a concept album about “a sex worker moving through cycles of exploitation and endurance,” and it’s inspired by the experiences of someone Castrati knows. Yup, it’s bleak, but it’s also surprisingly catchy…dark wave? I don’t know how to classify it. That’s typical, according to Castrati. “A lot of industry people will hear our music and ask ‘What the fuck genre even is this shit?’” Quibbling about genre is easier than sitting with the themes of the music, that’s for sure.

Drunken Prayer

When a band calls itself Drunken Prayer, the influence of Tom Waits is not surprising. While Drunken Prayer doesn’t play “jazzbo carny music for lonely boys,” as John Hodgman memorably described Waits’ style in Medallion Status, you could say Waits set the whole project in motion. Morgan Geer, a.k.a. Drunken Prayer, met him by chance at a book store. As Geer told Willamette Week:

“I was at a real crossroads,” he says. “I was out of the creative rut I was in, but once you get out of the safety zone of that rut, it’s like, well, now what do you do? I talked to him, and he was like, ‘Well, everything. Don’t put a fence around that property.’”

So Geer did a very Waitsian thing and moved to Portland, Oregon, and started performing at a biker bar on Sunday mornings. Thus, the name Drunken Prayer.

The theme continues on last year’s Thy Burdens, “an homage to the intense, sublime music of the church that means so much to the musicians who worked on it.” Geer and collaborator Bobby Matt Patton of the Drive-By Truckers grew up in Southern churches, though Waits has his fingerprints here too: He recommended a gospel album to Geer when they met.

The Taste of Vomit

When you read this name, did you think, “Weird emo kid rap from the planet Earth”? Of course not, but that’s their Bandcamp bio. This Instagram makes a better case.

Said weird emo kid hails from the Philadelphia part of Earth, an area with a deep hip-hop history and fairly straightforward names: Schoolly D. The Roots. Meek Mill. Lil Uzi Vert. Beanie Sigel. The Taste of Vomit certainly sticks out as a moniker. Take last fall’s A Spark of Courage hip-hop and R&B showcase:

The phenomenon carries over to Taste’s prolific discography, which features collabs with artists like Burnt Bakarak, Chill da God, DYLPDX, Charysma, and Juice Got Me Juicy. (Actually, that last one segues fine.)

So why the Taste of Vomit? On the Forecasted Podcast, Taste said it came from his stint as a graffiti artist.

Because in graffiti culture, often you would pick something with like five letters, so you could have the symmetry of it all. So I picked “vomit,” and then I would like hand-throw “the taste of” on top of it and block out “vomit.” And then I would like draw flowers and stuff in between.

His graffiti history helps explain this T-shirt design:

Taste confesses that the guys he hung around with were way better at graffiti, so he was demoted to lookout. The name stuck, though.

While the Taste of Vomit is an odd MC name, it works better than his real one, David Bupp III.1 Ordinal numbers in names always sound fancy to me. I like to imagine the elder David Buppses tsk-tsking about what’s to be done with young David III.

“The Taste of Vomit! That’s what he calls himself!” one of them says. The other, sipping a tumbler of scotch, pensively stares out the window at dusk settling over Philadelphia. “It’s not even a worthy goregrind name.”

Styrofoam Winos

You can be damn sure Bupp I and Bupp II would never drink wine from styrofoam cups. No discerning oenophile would, but we’re talking about winos here. For them, it’s all about cheap, fortified wine from cheap containers—preferably MD 20/202—because sobriety must be subjugated.

Despite the name, I can’t find any information about the booze preferences of Nashville’s Styrofoam Winos. What I did learn is that members Trevor Nikrant, Lou Turner, and Joe Kenkel are solo artists in their own right and used to perform in each other’s backing bands. As Kenkel told WNXP:

There were shows that each of us played that were billed as our first name “and Styrofoam Winos,” and then eventually became more fun to just play songs that belonged to all of us as a group and to write together as well.

But why Styrofoam Winos in the first place? Maybe they just like the flavor of styrene leaching into their wine. Mmm, I can really taste the hormone disruption.

Wine Lips

Winos obviously have wine lips, especially if they’re taking down the neon-rainbow spectrum of MD 20/20. It seems the members of this Toronto garage-punk outfit have slightly classier taste. In an interview with the UK’s Clash Magazine that must’ve taken minutes to prepare, drummer Aurora Evans reminisced about drinking something called Bodacious Smooth Red in the band’s early days.

“This bottle of wine that was under $10 and truly brought the definition of ‘Wine Lips’ to the surface,” she said, noting it was “an inspiration as to how we started.”

One website raves Bodacious Smooth Red is “a star in the Ontario market,” which is like a band claiming they’re huge in Serbia. Some reviewers aren’t as enthusiastic: “It’s not even good as a cooking wine.” “So far the worst wine I ever had.” “I might buy this wine again if there were absolutely no other options available.” But 16 million Ontario residents can’t be wrong!

Vodka Breadbowl

A vodka bread bowl sounds like one of those rage-bait TikToks where someone makes a bunch of disgusting food on purpose. I picture them dumping a fifth of vodka in a hollowed-out sourdough loaf, then putting a bunch of tuna on it or something and pretending it’s delicious.

Bad taste applies to the origin of this name, as singer-guitarist Julia Batz described on the Friday Night on the Air podcast back in 2020: “We wanted to start a punk band, and we wanted the most cursed band name possible. So Vodka Breadbowl happened.”

We here at Band Name Bureau HQ could list so many monikers far more cursed than Vodka Breadbowl, but I appreciate her intent. The name works better in this 2013 joke from comedian Chad Opitz, a screenshot of which became Vodka Breadbowl’s first Instagram post.

Regardless, the LA quartet self-describes as “if an indie coming of age movie gained sentience and started making music,” which in turn sounds like a Suno prompt.

POST-SCRIPTS

• I’m adding “Don’t put a fence around that property” to my go-to phrases. Speaking of Tom Waits, this killed me:

• Hello Janus Name Journeys readers! I don’t have a Ph.D. like Hannah Emery, but I do have a doctorate in ::checks notes:: cold rockin’ it.

• Next month: Our annual dispatch from music festival season. I’ve got 40+ festival lineups to go through before then.

Every famous band has a name that almost happened—or did happen, for a minute.

As a scholar of the band-name craft, my interest goes beyond the names artists chose. I want to know the names they considered and/or the names they went by before violating the first rule of Band Name Bureau.1

For up-and-coming or lesser-known bands, it’s not a big deal. For instance, learning that Winona Fighter considered the name Beijing Beef is funny, but not OMG-level.

@bandnamebureauSee the rest of the interview in BNB #106 @WINONA FIGHTER

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But even the most famous bands may not be all that interesting. The proper response to the Beatles’ earliest name, the Quarrymen, is a non-committal “Hmm.” My brain is fully desensitized. I’m more interested in how they briefly went by Johnny and the Moondogs.

Hence Almost Named, BNB’s new occasional series. I’m digging into the precursors, the alternate names, and the monikers artists considered before settling on the one they became famous with. I’ve created a list of 200+ bands—past and present—to investigate and will periodically return with the stories I’ve found.

That’s presuming there is a story, because that’s not always the case. ABBA originally went by Björn & Benny, Agnetha & Anni-Frid, the four members’ first names. Then they rearranged the first letters into a palindrome. FASCINATING!

Let’s begin.

The Hookers → Aerosmith

If you’ve spent time with the cock-rockin’ sounds of Steven Tyler and Aerosmith, it will not surprise you that Tyler suggested the Hookers as a potential group name. In his 2011 memoir, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, Tyler says they also considered Stit Jane (no idea what that means), and various sources on the internet say Spike Jones and the Bananas were also considered. (That’s two names: Spike Jones, then the Bananas—though “Spike Jones and the Bananas” isn’t any worse.)

Before you judge Tyler, he’ll have you know that the Hookers name was commentary, man.

“I’d thought of calling us the Hookers because I considered playing clubs a form of prostitution—I’d spent six years playing clubs in New York and knew how exhausting and frustrating it was.”

The band didn’t go for it. Drummer Joey Kramer suggested Arrowsmith after the Sinclair Lewis novel they’d read in high school,2 and Tyler suggested spelling it A-E-R-O because it evoked space “aerodynamics, supersonic thrust, Mach II, the sound barrier.”

It’s safe to assume Tyler describes his own thrusting skills as “supersonic.”

Fellini’s Children → The B-52’s

Why would rock’s foremost purveyors of camp nearly name themselves after iconic Italian director Federico Fellini, who was known for “deeply personal films [that] were vivid, sometimes bizarre portraits of the human condition”?

“Vivid”? “Sometimes bizarre”? Those descriptors fit the group that came together in the college town of Athens, Georgia, in the mid-’70s. Being a bunch of artsy weirdos in the conservative South, they were naturally cineastes.

“That was the thing in college. It seemed like everyone watched those films,” singer Kate Pierson recently said on the Revolutions Per Movie podcast. “You went to see Bergman and Fellini and Antonioni and Kurosawa.”

Theme parties followed. Jeremy Ayers, a Warhol associate and Factory personality, had returned to his hometown of Athens around this time and befriended the group. “We’d go to see a Fellini film and he’d have a party where we dress as Fellini characters,” Pierson says.

Characters they inhabited in the B-52’s too. She added that Fellini heavily inspired music for “Planet Claire” and the video for “Deadbeat Club.”

The band also considered the name Tina-Trons, whose origins I can’t ascertain.3 In the end, they settled on slang for the beehive wigs they wore in the band’s early days, leaving Federico Fellini childless.

Tribal Nation → Atban Klann → The Black Eyed Peas

Can we blame Eazy-E for “My Humps”? In a way, yes. The late N.W.A. icon and Ruthless Records founder signed Tribal Nation, the earliest incarnation of the Black Eyed Peas with teenagers will.i.am and apl.de.ap.

After signing, the group changed their name to Atban Klann, the first word standing for “A Tribe Beyond a Nation,” because early ’90s. The future Peas looked to A Tribe Called Quest and De La Soul more than the sounds coming out of their hometown of LA. Instead of gangsta rap, they favored “post-Daisy Age rapping with a modicum of social commentary added into the grooves,” according to Daryl Easlea’s book, Let’s Get It Started: The Rise & Rise of the Black Eyed Peas. That seems…off-brand for Eazy-E?

Although Atban Klann befuddled the staff at Ruthless, Eazy saw commercial potential. The group recorded their debut, Grass Roots and released a single called “Puddles of H20”—then nothing happened. The album sat on the shelf4 for nearly two years when Eazy died in March 1995.

As Ruthless fell apart, Atban Klann was eager to move on. Because the label owned the name, they re-emerged as the Black Eyed Peas. (They also considered Blue Unit and Turquoise Vines, because they were in their Blue Period, I guess?)

“[The bean’s] white appearance with a black speck in the middle seemed to symbolise the sort of music that the group was intending to make: soulful, multi-racial, unifying, warming,” Easlea writes. “It also had a ring to it of the multi-platinum selling Red Hot Chili Peppers.”

So wait, we can blame Eazy-E and the Red Hot Chili Peppers?

Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem → Red Hot Chili Peppers

These fucking guys.

Unique Attraction → Boyz II Men

Shawn Stockman of Boyz II Men is so embarrassed by the group’s original name that he went public with his struggle to People magazine. “Ugh, so gross! It was such a Philadelphia name,” he said. “If you grew up in Philadelphia, you know exactly what I’m talking about. It was cheesy, but it was the vibe back then.” Good thing a New Edition song inspired a name change so they could make this video, which is definitely not cheesy at all!

Richard and the Rabbits → Cap’n Swing → The Cars

The Cars is a shrug of a name—and that was the point, according to drummer David Robinson. “It was easy to remember, and it wasn’t pegged to a specific decade or sound,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “The name was meaningless and conjured up nothing, which was perfect.”

Perfect for you. We here at Band Name Bureau hold artists to a HIGHER STANDARD, celebrating the genius Happy Mother’s Day, I Can’t Read. Look into it, legendary drummer of an iconic rock band!

Robinson’s first band was the Modern Lovers, and the story goes that Jonathan Richman bestowed Richard and the Rabbits upon Ric Ocasek and Ben Orr’s early project. Sometime in 1975 they changed it to Cap’n Swing5 for reasons I haven’t been able to uncover. It only lasted a year before the sweet, forgettable simplicity of the Cars took over for good. Or until the New Cars enjoyed a brief, embarrassing run.

Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe → New Order

Listen, the former members of Joy Division6 had just been through something traumatic. Ian Curtis killed himself on the eve of a big U.S. tour, leaving the three remaining members suddenly adrift—down a friend and collaborator, and without a future that had looked so bright.

They were vulnerable as they embarked on a new identity, so we can’t hold them responsible for liking the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe. To be fair, only drummer Stephen Morris and manager Rob Gretton liked it. Bassist Peter Hook and guitarist Bernard Sumner vowed to quit if they used it, as they charmingly discuss in the excellent podcast Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division and New Order.

Morris also suggested Sunshine Valley Dance Band, and Gretton had a whole list of potential names: Mau Mau, Dead End, Theatre of Cruelty, Sons of God, Maxim Gorky, Angry Brigade, Khmer Rouge, and the New Order of the Kampuchean Front. (“They were all terrorist organizations, which was the odd thing,” Hook says.)

Eventually they chose the New Order, but because an MC5/Stooges spinoff group used that name, they simplified it to New Order. Thus Ian Curtis’ tortured soul was freed of some torment, as his former bandmates didn’t call themselves the Witch Doctors of Zimbabwe.

Transistor Revolt → Rise Against

These punk lifers had questionable names in their past—like 88 Fingers Louie and Pinhead Circus—as their new band took shape in the early ’00s. They recorded early demos under the name Transistor Revolt, which was fine until they signed to Fat Wreck Chords. Label co-founder and NOFX frontman Fat Mike didn’t like the name, and he suggested some alternatives. As bassist Joe Principe told me for their vinyl box set:

“What about the Chicago Tar?” I’d go, “There’s a band from Chicago called Tar.” Then he’s like, “What about It’s the Cops?” I’m like “Nope. We’re not naming the band It’s the Cops. That’s ridiculous.” At one point, he had the name Jimmy Cracked Corn and the I Don’t Cares. I was like “Oh my God, we’re not doing that.”

The group’s first drummer had suggested Rise Against, which the band had back-pocketed just in case. Everyone was on board with that one, and they all learned a valuable lesson: Don’t listen to name suggestions from a guy who called his band NOFX.7

POST-SCRIPTS

• My first arena show: The B-52’s on the Cosmic Thing tour, with Toad the Wet Sprocket opening.

• Other than the song “Puddles of H20,” Atban Klann’s only other official appearance was on an Eazy-E Christmas song called “Merry Muthafuckin’ Xmas.” As you can imagine, it’s embarrassing for everyone involved.

• According to the Last.fm wiki, Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem was a joke name for a one-off show: “The band improvised music while Kiedis rapped a poem he had written called ‘Out in L.A.’” Funny enough, that’s my exact description of hell on earth. Hamish Duncan’s Out in L.A.: The Red Hot Chili Peppers, 1983 suggests there was a little more to it than that, but enough people liked them that they became a real band and changed their name—first to the Flow, then eventually RHCP.

• The “Motownphilly” video gives me another chance to shout out Dave Holmes’ great limited podcast, Waiting for Impact. It’s his investigation into the mysterious white randos who appeared in the video for a second, then were basically never heard from again.

The year is 2006.

The Iraq War still rages, while Saddam Hussein is executed for crimes against humanity. Speaking of crimes against humanity, Crash wins Best Picture at the Oscars. American Idol still dominates TV. The soundtrack to High School Musical is the year’s best-selling album, and U2 wins a bewildering five Grammys for How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.

MySpace rules the nascent social media world, but Twitter launches in July, and then in September, Facebook opens to people who aren’t college students. The world has been worse ever since.

Here are bands who may or may not have helped matters.

LMFAO

No other name or group better embodies this time. LMFAO were like an over-customized MySpace page come to life.

Redfoo and Sky Blu—a.k.a. Stefan and Skyler Gordy, the son and grandson, respectively, of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy—made brainless, hyperactive party music. Like “a song called ‘Shots’ with Lil’ Jon”-level brainless.

Even that assessment may be generous. If you only listen for 30 seconds, you’ll hear everything LMFAO has to offer. There was truly nothing going on beyond the surface of partying, getting loaded, hooking up, and some combination of those. They made Andrew W.K. look like Leonard Cohen.

To be fair, that was the point. When asked about the inspiration behind their music—which includes songs like “I’m in Miami Bitch,” “What Happens at the Party,” “I Am Not a Whore,” “Put That A$$ to Work,” “We Came Here to Party,” etc.—Redfoo said, “Probably… women. You know, we love the ladies. Just ah… expressing that feeling inside that says [Slaps hands together.] I’m alive!”

The name tells you everything you need to know. Although internet slang for “laughing my fucking ass off” long predated the duo, it perfectly matched the group’s AOL Instant Messenger-addled shtick. (Perhaps ROFL was too PG for their 21+ vibe.)

Wikipedia will tell you, without citation, that Redfoo and Sky Blu briefly went by the name Sexy Dudes before LMFAO. Some digging turns up a bunch of interviews—like this one with NPR—with versions of this quote about Sky Blu’s grandmother.

“We were on Instant Messenger,” Stefan says, “and we asked her, ‘What do you think of our new name, Sexy Dudes?’ And she simply replied, ‘LMFAO. Are you serious?’”

This is, of course, bullshit. Setting aside the improbability of any grandmother a) using Instant Messenger and b) even knowing what “LMFAO” means, Sky’s grandma Thelma Gordy died in July 2006 at age 74. But kudos to LMFAO for not breaking character with Guy Raz on All Things Considered!

Continuing the bullshit, Know Your Meme says the duo also claimed the initialism stood for “Loving My Friends And Others.” I mean, we know they loved the ladies at least.

That would’ve worked better than the real meaning when LMFAO applied for a trademark in 2008. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected it for containing “immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter.”1 When they resubmitted in 2012, LMFAO claimed it meant “laughing my freaking ass off.”

Apparently the USPTO is cool with “ass,” because their trademark database shows it was approved. The office is also cool with “bitch,” because they approved I’M IN MIAMI BITCH for apparel. You can see Sky Blu rocking that shirt on their Wikipedia page.

All of their trademarks are now listed as dead, abandoned, or canceled.2 That’s because LMFAO were here for a good time, not a long time. After the massive success of their second album, 2011’s Sorry for Party Rocking—including the inescapable No. 1 hit “Party Rock Anthem,” which has 2.5 billion views on YouTube—and an appearance with Madonna during the Super Bowl halftime show in 2012, they put that a$$ out to pasture.

Vampire Weekend

Embodying this era for the Pitchfork Best New Music crowd is Vampire Weekend. They played their first show in 2006 at a battle of the bands at Columbia University, where they were students, and placed third out of four, according to Rolling Stone. By the following year, “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” was included in that magazine’s Best Songs of 2007. After their highly acclaimed debut dropped in January 2008, they landed the cover of Spin, a song in the opening credits of Step Brothers, a performance on Saturday Night Live, and a spot at Glastonbury.

Unsurprisingly, a backlash swiftly followed. That’s to be expected when a bunch of Ivy League preps inspired by African pop music3 find success playing smarty-pants indie rock. The jokes were so easy, even Alice Cooper got in on the fun, telling Noisecreep:

“Are all American bands metro-sexual now? I heard the title Vampire Weekend and I thought, ‘Oh, man, that’s gonna be great. I gotta see it.’ And there are these guys with little Gap T-shirts on and I’m going, ‘What happened to the balls in rock ’n’ roll? Why are American bands so wimpy?’”

As Josh Eells wrote in a Rolling Stone interview for the band’s 2010 album, Contra, “Their party-at-the-yacht-club vibe obscures the fact that songs like ‘Oxford Comma’ and ‘One (Blake’s Got a New Face)’ are slyly mocking the affluent twentysomethings that Vampire Weekend are assumed to represent.”

Still, when paired with the band’s music, the name Vampire Weekend feels less Tim Burton and more Wes Anderson. Just look at the inspiration: Koenig’s Lost Boys–inspired film spoof. While he never finished it, he cut a trailer.

That classic band-name scenario followed: When the group was about to play a show, Koenig needed a moniker. Thus began Vampire Weekend’s journey to disappointing Alice Cooper.

Japandroids

Japandroids doubled up on band-name tropes. Not only did they hastily choose their name before a performance, but they also employed a clumsy portmanteau, a popular naming convention (CunninLynguists, ApotheCarrioN, Audiotopsy, etc.)

Theirs is rooted in compromise, though. Drummer-vocalist David Prowse had suggested the name Japanese Scream (an allusion to a lyric from Kings of Leon’s “The Bucket”), while guitarist-vocalist Brian King wanted Pleasure Droids. So they mashed them together.

“Neither one of us especially liked Japandroids, but at least there was some satisfaction in knowing that neither one of us had to settle for a name that we consciously disliked,” King told The Line of Best Fit in 2009.

“I did that because we needed a name to put on this poster for one of our first shows,” he later told Tokyo Weekender. “I always thought, ‘We can change it later, whatever.’”

Ah, but bands always stick with the name they chose in a rush. Sometimes, it’s no big deal, like with Japandroids. Other times, it’s a millstone, like with Jimmy Eat World. But unlike Japandroids, Jimmy Eat World hasn’t broken up.

The Airborne Toxic Event

In Don Delillo’s 1985 novel White Noise, a railroad tank car derails, spilling a chemical that creates a cloud of noxious black smoke near the home of protagonist Jack Gladney.

“It doesn’t cause nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath, like they said before.”
“What does it cause?”
“Heart palpitations and a sense of déjà vu.”
“Déjà vu?”
“It affects the false part of the human memory or whatever. That’s not all. They’re not calling it the black billowing cloud anymore.”
“What are they calling it?”
He looked at me carefully.
“The airborne toxic event.”

Frontman Mikel Jollett is a writer, so he went literary when choosing a moniker. “People think we’re an Orange County punk band,” he told Spin in 2008. Fair.

But it wasn’t a “looks like we have ourselves a reader” flex, as Jollett explained to the Radio Free Silver Lake blog shortly after the Airborne Toxic Event formed:

White Noise changed my life. I’m not sure if it was because of his treatment of a world consumed by media or the way he dealt with the fear of death. But there’s something both touching and absurd about that book that seemed to capture what it feels like to live in America right now. You know: terrorism, death, fear, YouTube.

Some things haven’t changed!

OK, this is a lot meatier than expected. Lightning-ish round!

Other bands that formed in 2006

• Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate). When a name has two exclamation points and a set of parentheses, there’s probably some long-ass explanation for it. And it’s even longer than you think, as I detailed in BNB #69.

• Does It Offend You, Yeah? This name doesn’t hide its Britishness, and that’s before you learn it comes from the original British version of The Office. The group’s Dan Coop told NME, “When me and James [Rushent] first started writing music together, we decided to put it up on MySpace. We needed a name to put as our profile name, so [we] just put the first thing that was said on TV. We switched it on, and Ricky Gervais said, ‘Does it offend you, yeah? My drinking?’ So we just went with that. No thought went into it whatsoever.”

• Yeasayer. Ever wondered what’s the opposite of a naysayer? These dudes are glad you asked.

• Dananananaykroyd. This is a preposterous name, and I respect that. In a 2011 interview, member Calum Gunn said, “We really didn’t think about it when we were starting the band. We didn’t actually think we’d make it this far.” They announced their breakup a month later.

• Street Sweeper Social Club. The short-lived project of Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and the Coup’s Boots Riley originally called itself Street Sweeper, but added “Social Club” because someone else already had the name. As Morello told Punk Rock Theory in 2009, “A street sweeper is an automatic shotgun. It’s basically a machine gun that fires shotgun-sized shells and is the only weapon that the NRA is in favor of banning.” Fully automatic weapons are already banned, though I’m sure the NRA would love to change that.

• Thy Art is Murder. Thy name is stupid.

• Tiger! Shit! Tiger! Tiger! The ’00s were the golden age for exclamation point names, though the origins of this Italian band’s moniker remain mysterious. That doesn’t stop their bio from touting how much Stephen King likes it.

• Pianos Become the Teeth. “Everyone hates our name,” said vocalist Kyle Durfey in a 2011 interview. “Our old drummer came up with it. The basic thing of it is just, if you dwell on a problem so much, you become that problem. We get shit for our name all the time.” To me, the name sounds cartoonish, and I’m not the first person to say so. Bassist Zac Sewell added, “One person told us that our name reminded him of Looney Tunes, when a piano falls on a character, and they get up and they have piano keys as teeth.” While they considered changing the name, they decided against it. “If I didn’t listen to bands that had shitty band names, I wouldn’t have loved half of the bands that I absolutely love,” added guitarist Mike York. “Jimmy Eat World? Jimmy did not eat the world.” But he was so fat he could have, as we learned:

POST-SCRIPTS

• I spent a truly insane amount of time fact-checking LMFAO. Please buy me a coffee so I can sip and reflect on my life choices.

• Related: Redfoo currently spends his time as a tennis pro. The life of the idle rich.

• In 2020, Mikel Jollett’s band and writing lives came together in Hollywood Park, an Airborne Toxic Event album and memoir about his life in the infamous Synanon cult. From the book description: “Per the leader’s mandate, all children, including Jollett and his older brother, were separated from their parents when they were six months old, and handed over to the cult’s ‘School.’ After spending years in what was essentially an orphanage, Mikel escaped the cult one morning with his mother and older brother. But in many ways, life outside Synanon was even harder and more erratic.” I’ve already checked it out from my library.

While I imagined a deluge of AI slop awaiting me at Bandcamp, it was lighter than I expected (especially compared to what I found for Halloween). I decided ahead of time not to highlight any obvious AI tomfoolery for Midnight Mass, because a) I’m tired of hearing/talking about it, and b) let’s not feed the machine.

And anyway, AI tech can’t yet replicate the singular magic of grindcore. A song title like “Jingle My Ballz” may sound obvious, but Suno could never capture the vibe like ::checks notes:: Putrid Cock Grinder.

Yes, barely 100 words into a Christmas-music roundup is awfully early to throw around words like “putrid cock grinder,” but I follow the muse, y’all. To quote Clark Griswold, I hope it enhances your holiday spirit.

This being grindcore, I have no idea what the vocals are saying. I didn’t realize I was even hearing vocals at first, because they’re so low and guttural. The lyrics are probably deeply silly and scatological—and hopefully not insanely misogynistic. You never know with grindcore. But we do know PCG is concerned about testicular health, as last month it dropped “I Have Microplastics in My Balls.”

Speaking of Christmas Vacation, if you’re a fan of that movie and ’90s SoCal punk, Hooray For Dad1 has a song for you. “Christmas Vacation,” from this year’s A Merry Punk Dad Christmas, basically recounts the movie from Clark Griswold’s point of view:

Now the shitter is full, the Christmas tree’s up in flames
The house is destroyed, my Christmas bonus never came
Everyone wants to leave, and I’m probably going to jail
But I can’t afford to be an elf, how will I ever make bail?
Hallelujah, holy shit, where’s the Tylenol?

They should do a split with Dad Brains.

Continuing the parental theme, Your New Parents aren’t joking with their name. Co-founders Graham Dodge and Heather Brown Dodge2 have five children,3 something my brain cannot compute as a one-and-done parent.

Adjusting to a new parent is awkward, especially when you learn they’re super into Jesus.

For whatever reason, I expected “Complicated Christmas” to be about family dynamics. And it’s not not about that…

When the kids call grandpa grandad and grandad gets called pop pop
And the uncle’s not an uncle just a friend we like a lot
Our blended family’s still the only family that we got

But then right after:

It’s a complicated Christmas
But Jesus makes it not

JC may uncomplicate Christmas, but he can’t ease the awkwardness of “But Jesus makes it not.”

Wrapping up the parental theme is Burning Dutch Girl, who beseeches listeners with “If You Don’t Buy This Christmas Single My Kids Will Starve.” The group self-describes as a “one man noise rock dripping from the ceiling and leaking out of the pipes,” so it’s not looking good for the children.

When they formed back in the mid-’90s, Weak Ass Mushroom Tea went by the Down, a name so blah and unmemorable the quartet overcompensated with this ridiculous replacement. While I have belabored how the first rule of Band Name Bureau is “Never change your name,” I support bands opting for silliness 100%.

WAMT just released Holiday Hullabaloo, which it describes as “a funny, sweet, and sometimes subversive holiday album.” “I Can’t Believe It’s Fucking Christmas Time Again” says everything in the title, but “Hell Ya! It’s Christmas Time” is a curveball.

It’s about growing up in Southeast Asia, where they’ve “never seen sleighs, just monsoon days” and “never read the Bible, don’t know about disciples.” That changes in 1979, the narrator’s first Christmas.

I can finally say
I’ve seen the holidays
Heaven please forgive us
I still don’t pray to Jesus
But hell ya! It’s Christmas time!

That really contrasts with “M.I.L.F. and Cookies (All Santa Wants).”4

Would you expect an artist with the name the Ardvark Felon to look like this?

That’s Frank Velardo, whose name anagrams into “Ardvark Felon.” While that word is actually spelled a-a-r-d-v-a-r-k, the guy in that photo isn’t hung up on orthodoxy, man. It’s all about vibes! Like the ones you get from biting into homemade Christmas cookies. This felonious aardvark wrote a sentimental, yacht-rockin’ song about them called “Christmas Cookie Magic.”

I can taste the memories
Warm, soft and carefree
It makes me weak in the knees
May I have another please?
You know that these are my faves
My favorite flaves

Minus 20 points for “flaves.” He’s already pushing it with that “ardvark” thing.

On the other side of the holiday-cheer spectrum is the Infinite Monkey Theorem. Last year, the German artist released Christmas 2024, inspired by the never-been-done-before idea of songs “that shed light on the dark and negative sides of the holiday season: Loneliness and isolation, toxic family relationships, unbridled consumerism at the expense of the earth’s resources, and homelessness.”

Wait, what’s this? Christmas has a dark side? Why, I have never considered such a thing! Please to elaborate on your songs, mein Herr!

“I Dreamed of a Carol” (about living in a dream world and excessive expectations of Christmas), “Silent Bells” (about the last Christmas on Earth before the extinction of mankind), “Christmas in Hell” (about dead rituals in toxic family constellations at family celebrations) and “Il freddo dell’ asfalto”5 (about Christmas Eve in the big city from the point of view of a homeless person).

Feeling the spirit yet? If you’re feeling melodramatic and angry at your family this holiday season, cue up “Christmas in Hell”:

The family’s gathered, in contempt and despair
Only hatred and envy, there’s no love in the air
No tinsel, no songs, no holly or cheer
Is Christmas in Hell worse than Christmas right here

That is probably the most German thing ever.

Very Canadian is Toronto’s Kristian Noel Pedersen, who just released his 17th album of Christmas music, Bullshit & Gift Wrapping. That title reads like the text your friend sends after you ask what they’re up to back home. “I don’t know, just bullshit & gift wrapping.”

Pedersen’s streak is impressive, especially considering his albums aren’t just rehashed standards. They’re all originals as far as I can tell, made with genuine craft. It reminds me of his fellow Canadian Jon K. Samson of the Weakerthans, with elements of Sufjan Stevens and other sensitive boys with thin voices. (That sounds like a dig, but I like those guys. Maybe because I’m also a sensitive boy with a thin singing voice?)

Well, shit. This is an anticlimactically sincere way to end Midnight Mass. Hold on, let me check my notes. Okay, this will do:

Something called Holiday Super Spreader released “World’s Worst Rendition of Feliz Navidad,” and it’s hard to argue. Ever wanted to sit in on your friends’ band practice while they try to figure out a song? Well I have good news.

POST-SCRIPTS

• OG Band Name Bureau readers may recall the story about my friend’s high school death metal band, which originally went by the name Genital Grinder. They changed it to Biophobic so they’d be taken more seriously, but not for the reason you think. “Genital Grinder” is a Carcass song, and they didn’t want to seem unoriginal. They had a song called “Coprophagic Kleptomaniac,” about a person who steals feces to eat it. Now that’s original.

• Want to read the longest way to say “I made this with AI”? “This project was made possible through tools shaped by generations of artists. Their influence moves through every word, sound, and image. We honor the creative lineage behind it all.” Mm-hmm.

• The above is for an album called Obscene Celebration, about “the lie we dress in glitter and call joy. The ritual of pretending the machine is holy because it hums in red and gold. We stand beneath its glow, calling the fumes ‘faith,’ wrapping despair in tinsel and calling it love.” Also, have you ever noticed how if you rearrange the letters in “Santa,” it spells “Satan”?!?! 🤯🤯🤯

• Coming next month: It’s January, so it’s time to look at the bands that formed 20 years ago, which includes some biggies like Vampire Weekend and Cage the Elephant. And let’s not forget Cannabis Corpse.

POST-POST-SCRIPT

Hey, speaking of anticlimactic sincerity, here are my favorite albums of the year, in no real order (though the top two are my faves). I dropped these songs on a playlist, along with some others I liked this year.

• Weakened Friends, Feels Like Hell. No surprise here, if you’ve been reading Band Name Bureau this year. This album slays. Start here: “Not for Nothing.”

• Press Club, To All the Ones That I Love. My other favorite album this year. Punky indie rock from Australia, and Spotify tells me I played this song 29 times in 2025 (I’m about to make it 30): “Vacate.”

• Winona Fighter, My Apologies to the Chef. I’ve been a fan of this Memphis punk band for a couple years now. Super melodic and polemic, with one of my favorite songs of the past couple years: “I’M IN THE MARKET TO PLEASE NO ONE.”

• The Beaches, No Hard Feelings. The Beaches specialize in attitude-heavy post-punk focused on making the most of youth (i.e., sleeping around and staying out late). Start here: “Did I Say Too Much.”

• Neko Case, Neon Grey Midnight Green. Case is basically a layup for my year-end list every time she releases something. Start here: “Winchester Manchester of Sound.”

• Superchunk, Songs in the Key of Yikes. Speaking of layups, Superchunk released another great new album (the title…well, you can’t win ’em all). Start here: “Bruised Lung.”

• Motion City Soundtrack, The Same Old Wasted Wonderful World. This is Motion City Soundtrack’s first album since their brief hiatus, and you can always count on them for hooky pop-punk with occasionally devastating lyrics. Start here: “You Know Who the Fuck We Are.”

• Chance the Rapper, Star Line. Speaking of devastating, check out this song: “No More Old Men.”

• Clipse, Let God Sort Em Out. Clipse has made some of my favorite hip-hop of the past 20+ years, so I was thrilled that Pusha T and Malice reunited. This song uses a Werner Herzog line for a hook, so 🤌: “The Birds Don’t Sing.”

• Pelican, Flickering Resonance. Chicago’s masters of instrumental metal have been quiet for a few years, but this is the opposite of quiet. Start here: “Cascading Crescent.”

• Beach Bunny, Tunnel Vision. Lili Trifilio has a knack for hooky indie rock with insightful lyrics. This is her best work to date, and this song rules: “Clueless.”

• Bob Mould, Here We Go Crazy. He’s an icon who can be counted on for a solid album every couple of years. While my brain processes that Sugar is playing shows next year, this album delivers what Mould does so well. Start here: “Fur Mink Augurs.” And check out the new Sugar song!

• Horsegirl, Phonetics On and On. I was kind of underwhelmed by this album’s minimalism, but it has stayed with me. Start here: “2468.”

• Swami John Reis, Time to Let You Down. I recently played this again and wondered why I haven’t been listening to it nonstop. John Reis is a legend. See also the new Plosivs album. Start here: “Prince of the Parade.”

Let’s take a look back at 2025 and give thanks for everything we learned this year.

1.
Among the bands that formed in 2005, Cute is What We Aim For not only had an irritating name and infuriating hair…

…but frontman Shaant Hacikyan (above) also had some hot takes on rape and racism best left to the back lounge of a tour bus. He wisely stopped posting on social media years ago, but more digging for this issue found him on a Buffalo hair salon’s Instagram. Turns out his partner runs the place, and they have an adorable family. Hacikyan has finally attained the cuteness he aimed for, but it’s kinda funny he ended up with a hairstylist.

2.
Liver failure broke up BNB faves Beercan Pentagram. I was immediately taken by this Wisconsin thrash band when I wrote about them in 2022, but it seemed like they were no longer active. For our 100th issue midtacular, I reached out and learned Beercan Pentagram ended because vocalist Howard had to stop performing after his liver failed. He’s okay now, but if nothing else, it was a fitting end for a band that posted this image on their Facebook.

3.
The first rule of Band Name Bureau is don’t change your name, which Lana Del Rabies learned the hard way. When she announced plans to change her name a few years back, there was such an outcry among fans that she ended up keeping it.

That’s as far as she goes when it comes to pleasing anyone, though. She recently released Omnipotent Fuck, and while you can stream it on various platforms, Lana declares, “This is not a record. It’s not an EP. It definitely is the most deranged thing I’ve made so far.” The bio describes it as “a raw, four-take, stream-of-consciousness recording” that “grapples with romantic possession by a demonic force, embodying a fevered confrontation between desire and surrender to death.”

In other words, it’s the perfect soundtrack for your holiday gathering. May I suggest “Consensual Pain”?

4.
Report Suspicious Activity, one of the many projects the inimitable J. Robbins has played in over the decades, cohered during George W. Bush’s post-9/11 reign of crapitude. As a joke, Report Suspicious Activity made shirts that said “Why not invade Canada?” Ha ha ha! Wouldn’t it be funny if an American president threatened to invade our friendly northern neighbors? Such a thing is preposterous, and therefore hilarious to contemplate!

5.
When your most popular song is called “I Fucked Yr Mom”—25 million streams and counting—it’s probably best that your band is called Sorry Mom. Even if you identify as “the world’s premiere DIY queer punk band,” mom had such high hopes for you. Why can’t you make nice music for nice people?

6.
I would guess most of the artists Band Name Bureau celebrates don’t care about that, especially ones with swears in their name. As Vish Khanna of the Kreative Kontrol podcast put it back in July:

I do think that the bands who put curses in their name probably don’t care about the stuff we’re talking about. If you give yourself a name that is going to niche yourself, then you’re probably in a way not as concerned. If that’s your name from day one, you’re probably like, “Well, we’re going to have limited resonance in the mainstream. Our name has curses in it.”

7.
Or you could go the opposite direction and name yourself after a person who’s been a media fixture for decades, like Ira Glass. The band Ira Glass also hails from Chicago, the birthplace of Glass’ celebrated NPR show This American Life. While that is where the similarities end, let’s see if we can turn song titles from the new Joy is a No Knocking Nation into This American Life episode acts!

Today’s show is in five acts. Act one, “It’s a Whole ‘Who Shot John’ Story,” in which a legendary wanderer says goodbye to the powers that once ruled him. Act two, “FD&C Red 40,” in which a man surveys a world full of poseurs and realizes he is one of them. Act three, “New Guy (Big Softie),” in which numbers insist on order, nostalgia insists on kindness, and one bold ZIP code ruins the fantasy. Act four, “Fritz All Over You,” in which everything polished collapses and a hairpin escape becomes the plan. Act five, “That’s It/That? That’s All You Can Say?,” in which he calls her “precious,” she calls him out, and the streets call the shots.

Hit me up, TAL.

8.
Also based on a celebrity, but tweaked slightly is Winona Fighter. If you don’t like that name, just be glad some of the others didn’t make it, as vocalist/drummer Coco Kinnon shares in this clip from the BNB TikTok, now semi-regularly updated!

@bandnamebureauSee the rest of the interview in BNB #106 @WINONA FIGHTER

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How semi-regularly updated? Why, I even posted Wave Chapelle talking about the time he met Dave Chappelle!

@bandnamebureauRap right now, @realwavechapelle! From BNB #111, out now.

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And Sonia Sturino of Weakened Friends talking about her unlikely friendship with Buckethead! DO I PLEASE YOU NOW, ALGORITHM? SHINE YOUR FAVOR UPON ME!

@bandnamebureau“It’s one of those videos on the internet where a chicken and a monkey are friends.” —Annie Hoffman of @Weakened Friends describing Sonia Sturino’s unlikely friendship with @Buckethead. See more in BNB #112

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9.
In September, Band Name Bureau became your source for weird facts about moths vis-à-vis the Most Beautiful Moth in America. Founder Maggie Rosenberg explained the name came from a video about the luna moth, the species most often given the title of most beautiful in America. My research turned up this incredible fact: Adult luna moths don’t have mouths and live for only a week. They don’t need mouths, you see, because they spend the whole time continually having sex. Look to the luna moth, everyone. Look to the luna moth.

10.
No self-serving year in review would be complete without some masturbatory self-congratulation. I was interviewed by the great Jim DeRogatis and Greg Kot for Sound Opinions back in June. You probably know that already, because it’s the reason a bunch of you are here.

However, you may not know that nearly every artist featured in Band Name Bureau appears on the official BNB Spotify playlist. It’s currently 344 songs and 21.5 hours long, a true gauntlet for anyone up to the task.

Much more svelte is the BNB Recs playlist, which highlights bands I think are worth an extra listen. It’s only 53 songs and three hours long, a comparative sprint!

Here are the songs I added this year:

• Ira Glass, “It’s a Whole ‘Who Shot John’ Story” (#105) This is abrasive chaos from a band that could have a lot in store for it, or collapse before hitting its stride. Each seems as likely as the other.

• They are Gutting a Body of Water, “The Chase” (#109) Speaking of collapsing or triumphing, this Philly shoegaze outfit continually teeters between the two. Why? The lyrics spell it out.

• So Totally, “Distinct Star” (#108) Sure, I made sport of this shoegaze band’s interminable bio, but I also said they were good. “Distinct Star” is catchier and more polished than TAGABOW, but there’s room for both of them on this list.

• Weakened Friends, “Not for Nothing” (#112 and #11) The recent Feels Like Hell is probably my album of the year—it certainly has the coolest vinyl—and this is my favorite song. No one sings like Sonia Sturino, and they know their way around hooky, ’90s-indebted guitar-rock.

• Wave Chapelle, “Soul Food & Hennessy” (#111 and #102) When Dave Chappelle demanded his namesake rap for him on the spot, this is what he heard. I get why Dave was into it.

• Discoveries of the American Scientific, “Last Planet” (#109): Relistening to this, I wonder why I haven’t had it on a loop. Synth-laden, propulsive rock that sounds massive. Restarting now.

• Hey Nothing, “Death Song” (#108): As a doting parent who hyperventilates when he imagines anything happening to his kid, I shouldn’t be able to handle the fantastically awful loss at the center of this song. But I still kind of love it?

• Fcukers, “Bon Bon” (#102): This duo exists in a bubble of cool none of us will ever experience, and their breakthrough song sounds the music played at a hip club that won’t let you inside. Just don’t get too big a head, Fcukers. One of you used to be a band called Spud Cannon.

POST-SCRIPTS

• The annual traditions continue next month, with BNB’s Midnight Mass, our yearly look at questionable holiday music. Ugh, I just realized how much AI slop I’m gonna have to wade through.

Band names don’t promise personality.

Just because a group has a funny name doesn’t mean they have anything to say. This is one of the few universal truths uncovered over Band Name Bureau’s 112 issues.

Almost exactly 100 issues ago, we met Weakened Friends, the trio of married couple Sonia Sturino (guitar, vocals) and Annie Hoffman (bass, production), along with Adam Hand (drums) that formed in Maine a decade ago. That they had personality beyond their play-on-words moniker was immediately obvious. There was a series of amusing tweets about their in-progress album (“There’s vocoder on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it”), a playful Patreon called the Friend Zone, and, most important, music that paired bracing candor with hooky guitar rock. Their sound forcefully nods to the punkier end of ’90s alt-rock, especially the Chicago scene that bred Veruca Salt, Liz Phair, and Fig Dish.

So it’s fitting to post this interview with Weakened Friends just before the Chicago stop of their current tour supporting the excellent new Feels Like Hell. (I’m particularly fond of the stretch from “NPC”—which features a WTF cameo by guitar maestro Buckethead—to my favorite song, “Not for Nothing.”)

Sonia and Annie spoke with Band Name Bureau shortly after the tour started.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity blah blah blah.

Band Name Bureau: How did you end up choosing Weakened Friends?

Sonia Sturino: Oh my God, I hate it, first and foremost. I chose it. It’s my fault. I did it. It’s, like, the world’s worst band name. I mean, I don’t know if it’s the world’s worst band name, but it’s—

Annie Hoffman: It’s a mouthful. It’s hard to spell. It’s hard to find, because people hear it, and then they type a different word. It’s been a curse.

SS: Yeah, it’s been a little bit of a curse for our band, but it is our name, and I guess—in a masochistic way—I just had to choose the band name that kind of sucks to have. It’s too late now. We’re keeping it. It’s who we are.

AH: When you sent it to the group text, like, “What about this name?” It was before we were together or had admitted that we liked each other, and I just had the biggest crush on you. I didn’t want to say, “I don’t know about this one.”

SS: I really wish you would’ve been like, “Nah.”

AH: But it was a side project! We didn’t even realize we’d be here, three albums deep.

SS: I really had no intention of pursuing this band as an actual career.

AH: They were like, “Maybe we’ll play some shows. Maybe we’ll record an EP.”

SS: Well, here we are.

AH: Apologies from the past.

SS: It’s funny because I’m dyslexic, and I have a really hard time spelling everything. Spelling’s not my forte. It’s like I’ve turned it around on the world and I’ve been like, “Well, you try to spell this word!”

BNB: That’s the curse of having a play on words as a name, right? Were any other names in contention?

SS: I don’t know. I’m bad at naming things. I mean, I like the name of our new record. I like Feels Like Hell. It’s a good album name. I was like, “Yeah, I did one!”

AH: It’s a darn good one.

SS: It’s just hard. Since then I’ve been like, “Oh, that would be a cool band name.” It’s probably already a band name, but I was thinking of a band named Sudsy.1 I was like, “That’s kind of cool.” I like Sudsy or Queasy.2 But then again now that just sounds like I’m a SoundCloud rapper from a few years ago. Sudsy, but with dollar signs at the end. But yeah, I don’t know. It’s a hard world out there in the world of band names.

BNB: It is. You touched on this a moment ago, but is naming things—whether it’s band, album, songs—a relatively smooth process for y’all?

SS: It really depends. I mean, sometimes I’ll have a title before I even have anything else. I’ll have a song title and I’m like, “I want to call a song this.”

AH: “Girls gone mild.” That ended up being a lyric, but it originally was going to be a song title.

SS: Yeah, I just wrote it down. I’m like, “That’s funny.” I think I was just describing my general life now. I’m like, “Yeah, I go to bed at 10. I wake up at 5. I go for a run. I love tea. I don’t drink.”

At first I thought it was going to be this kind of song that was almost funny or parody or whatever. And then that lyric snuck its way into one of the sadder moments on the sadder songs.3

BNB: You titled this album because you liked the line “feels like hell” from one of the songs. How did you settle on Quitter and Common Blah?

SS: Common Blah and Quitter, those are both song titles.

AH: But the song title “Common Blah” has nothing... it’s not mentioned in the song. So did you just like the play on words?

SS: I guess. It was almost 10 years ago. I was really into plays on words.

BNB: You were in your pun phase.

SS: Yeah, in my pun phase. [Laughs.] Instead of a punk phase, I went through a pun phase—it’s like punk without the K. But I went through that, and then Quitter was just like a lot of that song. That record has to do with burnout, because making that record burnt me out and almost made me want to quit making music. We wanted to call that record one of two things: Bonkers Funhouse. [Laughs.]

AH: That was my vote!

SS: Then With Sigourney Weaver. [Laughs.] So then the press would go out, and it’d be like “Weakened Friends With Sigourney Weaver.” So those were the holding titles, and then we went with Quitter.

Feels Like Hell, the contrast to that is it’s not a song on the album. It’s a lyric in the song “Not For Nothing,” which I think the holding title for a second was Not For Nothing for this record. It’s interesting because that thematically comes back because in “Great Expectations” I have the line, “I keep making it hell for myself,” the “it feels like hell” line [in “Not For Nothing”], and then “I’m living in a carbon copy hell” in “NPC.”

BNB: What about the names of your previous bands like the Box Tiger and the Field Effect? What’s the story with those?

SS: Box Tiger is another bad band name picked by me.

AH: It’s not bad!

SS: It was supposed to just be Boxed Tiger.

AH: That is bad.

SS: Which is bad. I was like, “Maybe just be Box Tiger,” and then someone put the “the” in there, and then we just kept the “the,” and I didn’t like the “the.”

AH: The Field Effect, we had a huge list of contending names, and that one rose to the top somehow. But a few of us were/are engineers, and there’s something called a field-effect transistor, and we’re like, “That has a cool vibe to it.”

SS: Nerds.

BNB: A lot of times with band names, people don’t expect the band to catch on. Then it becomes this thing you have to live with.

SS: Yeah. It’s funny, there was a band that came through the venue I work at called Zinadelphia recently. I was like, “What is going on?” There’s just some names where I’m like, “That’s a whole vibe. I wonder what the backstory is.”4

BNB: I was going to say, because you work at a venue, you see lots of names. Then you’re on tour, so you see lots of names that way too.

SS: The stickers in venues are the best. There was one with a sticker, it looked like the Planet Fitness logo, but it said Planet Fatass.

AH: There was one at Ralph’s Rock Diner in Worcester. It was this bright yellow sticker. It said Grampy’s Banana. [Laughs.] That’s a horrible band name!

SS: What was the Slippery When Fat band?

AH: Oh, Fat Boy.

SS: Fat Boy. And they had a record called Slippery When Fat. That was a CD at the studio we used to record at.

AH: They were ’90s or maybe early 2000s Boston band.

SS: We were literally observing one and we’re like, “Wow, that might be worse than our band name.” It was a sticker. It was teardux, but it was “tear” and then D-U-X, all one word.

BNB: Yeah, that’s bad. To shift gears, I wanted to ask about the album. I was struck by how much the press materials go into what it calls the “Fleetwood Mac, minus the cocaine and plus a dose of multivitamins” story of Weakened Friends. You two got together after the band started, and Annie and Adam had previously dated. Your personal stories are so intertwined with the band, so I wonder where you draw the line with what you feel comfortable sharing. Has it ever felt like too much?

AH: Nobody’s crossed line. In fact, we don’t even get asked about it that much.

SS: I mean, I think we’re just oversharing queer people. We’re just gay. We’re here to tell you everything. There is no boundary.

I think about it more and more as the band grows. I think initially when you first start as a band, and especially in the age of social media, you’re like, “You’re all my friends! Know everything about me!” Your personal life and your personal self and your art are all interwoven, especially in the way people consume art now with TikTok and stuff. You are there. I’m the type of person who’s at the merch table. I’m hanging out. I’m in the crowd watching the opening band. I’m not trying to hide myself in a high tower from the fans who are there. I like to have a sense of community. When we’re at shows, I am in that community, and I think we’re at a level now where that is still very possible.

I understand that as artists grow and get bigger, it becomes a little bit more difficult to do that—just because fandom and the way that the brain works when someone is a fan can get a little weird. Honestly, we’ve always had great people surrounding our band, and so I’ve always tried to make myself accessible to people. My songs are my story, and that’s who I am. So I’ve always been willing to just share myself, but as things do grow, I sense even my own personal self being like, “Well, there are some things I want to keep a little bit closer to just me.”

But then again, as a queer person, if even 10, 15 years ago, whenever I was coming out, there wasn’t that much representation or visibility as there is now. I would’ve loved to find a band and know a little bit more about them personally and know that part of their journey to feel more accepted and be like, “Oh wow, there’s a good path for me.”

So yeah, it’s an interesting dance. I’m sure if you ask me a couple years from now, maybe the answer will change if the band grows. It might be a little bit harder to be as accessible. But while we still can, I feel like we’re all family at the Weakened Friends camp.

BNB: Something I also wanted to ask you about, Sonia, is you said you had bad writer’s block before Feels Like Hell. What shook you out of it?

SS: Yeah, when we made Quitter, I think we just got a little bit too in the weeds with it. It was during COVID. Then things opened back up, we went back out on tour, and we overdid it almost. I remember we played 52 shows in 61 days, and just low-level touring—no crew, just the three of us all crammed in one hotel room. It just really became not great. I built up this really toxic mental-health relationship with music.

We weren’t making a lot of money, and it was really stressful, and I think I just needed to work myself out of that toxic feeling towards it. This thing of, “This is sucking all my money. It’s getting all my energy. I’m just so tired. Making this record was a slog. I’m just depressed.” I had to get myself out of that and I did. I worked really hard on myself and on the band.

Then we got to a point last year where I’m like, “I’m ready.” Annie and I worked together, and we wrote these songs, and they came together pretty quickly. I think half this record wasn’t even written a year ago today.

AH: Yeah, we got on a really creative wave where the songs were just coming to us.

SS: Sometimes you write a song and you’re just like, “I don’t even know. I was just conduit to something.”

AH: The night we put “Tough Luck” together and we played it back, we’re like, “Wait, that’s us?! Where did it come from? It’s so cool.” [Laughs.]

BNB: It’s interesting how much you’ve talked about how fraught Quitter was. When I first wrote about you, you’d tweeted about making it. “There’s vocoder on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it.” “There’s banjo on our new record and I hope everyone fucking hates it.” And your Twitter bio said, “I hope you hate it.” It was funny, but hearing you talk about it now, I’m like, “Oh, that sounds rough.”

SS: No, yeah, it was fun to make that record.

AH: Was it? I feel like it got under your skin.

SS: Yeah, it was rough. I mean, there were cool moments, and I’m happy with the songs on it. It’s a cool record. It’s a learning record. I think now we’re a stronger band because we made that record, and we were able to make this record because we made that record. It’s all a creative journey. You just keep moving forward from one thing to the other, but they all kind of feed each other.

AH: You phrased it really well. We thought we had something to prove, and we had all this ample time because it was COVID, and that’s just not a good place to make art from.

SS: I mean, it can be. I feel like I’ve written songs from that mindset.

AH: I should make it more personal: I thought I had something to prove because I’m like, “Oh, people liked the first record.”

SS: More eyes on you.

AH: I’m the one engineering, and I need it to be good. I need everybody to like it. This one, I didn’t even think about anybody else. I’m like, “What does this song want? What is it calling for? That feels good. Let’s follow that.” Instead of my anxieties about what somebody I don’t even know might think. Why am I putting that lens in front of myself? It doesn’t make any sense.

BNB: Since then, Sonia, you’ve come out gender nonconforming. Did that also make this process a little easier?

SS: I think it made life easier. [Laughs.] It’s just nice to know who you are and not really feel like you have to subscribe to any sort of mannerism. Art is self-expression, right? So if you’re at peace with that, and you can not judge yourself anymore, you’re not going to judge your art as much, and you’re not going to judge what you’re doing as much. I think there’s a freedom to that. That was really nice to stumble upon. It helps the creative process tremendously to just be comfortable in your own skin.

AH: I was practicing something in advance of this tour, because we’re pulling out some stuff from the back catalog that we haven’t played in a while, and you came into the room and you’re like, “Wow, I can hear myself trying to feminize my voice for this recording.” I thought that was interesting.

SS: Yeah, all the walls are down. You don’t have those learned habits that are just there as self-preservation.

BNB: Another thing I wanted to ask about is the musical dynamic among the three of you. Both Annie and Adam went to the Berklee College of Music, and Sonia’s more self-taught. In some ways being untrained, you’re not getting in your head about theory or whatever. But I also think it could be intimidating working in a creative partnership with people who are trained.

AH: That was one of the lessons coming out of school. I immediately got a job in a recording studio, and I was like, “Oh man, a lot of the bands I’m working with at the studio do not have a technically trained background in music.” You have to develop a language to communicate ideas with people that might not know theory or what beat I’m talking about in a bar. So I had already developed a way of communicating.

[To Sonia.] You’re just so naturally talented. The music that comes from your brain, if I would ask you what it is, theoretically you wouldn’t be able to tell me, but that doesn’t matter. All theory is and notation and all of that, that’s just a way to take music that’s coming from your brain and be able to communicate it to others or write it out so someone else can play it. But the important thing is the generation of the art, and you have that.

SS: For me, the flip side is it’s rock ’n’ roll. I fell in love with music from an emotional place, and I fell in love with music from watching some of my favorite bands on stage and that raw energy.

I’m not saying if you’re a theoretical player, you don’t have that same connection to music. I actually went to an art school in high school. It was a dedicated music program. You had to audition to get in, and I played the baritone sax. I was okay with reading music a little bit for the sax, but generally speaking, I would take the time to learn things by ear and kind of fake it. I definitely did not do well with any of the written exams for musical notation and stuff.

Then when I was deciding to go to college, I auditioned for Berklee, and I actually got in. I got accepted to Berklee and I got accepted to Humber College, which was almost the Toronto, Canada, version of Berklee. I just was like, “I don’t want to play jazz. I don’t want to read charts.” I want to write songs and be creative in a way that these artists that I admire are creative onstage and do that. So I’m like, “I’m going to just start a band.” That’s when I started Box Tiger.

I got a scholarship, and I went to school with a history major and an English literature minor. So I just went and read books. It was great because I feel like that inspired me more to write songs than if I was just getting frustrated.

There is ego in being a creative, and if you’re in an environment where you feel like you’re just lesser than or you can’t keep up, you feel like shit, then you’re not going to want to stay in it. No matter how hard I tried in my big-ass dyslexic brain, I couldn’t read music notation. It wasn’t how I wanted to focus on music. So it would’ve been counterintuitive to put myself in an environment where that is the endgame. I’m not trying to write music to get a grade, you know what I mean?

BNB: I find that the people who judge things like, “That’s not technically very good,” it’s like, “Yeah, but does it sound good? Does it work?” There’s nothing more annoying than some technical music nerd.

AH: The shredder guitar guy being like, “Nirvana sucks! He can’t even play.” It makes you feel something!

SS: Everybody has their own opinions. If the shredder dude likes that, then that’s great, but I can’t stand it. Also, outside of just the music itself, in the music industry, and especially in the audio-engineering industry, there are these pedantic, know-it-all assholes—mostly always dudes—who are just like, [Nerdy voice.] “Well, this microphone is the better microphone, so this record sounds like shit because you didn’t use the microphone I like.” I’m like, fuck off, just listen to the record. Is the emotion there? I can’t stand that.

[To Annie.] You like cool gear. That’s why I liked working with you as an engineer before we were together. I remember getting to the studio with you, and you knew what everything was and you knew cool shit, but you didn’t do—for lack of a better word—that dick-swing thing, where you’re like, “I’m the studio guy.” I don’t want to yuck anyone’s yum, and I get that those people are probably just really excited about their craft, but...

AH: The artist doesn’t have bothered about all that. Just help facilitate the art. The technical stuff’s just happening in the background. That’s what it should be.

SS: Sometimes, honestly, it’s like you don’t even need it. Some of the best shit’s just recorded on crappy gear because musicians don’t have money, and the heart was there and the energy was there.

AH: Sometimes the limitations can generate really cool art. When we were recording part of the record, we recorded at the house. At the studio we have the Hammond, we got the grand piano, we got the upright piano, we got all these synths, we got every amp you could want, every guitar you could want. But then at home...

SS: We have a lot of stuff.

AH: Our stuff. But I remember when we were making Quitter, I was like, “I want something like a big timpani or a big orchestral bass drum.” We took a mallet, and we opened the oven and you hit the side of the oven, and it sounded fucking awesome!

SS: The song “Great Expectations” on the new record, that’s all mostly demo track.

BNB: Oh, really?

SS: That was me and Annie, just futzing. That guitar take is the first take of a demo track.

AH: The speakers were playing. You can hear the click track. I had to try to get some of that out.

SS: When we were sitting with it. I’m like, “I think if we go back and record it, it won’t have the correct energy.” There’s something so sad and real about that song, that flowy, almost riffing guitar part. It was almost like improv. I was like, “I think if I try to go recreate that, it’ll just sound sterile and weird.” And the tone was cool, so we kept it.

BNB: To talk about the shredders again, you have an unlikely friendship with Buckethead, who plays on “NPC.” He could very well have been that condescending nerd, but it doesn’t sound like he’s that way.

SS: No, not at all. He is so cool, and he’s just a champion of artists and musicians doing their thing. When he wrote that part for “NPC,” we were talking on the phone and I was like, “Dude, it is so cool. I definitely won’t be able to play it live. I would’ve had to start practicing 20 years ago.” He was laughing. He was like, “Yeah, but you don’t have to.”

He just loves emotion behind music. He obviously is this shredder, and I think the way he plays guitar, it is alchemy. It’s unbelievable. It’s so cool. But he is not projecting that on other people’s art at all. I think he’s just a champion of people who are in music for the right reasons and have their heart in the right place. He seems to really appreciate that.

In a world where it’s TikTok/viral/industry/numbers/Spotify just constantly berating you, it’s been nice to have someone who’s just like, “I did some collage crafting and listened to this record and wrote this guitar part I’m sharing with you.” I’m like, “This is so nice to have.” Someone who’s just not that at all. It’s an unlikely friendship.

AH: It’s one of those videos on the internet where a chicken and a monkey are friends.

BNB: I’ll close out by asking you the same thing I always ask in these interviews: Do you think it’s better to have a sort of vanilla name that isn’t necessarily memorable or a bad name that people remember?

SS: I think the bad name people remember. A classic example is Mannequin Pussy.5 That is a rough name. I like it. I love them, and it works for their energy, but I feel like in the last few years, they’ve just fully embraced it and honed in on it. But it’s a hard name to market. People just don’t like saying “pussy.”

AH: You probably can’t put ad spend on it.

SS: You can’t. They played at the venue I work at, and it’s like, an email blast. To be as huge as they’ve gotten with that name, it’s awesome. It’s a testament to how amazing they are. I just like their whole energy of just like, “This is who the fuck we are, and we don’t give a fuck. Say ‘pussy,’ you pussy!” I’d rather have a bad name that catches the eye and does well than just fade into the background.

BNB: Do you agree, Annie?

AH: Yeah, I do agree. Even when people ask me what my band name is, and then I have to explain it. I feel like it does crystallize with people after the explanation. They’ll walk away with it like, “Oh, okay.”

SS: I’m sick and tired of explaining it, but I’m happy. I’m happy.

POST-SCRIPTS

• How did Sonia become the monkey to Buckethead’s chicken? Chip Midnight at The Big Takeover found out:

• My favorite part of The Four Seasons on Netflix was when Mannequin Pussy came up. (Spoiler alert.)

• Seriously, Feels Like Hell rules. Get it, and go see Weakened Friends live.

• Coming in a couple weeks: the annual Band Name Bureau Thanks List.

Among the most time-honored of naming conventions is the twist on a celebrity’s name. You can combine two into one (Michael Cera Palin), play with how the name sounds (Anti-Difranco, Mashd N Kutcher), get more conceptual (Princess Die Die Die & The Dody Flayed’s), go full Wheel of Fortune Before & After (Tom Cruise Control, Harrison Ford Escort), tie it to a pop-culture reference (Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head), or make a simple thematic tweak (Sob Dylan).

Milwaukee rapper Wave Chapelle chose the last route. He was inspired, in a roundabout way, by someone who made the same choice: rapper Max B, a.k.a. Wavy Crockett. He popularized the slang “wavy” in the ’00s, when a young Wave Chapelle was rapping under the name Astro. As he told Fake Shore Drive back in 2016:

“I pretty much got my name from just kicking it in the studio with the homies. We would always come up with these names like ‘Trill Cosby’ or ‘Xanny Glover’ and whatnot. This was around the time I got hip to the ‘Wavy’ term. I was using it a lot in my raps, and I said this crazy line where I ended up calling myself Wave Chapelle.”

You may remember that quote from BNB #102, which is the first time I wrote about Wave Chapelle. That also marked the beginning of my copyediting agony, because Dave Chappelle has two Ps and Wave Chapelle has one, for legal cover.

With the release of his great new EP, The B&W Pack—the 12th in a series of color-coded EPs with “pack” in the name—I decided it was time to check in with Wave about his namesake, why he nearly walked away from music, and why Drake is a great name for a performer.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity blah blah blah.

Band Name Bureau: You were Astro before you were Wave Chapelle. Where did that name come from?

Wave Chapelle: I started off in high school. I was in a rap group called B*right. My rap name was Astro, kind of play off of the anime character Astro Boy. I had this really weird haircut that was angled, kind of like his. Once I moved to Memphis for college—I went to University of Memphis—that’s when I transitioned from Astro to Wave Chapelle officially.

BNB: When was that?

WC: I’d say probably 2014.

BNB: So that was when Dave Chappelle was performing, but he hadn’t fully come back.

WC: Yeah, [Chappelle’s Show] had ended, and then he kind of went off the grid for a little bit. But I vividly remember… I was staying with my older cousin. My older cousin was maybe like 18, 19 at the time. They had an apartment, and I was living with them at 16. We didn’t have no cable, but we had a PlayStation 2 and an Xbox, and I had these Dave Chappelle DVDs. So even though the show wasn’t on TV anymore, I would binge-watch these DVDs all the time.

BNB: How did it become your stage name?

WC: My style—like style of dress, style of rap—was very East Coast-driven. Some people even thought I was from New York, just because of the style of rap, you know what I mean? So people would be like, “Yo, he’s wavy.” “You wavy, bro.” Being wavy was always a thing. Even when I was Astro, I would [have an] alias. I would go as Wave—that just be a nickname.

When I officially decided to turn it into a rap name, I was going to school for marketing. I’m like, “Man, it’s gotta be catchy. It’s gotta be something more than Wave.” ’Cause there’s so many people that use “wave” and things like that. So I was like, “Wave…Dave…Chappelle.” It was just a light-bulb moment. “Maybe I should add ‘Chapelle’ to the end of this and just make it a thing.” It proved to work in that way, you know what I mean? When people hear it, whether you hate it or you love it, it’s like a fishing hook. It just grabs you.

BNB: Do you feel like the wave influence is still strong in the music you’re making now?

WC: A hundred percent. A hundred percent. I think I’m a lot more mature, but I’m also smarter. Everything that I was doing earlier on is just amplified now, because I’ve got way more experience. I’m way more skilled as a rapper. I’m way more, I guess, witty. I’m witty with everything that I do. When I started being Wave Chapelle, I was clever then, but now everything is kind of like times 10.

BNB: Have you heard from Dave Chappelle’s people at all?

WC: Yeah, man, two times, actually. In 2016, I met him directly. It was at a comedy show in New York. My manager at the time knew his people, right? We buy tickets, we go to the show, but then afterwards, my manager’s like, “Yo, come with me to the back. We going to try to meet him.” Man, sure enough, I went to the back, and his manager walked us in. He’s sitting there, talking with his people. And I’m nervous, right? I’m super, super, super nervous, ’cause I’m pretty much just using his name, basically.

I meet him, and as soon as I try to shake his hand, he goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. Rap. Let me hear something.” Super-raspy voice. He got the cigarette going. I’m like, “Man, it’s an honor to meet you,” you know what I mean? He’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. Rap. Rap right now!” I’m just, like, thinking the best verse I can memorize. I rap it for him. He’s like, “You all right, man. You nice, man.” He kind of gave me the stamp of approval, like, “anything you need, you good.”

Then fast forward to the beginning of this year. I did a show with Talib Kweli, which is one of his really good friends. During soundcheck I meet Talib. He’s like, “Yo, you Wave Chapelle?” I was like, “Yeah.” He’s like, “Yo, what’s funny is I just texted Dave, ‘Yo, you’ll never believe I’m performing with this kid who has a name similar to yours.’” And Dave texted—he showed me the text—he’s like, “Yo, I know who that is!” And I was like, “Yo, that’s fire!” [Laughs.]

BNB: What an awkward position to be in, to have him be like, “Oh yeah, now drop something for me.”

WC: Yeah, man, that is not how I thought it was gonna go. When you meet your idols and people you look up to, you wanna give them they flowers. So I had this whole spiel in my mind that I was ready to give him.

BNB: What song did you do?

WC: I think I did two verses from a song called “Soul Food & Hennessy.” It remind you of some College Dropout type of vibe. But it was fire, though! I got some good bars in there. One of the first raps that I wrote that was really, really good. I told myself when I wrote this song, “Nah, I can rap at a high level.”

BNB: You know he loves a College Dropout vibe because you watched the DVDs. Kanye’s first TV appearance was on Chappelle’s Show.

WC: Yeah, exactly. That’s why the Dave Chappelle series means so much to me, because that was really my introduction to seeing hip-hop culture. All the people that Dave was bringing on was these really, really good rappers. I was watching that stuff in like fourth, fifth grade. [Laughs.]

BNB: How has it been having Wave Chapelle as a name since you first met him in 2016? He’s not a dude who’s without controversy these days. Do you get any blowback?

WC: Nah, never, man. Never. I got people that think it’s cheesy. But see, my thing is it’s gonna make you feel something, you know what I mean? Either you’re gonna be like, “Ah, that’s clever,” or you’re gonna like, “Ah, that’s cheesy,” but you gonna react. So I think that’s the main thing. I don’t think anybody ever looks too deep into it, ’cause at the end of the day, I’m not Dave, so even if you got a gripe with him, there’s nothing you can really say to me. I’m whole ’nother person. I like to play when I do shows and stuff. I’m like, “Wave Chapelle like Dave Chappelle. Shoutout to my uncle.” People be like, “Oh my God, is that really your uncle?” [Laughs.]

BNB: What about you personally? Has your feeling toward the name changed at all?

WC: Nah, not necessarily. Outside of the name, I do think that I’m a totally different person. My ideals and things of that nature are just very different. The thing that connects us is the Chapelle part, right?

When I introduce myself to people, I’m like, “What’s up? I’m Wave,” so I’m Wave at the end of the day. But the Chapelle part is just the marketing part of it. I’m pretty able to separate myself from whatever controversy is going on, you know what I mean? He’s a world-famous comedian. I’m sure that doesn’t come without any controversy.

BNB: Yeah, and it’s hard to gauge how many people actually care. For some people, he’s persona non grata. But his specials are some of the most-watched things on Netflix.

WC: My other thing too is I’m just a creative at the end of the day. Whether it’s comedy, whether it’s painting, whether it’s acting, all these things. I’m always sensitive to the creative because we are in a space that a lot of things are policed, and a lot of things are watched with a magnifying glass. We still need to be allowed to create and be open to be creative as possible.

So somebody like Dave Chappelle, we can’t really police what he’s gonna say on stage, ’cause this is part of his performance, you know what I mean? At the end of the day, painters can paint however they want.

BNB: Do you feel like the process of coming up with a name as a hip-hop artist is different from other genres of music?

WC: Nah. I mean, it shouldn’t be. I don’t think it should. I think when it comes to coming up with a name for music recording artists in general, I think the aim should be the same thing. It’s like the title to a book. Whatever you name yourself, you’re supposed to bring people in. You want it to grab people. Whether you’re going with your real name or you’re going with a moniker, I think it all has to just grab somebody.

Like, Drake is a great name to me because it’s normal, right? It’s normal, so it feels relatable. But then the more he does, the name builds up, right? It’s Drake, right? But then you got somebody like the Clipse. Sounds good, right? It just grabs you.

I think the process is the same, though, even with rock bands. Green Day, Blink-182, Paramore. I don’t think it varies between genre. I think it just depends on what your aim is as an artist. Which, in my opinion, I feel like you want to grab people out the gate, you know what I mean? Even if they don’t know who you are, when you hear this name, it should grab you.

BNB: I’ll say with hip-hop, you see less silliness in names. That’s not scientific at all, just anecdotal. [Laughs.]

WC: No, I feel that, though. That might be a thing. But Chance the Rapper, that’s kind of funny to me. That to me is witty, kind of tongue-in-cheek a little bit, because of course he’s here to rap—he’s the rapper. Or even Wu-Tang. Don’t get me wrong, like Wu-Tang is obviously legendary now, but like when I first heard Wu-Tang, I’m like, “What is that?”

BNB: To shift gears a little bit, it feels like with The B&W Pack and all the Pack EPs your songs have been trending shorter in length. Is that organic or intentional?

WC: Yeah, so there’s a little bit of both. I think the spirit of it is to bottle up the creativity and be efficient with it. Sometimes an idea could be good, but not necessarily long. Our purpose with the EPs is to serve it to you. Not necessarily saying it’s fast food, ’cause it’s a good cooked meal. [Laughs.] But we never want to overcook. So if the idea is fresh, let’s get it. If I got this first verse, the second verse, we got the beat, let’s cook it, and then let’s move.

Because in the spirit of the EPs, anything under my catalog that has “pack” on the side of it, we are in this spirit of just cooking, cooking, cooking and then moving onto the next thing. Whereas my albums, I’ll sit for months. I’ll thoroughly write these songs and put a lot more thought into it and meaning and nuance, and then we go in on the post-production.

It’s just two different mentalities, you know what I mean? So with the Packs, I do find that some of the songs might be a little bit shorter, whether it’s one long verse, two short verses, whatever. It’s almost like attack mode, kind of rapid. It’s an exercise that we like to do to just stay consistent and just cook on a hot plate.

BNB: You’re talking about you and Menebeats?

WC: Yeah, so when I say “we,” I mean me, Menebeats, and Dacota G. Menebeats is the producer and sometimes we’ll have Dee Miinor in there. He collaborates with us a lot. Sometimes we have co-production, stuff like that, and then Dacota G is the engineer. He handles all the engineering and making it sound crispy and even putting in ideas here and there. All three of us collectively are the brain trust of my career for the past five years.

BNB: You’ve been working with them for a while now.

WC: Yeah, and I always gotta shout them out, man. They are pretty much responsible for keeping me in this thing, man. 2020 was rough for me. I really contemplated just stepping away from music and going in, like, a mentor role, just because I had been doing it for so long. I was just like, “Man, okay, let me find what the next avenue is.” But I moved to Atlanta, I met Dacota and Menebeats, and they were just like, “Nah, bro, you just too talented. Let’s work together.” They were like, “Give us just this year. Let’s do something, and we’ll see where it goes.” The project that we dropped was Waves Don’t Die, which was just so very symbolic. We created that, and that just resparked everything in me.

BNB: How long were you in Atlanta?

WC: I was in Atlanta for three years, up to 2023.

BNB: You were in Memphis for college and Atlanta for a few years. Did living in the South rub off on your sound?

WC: Not really. I think the reason people Down South love me so much is because I was so different. I was around all these people down South, but I sounded like I was from elsewhere, you know what I mean? I think that’s what helps me being from Milwaukee too. I don’t necessarily do the Milwaukee sound. A lot of people always describe my sound as like an East Coast vibe, like early 2000s. I think that sound is what makes me stand out wherever I’m at.

BNB: The Milwaukee sound, it’s more bass-heavy?

WC: The signature sound here I like to credit to this artist named Munch Lauren. When I was in high school, he would go to these house parties and he would produce on his own MacBook. All super, super bass-heavy, and then he’d add these claps. The claps became the signature because the culture in Milwaukee is to dance, right? Like, everybody loves to dance. The dances, they go to these uptempo beats. When the claps come in, whether it’s the girls, they dancing, they twerking or whatever, or the guys, they’re doing this dance called banging, and they’re doing all these different dances. The dances go to the music. And Munch Lauren kind of created the soundtrack to what these dances would be.

So that’s the Milwaukee sound. That’s the culture. If you come here, you go to the North Side, you go to the East Side, you go to these parties, or you go to the club and you hear somebody local, it’s gonna sound just like that. That’s not my style of music. I respect it and I love it to death. I love the Milwaukee music, but I think that I just paint with a different brush.

BNB: Is there a benefit of being in Milwaukee, away from the attention that Chicago attracts?

WC: I like to say that Chicago is the big building standing in front of us. Like when people come to the Midwest, they stop in Chicago. But if you are somebody that just decides to go a little bit further, you find this diamond in the rough, you know what I mean? One of the biggest advantages to being here is just being unique, being able to stand out, ’cause we have such a unique culture.

When people experience it for the first time, they fall in love with it. Which is why I think now Milwaukee is starting to blow up so much, whether it’s going viral on TikTok or you name it. I think once you get a taste of it, people just want more because it’s so different.

I think that is one of our biggest advantages. We’re unlike any place, whether it’s Chicago or any of the big cities. Milwaukee just has such a prominent culture that no one has ever had a taste of. It’s like finding a new restaurant for the first time. You’re just like, “Man, I love this. I gotta keep coming back.” I think in mainstream music, they’re finally getting a taste of it, and now it’s making Milwaukee flourish at a high level.

BNB: What drew you back from Atlanta?

WC: Well, if I’m being honest, my son being born is what brought me back completely. Me and his mother have been friends for a long time. I was living in Atlanta, and she just really wanted to raise him around a bunch of family. Me being born here, all my family is here, and so when we had that talk where she said, “I think I want him to be in Milwaukee,” I had to respect it. I’m obviously wherever he’s at. I’m gonna be with my son. I packed up. I didn’t even hesitate. I left my apartment, said, “I’ll figure it out later,” and I moved back here.

But one thing I promised myself when I moved back here to Milwaukee, I told myself that I would have to function at a high level. It’s a little easier doing music in places that are big cities, like Atlanta and New York. So, coming back here, I made a pact with myself that I have to function at a high level. If I’m gonna move back, there’s no slacking at all. It just ended up being one of the best decisions that I made, coming back here.

POST-SCRIPTS

• “Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. Rap. Rap right now!” LOL.

• Next month: Band Name Bureau’s annual thanks list, plus another interview. Probably!

Spotify already has a well-established problem with AI music1, but Bandcamp seems in greater danger. You only need an email address to post music, which makes it a gold mine for Band Name Bureau and an easy target for sloppers. It also has far fewer resources to fight slop, because Bandcamp is smaller by several orders of magnitude. That could be an asset, weirdly: The only way to make money from the famously stingy Spotify is with tons and tons of streams—and Bandcamp doesn’t offer that scale.

Yet the stuff I encountered isn’t, like, awful. Take Alex and the Chatbots, who just released Halloween Monster Madness:

Though the actual “band” “looks” like this:

The entirety of their Bandcamp bio says, “Written by humans, generated by AI”—a riddle hidden inside a sentence. What’s written? What’s generated?

Scroll down to Prompt Jockey AI Slop, the first of three albums Alex and the Chatbots have released since April, and you’ll learn that this “virtual rock band” has “a human locked away in a dungeon who writes the lyrics.”

The opening track of Prompt Jockey AI Slop, the Chatbots’ opening salvo to the world? “Huntin’ for Hot Wheels,” a punky pop song about…obsessive Hot Wheels collectors.

they rummage through the retail pegs
and dig through all those toys
they gotta find what they’re lookin’ for
they’re 65-year-old boys

Seems random, right? It’s not.

You can find the Chatbots at https://zobovor.bandcamp.com, and some quick searching for “Zobovor” turns up a homepage for David Edwards, a.k.a. Zobovor, an illustrator and writer famous for “recreating and redesigning action figures, die-cast vehicles, and other toys” (or as the headline up top puts it, “slathering ugly gobs of paint on your favorite childhood toys”).

While the Chatbots’ Bandcamp has no direct association with Edwards, the band is “from” Ogden, Utah, where Edwards lives. Considering the URL and that Hot Wheels song, I don’t think there’s any mystery here.

How’s the music? Only marginally more synthetic than your average K-pop. The Halloween album offers serviceable gothy, punky pop, all of it pretty wholesome. (See: Utah.) “Attack of the Killer Pumpkins” is fun, like AFI’s take on It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.

Does the world need this? No, but it seems pretty harmless. I mean, aside from data-processing centers spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and cooling themselves with our precious drinking water.

It’s not all fun times with the Chatbots, though. Last month they released a tribute to Iryna Zarutska called “Iryna.” You’ll recall that her horrific murder on a train in North Carolina intersected perfectly with right-wing hysteria about crime to make those folks briefly care about Ukrainian refugees.2 While the lyrics read as deeply sincere…

Iryna, we shout your name tonight
Iryna, we’ll take up arms and fight
Iryna, your death can’t be ignored
Iryna, we won’t stay silent anymore

…the song sounds like Josie and the Pussycats attempting a protest song for the dance floor. It’s super weird and the most unsettling song in this issue, yet it has nothing to do with Halloween.

More fun are the Gaslighters, a.k.a. “the bad boys of doo wop,” an AI creation of Jack Atkins, a wedding/party/event DJ based in Baltimore. He debuted the project last December with a vintage-sounding Christmas album whose opening song is about a little boy who sharts on Santa’s lap. It also included this:

Disclaimer: I aimed to give this project an old, classic feel, so please don’t expect a high-resolution listening experience. There’s an airy quality and intentional pitch shifts, designed to evoke the sound of playing a record on an old turntable. Additionally, AI technology isn’t perfect, and this was a lot of work! Please keep in mind that I’m just one person with a love of music and creativity... not five singers in a doo-wop group. I don’t sing. So please, understand what you’re getting here.

The Gaslighters’ new Spooky Season is a seven-song EP that includes a fun track called “He’s the American Psycho.”

He’s The American Psycho
(Patrick Bateman)
Got a face so smooth an’ a heart so low
Huey Lewis playin’ on the stereo
It’s The American Psycho
(American Psycho)

Moving on from AI to spam is DJ Chris Diablo. He floods Bandcamp with mash-ups, ambient tracks, and other miscellany so often that the site has previously banned him. “I’m Back - They deleted my last page - Ill try this again - Follow Me,” goes the bio on his current page.

In the past six weeks alone, Diablo has uploaded 45 albums’ worth of music themed around Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. (You can purchase his digital discography for only $538.65!)

Each track’s title includes the name of the song, “(DJ Chris Diablo Edit),” and a questionable BPM number. Take a listen to “131bpm- Tortured Souls(Dj Chris Diablo Edit)”:

For reference, Nicki Minaj’s “Anaconda” is 131 BPM. Maybe the souls are tortured because they can’t find the beat?

Each year “Horror music composer with a lifelong passion for horror” Sam Haynes posts a Halloween album because that’s what you do when you name yourself after Samhain. The ancient Celtic festival celebrating the end of harvest season is actually pronounced “SAH-win,” but try making a common name out of that! Something Winn? Cy Winn, maybe? Just spitballing here.

Pronouncing it as written is endorsed by none other than Glenn Danzig, who named his post-Misfits band Samhain. “The Celtic pronunciation is ‘sah-win,’ and the American pronunciation, of course, because Americans don’t speak Celtic, is ‘Sam-hain,’” Danzig told Vanyaland in 2015. Sam Haynes is British, not American, but let’s move on from my insufferable pedantry.

Thirteen, the 13th album in Haynes’ Halloween series, combines “elements of Synthwave, Gothic rock, EDM and more.” It’s the follow-up to Every Night is Halloween, which reached #11 in Rock Rage Radio’s Top 31 tracks of 2024. Which you obviously remember.

Wondering how an album ended up among the top tracks of 2024—again, insufferable—I did some digging. While I couldn’t confirm where Every Night is Halloween placed, I did find Rock Rage Radio.

It’s part of a network of sketchy-looking internet stations with names like Tattoo Metal Radio (the homepage takeover still mourns Ozzy), Brews Radio (beer or something), Country Rage Radio (red hats welcome), and Mud Radio (“We like it dirty”).

That last one looks extra sketchy, because the “team” page shows one DJ: Roc Rawker, with a stock photo of a DJ and this tossed-off bio:

Roc Rawker is a dude that loves Rock Music. So much so his parents new at birth he was destined to go on to rule the world of Rock N Roll. To not waste any time he was named Roc & that is just what he did.

When you search for the name lurking in the URL, https://mudradiolive.com/members/albert-philips/, a bunch of “talent scout” pages from other countries pop up. They all have different photos of a person purporting to be Albert Philips, but share the same nonsensical bio:

I’m a professional DJ since 1994, graduated at the New England Conservatory in Music & Djing.3 It two doesn’t, herb, have open subdue were. Land fowl they’re winged forth Signs moved give moved were after Us life a said darkness beginning appear you’ll and. Divided in bearing together forth also lesser fifth him appear form. Female. And had firmament there blessed without.

I guess “lorem ipsum” is passé.

Let’s move on to Mexico’s OCULTISMO, who just released ¡El Orejón, El Fanático Y El Valiente! (The Big-Eared, the Fanatic and the Brave!, per SpanishDict). Guess which is which:

It’s all lo-fi, synthesized instrumental music with campy horror vibes and absolutely no low end. But at least it doesn’t sound like AI.

I chuckled at the song title “No Quiero Tu Maldita Fruta En Mi Calabacita!!!!!!,” which Google told me means “I Don’t Want Your Damn Fruit In My Zucchini!!!!!” But the more-reliable SpanishDict noted calabacita can also mean “pumpkin,” which makes more sense and is less funny.

I’m also partial to “Niños Del Autobús A La Muerte,” or “Children from the Bus to Death.”

I’m getting a warning that this is near the email length limit, and I’ve barely covered anything. Let’s go lightning round!

• Speaking of spam, Ontario’s Phibes Praetorius has 563 releases on Bandcamp dating back to 2017. If they share a common denominator, it’s a devotion to quantity, not quality. The latest is By the Flickering Firelight, in which each track forms part of a sentence: 1. Well, We Warned You 2. When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls 3. And the bat in the moonlight flies 4. And inky clouds like funeral shrouds 5. Sail over the midnight skies 6. When the footpads quail at the night bird’s wail 7. And black dogs bay at the moon 8. Then is the spectre’s holiday 9. The dead of the night’s high noon 10. The welcome knell of the midnight well 11. Grisly Grim Goodnight 12. Gonna Git Ya. That last one feels out of place?

• Speaking of Canadians, Count Vlengar hails from Montreal and just released Call of the Gossamer Shadow. It’s a lot of gothy industrial stuff, but nothing with as great a title as “I Know They Hate Me But I Still Hug Human Brains Fresh Out of Pickle Jars,” from 2021’s Bittersweet Hell.

• Gotta say Warlock Corpse is a pretty sweet name for a “dungeon synth” project. It self-describes as music from another world “where magic, dragons and evil warlocks exist”—or Kazakhstan, per its bio. The music is created with vintage synths and recorded on cassette tape, like the new Melodies for Ghosts. It’s inspired by Japanese tales of the supernatural, so obviously there’s a song called “Sanctuary of Supernatural Cats.”

POST-SCRIPTS

• This is the fourth time we’ve done a Halloween issue, and I’ve retroactively branded them all Spook-ehh Season. Now I just watch those SEO dollars roll in!

• From DJ Chris Diablo’s Instagram:

“Hits like a beast!” he says. It belongs to his son, because the family that smokes together, something something.

• Wait, is the stem supposed to be the gorilla’s penis?

• More “He’s the American Psycho” lyrics:
  Well, he’s talkin’ ’bout Genesis with some lady friends
  With a nervous smile that jus’ never ends
  Then he stops mid-sentence, there’s a chill in the air
  Says, “Sabrina, eat her ass, now, don’t just stare”

• Those internet stations are apparently linked to a “record label” called Curtain Call Records. Why the quotation marks? Because it seems less like a label and more like a company that charges no-name bands for stuff like “tailored marketing strategies” and “impactful promotional campaigns” to “help your music shine.” Sounds legit!

When you self-describe as a “really nice Indie-Electronic Rock Band from Chicago” and play patient, layered indie rock, of course you’d tour with Jesus Jones.1 It goes without saying. Sadly, said tour was canceled, but you can find Jesus Jones co-headlining with EMF in the UK next month!

When they announced the tour was off, Discoveries of the American Scientific posted a great cover of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” But the video’s on Facebook, which doesn’t embed in Substack, so you’ll have to go there to see it. We all know that ain’t happening. But I can embed this Instagram post that’s relevant to their band name (and our current political climate).

They are Gutting a Body of Water

There are a lot of ways to open a press release about your new album. Philly’s They are Gutting a Body of Water chose darkness:

Fear. Hate. Distrust. Poverty. Exploitation. And in all of this hollowness, where do we find solace? Where do we seek wholeness?

If you answered “brightly colored products on shelves, dopamine-pushing apps or money-making scams, fed to us slowly and methodically to keep us hooked,” you chose darkness too. It goes on:

The hollow promise of having enough money to purchase an unending supply of things that will never truly make us feel complete, the carrot on the end of the stick that we chase forever.

Again, that’s the opening graf. From there, it non-transitions to “LOTTO, the fourth studio album from They Are Gutting a Body of Water…”

Wait, what? Should you stick around for the 900 words (!!) that follow, you’ll understand how those themes inform LOTTO. You’ll also be treated to quotes like this one from frontman Doug Dulgarian: “In a world of perpetually increasing artifice, this record is my attempt to surface through the sea of false muck.” (Is that worse than a sea of actual muck?)

All this before Dulgarian talks about waking up on New Year’s Day 2025 “nose-diving into fentanyl withdrawal.”

In short, Dulgarian has been through some shit on his way leading what Stereogum calls “the most important band in modern shoegaze.” (Keeping with the theme, writer Eli Enis called Dulgarian’s label, Julia’s War Recordings, “the Creation Records of 2020s shoegaze.”)

What he hasn’t been through, seemingly, are interviews asking the origin of his band name. I only found this one with radio station WPTS in 2023:

Our first question is super basic. We love the band name, how’d you come up with it?
First of all, I had a dream about it, and then I saw it as a tattoo on somebody.
Somebody had the tattoo that said “They Are Gutting A Body of Water?”
Yeah, it was like a stick-and-poke.

Maybe it’s bullshit, but Dulgarian has a lot floating around in his brain. Last year’s odds-and-ends comp swanlike (loosies 2020-2023) has a song called “Fight at a Kegger in the Woods and Everybody is Shining Their Phone Lights Into the Carnage Screaming.” So his story isn’t out of the question.

The Most Beautiful Moth in America

I can’t find much information about the New York-based group that self-identifies as “Coldplay for rats.” Clicking through to YouTube, it looks like the project of songwriter Maggie Rosenberg. When I reached out via Instagram about the origin of the name, she kindly indulged me:

I came up with the name several years before the band even became a thing actually. I was on a YouTube rabbit hole watching videos of moths in their cocoons and time lapse videos of them coming out of their cocoons etc. one of the videos was a kind of home made looking edit put together by some guy for his granddaughter or something. It was a time lapse of a Luna moth coming out of the cocoon and there were title cards overlayed describing what was happening. One of the title cards said “do you know why the Luna moth is so green?” And I remember thinking it would be some sort of scientific explanation, but then he answered with just “I think it’s so that she can be the most beautiful moth in America”

More scientific is a recent Facebook post by something called 1 Minute Animals. It proclaims the luna moth “The Most Beautiful Moth in America.” (Capitalized, so you know they mean it.)

I find all moths kind of gross, but I get it. Yet just a few words later, 1 Minute Animals backtracks, describing the luna moth as “one of the most breathtaking moths in North America.” Whoa, whoa, whoa, now it’s only breathtaking in North America? Who got to you, 1 Minute Animals? Was it those cecropia moth goons?

They only have one minute, so there’s no time to get into it, apparently. However, they’re happy to tell you the moths are nocturnal and don’t have mouths. That’s because they only live for a week and spend the whole time having sex. Let us look to the luna moth for inspiration, everybody.

My Life at The Bottom of the Ocean

The little information I could find about this “Midwest-emo grunge punk shoegaze post-hardcore type shit” group tells me it came together in July 2022, and didn’t we all feel like we were living at the bottom of the ocean during the pandemic? Like, with all the pressure and isolation? Please work with me here. I only have so much to go on with these guys.

I did manage to find a bio, so please retrieve your Local Band Bio bingo cards. Anyone have that they are “not to be pegged into any one genre of music”? How about how they’re “one of those bands that has to be experienced for yourself”? Does anyone’s card have a line about “undeniable” stage presence? Come get your prize!

There’s no word on the origin of their name. Searching online only turns up a couple references to people actually using the phrase “my life at the bottom of the ocean,” including a 2017 Facebook post for a mobile game called Fishdom. “I would have never imagined that I’d find the love of my life at the bottom of the ocean!” proclaims a prince who fell in love with a mermaid character or some shit.

People are mad at the game, according to comments on that post and another on Reddit called “Fishdom is a scam.” Apparently you have to keep buying stuff to make it past the levels.

Even now, I do not start a level unless I have 28 diamonds. I do not start a red level without either a black mine or a yellow colour bomb. I do not start a purple level without a red dynamite. I do not start a challenge level without both a yellow colour bomb and a red dynamite.

How fun!

Love? said the Commander

Normally you steel yourself for bleakness when you learn a band took their name from The Handmaid’s Tale.

Love? said the Commander. What kind of love?

Falling in love, I said.

The Commander looked at me with his candid boy’s eyes. Oh yes, he said. I’ve read the magazines, that’s what they were pushing, wasn’t it? But look at the stats, my dear. Was it really worth it, falling in love? Arranged marriages have always worked out just as well, if not better.

That passage follows a whole monologue from the Commander about how women are better off as baby machines with no autonomy. Today it sounds less like a future dystopia and more like a trad-wife influencer on TikTok. Nolite te bastardes, etc.

Anyway, this duo from “PhilaJersey” self-describes as “slow burning cinematic emo that’ll make ya feel stuff,” which sounds much more positive than Margaret Atwood’s novel or Hulu’s relentlessly bleak adaptation of same.

The duo even has a fun 30-second intro video on YouTube, explaining “who we are and what we do.” They have a series called Spaces, where they record “live performances in unique locations” (including one where member Kate Hall received a tattoo while playing piano) and The Public Domain Song Project, where they record songs for various media in the public domain. Mostly silent films.

Turns out “cinematic emo” is pretty literal and not, as I expected, another way to say “atmospheric.”

They also describe their approach as “maximal minimalism,” because you need to put your literature degree to use somewhere.2 While they don’t specify what, exactly, maximal minimalism means, the fact that they’re a duo that prominently feature the word “slow” in their bio should give you the gist.

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Hey, speaking of lit majors, this Philly band that plays “music for winter” takes its name from the English translation of Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter, a 1970 novel by Austrian writer Peter Handke. It’s about a washed-up pro soccer goalie who murders a woman, then hides out from the police in a town. As the New York Times put it in 1972, “This description of the book as a thriller doesn’t capture the deliberately exasperating experience of reading it.” (The reviewer meant it in a good way.)

To name yourself after an early novel by a shit-stirring3 avant garde writer is a nerd flex of the highest order. Next, the septet went after your freshman year reading list by titling their most recent (and apparently final) album The Iliad and the Odyssey and the Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, “Well, looks like we got ourselves a reader!”

Said reader is singer-guitarist Ben Curttright, who has a BA in English Language and Literature/Letters, an MFA in Creative Writing, and taught at Temple University. (Reviews at Rate My Professor give him a 3.9/5, with 70% of respondents saying they’d take his class again. Seems solid?)

The band is on pause, if not completely done, due to “a lot of boring personal and logistical reasons,” according to an Instagram post from summer 2024.

I’ll keep an eye out for what Curttright does next. Maybe a group called Woodcutters, inspired by Thomas Bernhard? That would be the talk of the English Department’s non-denominational end-of-year party!

Fate Propels the Falling Scythe

When I spoke with the legendary J. Robbins earlier this year, he shared a genre descriptor I hadn’t yet encountered:

I only recently found out that screamo turned into “skramz.” I don't know if it’s a subset of screamo, or if it’s just the way the kids are talking about it now.4

I don’t either. But NYC band Fate Propels the Falling Scythe do, because they identify as “skramz emoviolence metalcore” on their Bandcamp.

My brain can’t really process the words “skramz emoviolence,” because I’m old enough to know Jesus Jones. When I searched for “emoviolence” to get context, a post on the r/Emo subreddit explained:

skramz is a joke term that was made up essentially to mean “real Screamo”. Its only purpose is to differentiate between the DIY hardcore and Screamo scenes from the post- hardcore and metalcore of the 00s that the Hot Topic/ warped tour / taste of Chaos crowd was mistakenly calling Screamo.

SnooHabits5900 goes on to explain, “Emo violence is the subgenre that pulls in Aesthetic and sonic principles from power violence.”

So emoviolence is a subgenre of skramz? And that’s an actual sentence I just typed?

OK, sure. The demos on Fate Propels the Falling Scythe’s Bandcamp draw heavily from metal and hardcore. The music recalls Converge, but with slower interludes and vocals best be described as “hysterical.” Not funny hysterical. More like “being tortured by the Serbian mafia in a basement.”

Check it out for yourself, particularly around 1:45:

The band played their first show this past May, so I can barely find any information about them, much less the origin of their name. One link sent me to the fan wiki for Fate, the “procedurally-generated dungeon crawler RPG released by WildTangent in 2005.” It has a Reaper Scythe (you know, the 10th weapon in the Polearm Class), but I don’t think they’re connected. I’m just trying to get my head around “skramz emoviolence,” y’all.

POST-SCRIPTS

• Dammit, I meant for this to drop earlier. My new plan is to publish on the 10th of every month. Fingers crossed.

• Next month is our annual Halloween music hootenanny!

“Honestly Same is an amplified acoustic and synthetic quintet that improvises patient and contemplative music,” begins their bio. Something about “acoustic” and “synthetic” next to each other hits my ear wrong, but OK. “The sound worlds breathe, loop, iterate, layer.” Mmm-hmm. “Honestly Same finds inspiration in insect and frog calls, resonant harmonies, and the blue light of a neighbor’s TV.”

And there we are. To quote the great Jimmy Pardo, “Well aren’t you interesting.”

It’s an interview cliché to ask about influences, and the answers are always boring. The smartass in me appreciates a hypothetical scenario in which Honestly Same answers a question about their influences with, “Insect and frog calls.” While I don’t think they’re trying to be funny here, it’s still a better answer than, like, Brian Eno’s ambient albums.

Hey, Nothing

Have you seen The Perks of Being a Wallflower? While it’s not crucial to understanding the Atlanta/Athens emo-folk duo Hey, Nothing, it helps. There’s a character in the movie nicknamed Nothing, as the book that was the basis for the movie explains:

The kids started calling him Patty when his real name is Patrick. And “Nothing” told these kids, “Listen, you either call me Patrick, or you call me nothing.” So the kids started calling him “Nothing.” And the name just stuck.

The movie tweaks the origin story a bit and adds this scene, which gave the band Hey, Nothing its name.

Beyond that, a major plot point in the book and film is the secret same-sex relationship between Nothing/Patrick and the quarterback of the football team. A frequent area of inquiry for Hey, Nothing is the nature of the relationship between Tyler Mabry (he/him) and Harlow Phillips (they/them), as a web search reveals:

The never-been-more-reliable Google says they’re merely best friends, but stuff like this out-of-context live photo will keep the couple question at the top.

Shipping Hey, Nothing is a lot more fun than pondering the themes of 33˚, their EP from this year “that grapples with the subject of death through the lenses of parents, partners, siblings, & friends,” according to the band. “Yeah, so what?” you say. “That doesn’t sound very notable.” Allow Hey, Nothing to explain the closer, “Death Song.”

‘Death Song’ tells the story of a mother who is grieving the loss of her two children. It follows her as she tries to organically preserve their bodies, leading to her realization that she will never regain their lives, but that they will forever live with her in memory’s [sic] and in spirit.

Everybody sing along now!

Buried you inside
Nearly took all night
And you'll decompose
Before you start to grow
I know

Faced with a song about dead children, I’m not surprised people have other questions about the band.

Noworrieslmk

I can’t find much info about this LA “genre-fluid jazz quartet,” but their name tells me I shouldn’t stress about that.

Yeah No, For Sure

I can’t remember where I found this, but it was described as “the most Canadian name ever.” Canadian hockey players (!) from Saskatchewan (!!) confirm it.

As does comedian Ryan George.

@theryangeorgeA Perfectly Valid Canadian Conversation

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So which province or territory does the band Yeah No, For Sure hail from? Ontario. But also Indiana and Pennsylvania (though the latter changed its name to the Milktones, blah). My president tells me Canada will soon be part of the U.S., so it’s all the same thing, right?

It’s not clear that any of them are still active, though. The Ontarians haven’t updated their Facebook page since 2023, the Indiana band announced their EP on Instagram in 2021 and never posted again, and even the Milktones announced their debut show in February 2020 then disappeared (though so did the rest of the world).

Is the name to blame? Because neither Right On Yeah No For Sure nor No Yeah For Sure appears to be active anymore, either.

But at least Right On Yeah No For Sure left us with treasures like “High at the Grocery Store” (“i should probably buy some veggies, live a couple more years / i walked out with cigarettes and beer”) and “I Hope That All My Friends Think That I’m Dead” (“id say that shit would get better but thats a god damn lie / shits been goin downhill since tom petty died”).

So Totally

Continuing the theme, a quick look at the Facebook page for So Totally reveals they played a show in April 2024 with a band called Yeah, No! It’s hard to tell if Yeah, No has fallen victim to the curse since, because their Bandcamp hasn’t seen any action since “Jim’s Car Remixed November 2021”—released, curiously, in July 2021:

My name is Jim I hold this city’s key
Come to the bathroom do a bump with me
Let’s fuck

What was your name now I have go to go
You’ll hear of me from everyone you know
I suck but I don’t give a fuck

Back to So Totally. The Philly band debuted back in 2015 as So Totally in Love, and while the first rule of Band Name Bureau is “Don’t change your name,” I get it. Technically, they only shortened it—like BNB alums Now, Now (formerly Now, Now Every Children) and Say Hi (formerly Say Hi to Your Mom)—and I understand the need to purge the cringe from their name.

They need to purge their album notes, too. A curious phenomenon in the BNB universe is the local band with a ridiculously long bio. Whereas a new group releasing an album on a cool label will top out at 500 words, some random band that’s never played outside its hometown goes all Infinite Jest.

To wit, So Totally’s notes for last year’s Double Your Relaxation:

That’s 180 words, which is long for Bandcamp’s UI. Yet…“more.”

It continues for an additional, eye-glazing 566 words, practically defying anyone to reach the end. Tightly edited, it is not.1 For instance, instead of saying Double Your Relaxation is the first So Totally album that wasn’t self-produced, it laboriously explains:

So Totally’s tones over each work are especially remarkable as Double Your Relaxation is So Totally’s first in-studio record; in other words, their first record that wasn’t completely self-produced.

At least that’s fairly straightforward. Try parsing this monster that reads twice as long as its 44 words:

Lyrically and thematically, Double Your Relaxation explores where influence and “hypnosis” exist in life, specifically in environment, media, relationships, and self (via mental illness), bouncing between perspectives of witnessing, interacting with, and contributing to illusion and how that ultimately affects our idea of identity.

Because I value your time, I won’t paste a later 76-word anaconda of a sentence waiting to slowly strangle you with comma splices. Just know that the bio concludes like a book report, noting the songs lend themselves “very appropriately” to the shoegaze and “heavy indie” (??) favored by So Totally, “making them a perfect addition to the canon of the genre.”

I’m of two minds about this. First, this is the reason ChatGPT exists. Drop the bio in there, and let the machine work its magic while glazing you about the level of detail. Second, this is precisely the kind of nonsense that is Band Name Bureau’s raison d’être. Where would I be if bands like So Totally didn’t go overboard on their bios? Shine on, you wordy diamonds.

Ya, I Feel Ya

Not to keep on my bio bullshit, but…

We emerge with a story that blends our punk rock roots with the cosmic pull of auditory experimentation. Unbound by rules, where grit meets introspection, and chaos dances with calm. Rooted in immersive soundscapes that echo the complexities of life. With no expectations, we offer only this: Ya, I Feel Ya.2

That kicker is low-key funny and nicely undercuts the horseshit that precedes it. (Cosmic pull of auditory experimentation? Chaos dances with calm? Gimme a break.) Still, the press release for their debut single, “Chattering Mind,” sucks the fun right out of Ya, I Feel Ya’s moniker.

The band’s name isn’t just a phrase—it’s an acknowledgment, a connection. When someone shares something meaningful—whether it’s joy, struggle, or something in between—they reply with, “Ya, I feel ya.” It’s their way of saying, We hear you. We see you. We understand. This sentiment extends beyond the music; it’s the core of their bond. As bandmates and brothers, their music reflects a lifelong relationship built on empathy, authenticity, and an unwavering dedication.

Feeling seen yet?

Because the phrase “Ya, I feel ya,” for me, conjures a couple dudes catching up while smoking outside and sipping beers. Maybe they’re in Wisconsin and it’s a winter night. One of them probably looks like Mark Borchardt. They stare into the darkness, maybe some lights from a parking lot visible in the distance. “How you been?” one guy says. “Eh, fine,” says the other. “Work’s been kickin’ my ass, though.” “Yeah, I feel ya,” says the other guy. They commiserate for a bit longer, then drop their cigarettes in their beer bottles before heading back inside.

It’s specific, yes. But it’s more realistic than this line from the press release: “Ya I Feel Ya isn’t just a band. It’s a bond, a journey, and above all, a feeling.”

POST-SCRIPTS

• Speaking of AI, that “Chattering Mind” video is a blacklight poster come to life. Look at that thumbnail!

• I’m sure I wrote something similarly laborious to the So Totally bio in high school. I probably shoehorned some band I like into a theology paper or something. “How NOFX’s ‘Where’s My Slice’ Counters John Paul II’s Sollicitudo Rei Socialis,” By Kyle Ryan

• Also So Totally is pretty good!

• I’ve never seen The Perks of Being a Wallflower or The Flash, but I followed media stories about Ezra Miller’s flameout. Looks like they’ve stabilized and are taking tentative steps back into Hollywood. SOUNDTRACK OPPORTUNITY!

Even within the ever-shrinking world of media, it’s especially difficult to try to make a living talking about music these days. I witnessed it firsthand at The A.V. Club, where by the mid-2010s, music reviews and interviews drew few readers, even for prominent artists and releases. When all music is freely available at all times, listeners can easily listen and form their own opinions, so who needs critics? It also didn’t help that, within the A.V. Club world at least, musicians tended to give the least-interesting interviews.

Yet Vish Khanna has made it work for his podcast, Kreative Kontrol, which released its 1,000th episode today. When it seems like everyone and their brother has a podcast (or, uh, a newsletter), to reach that milestone is quite an accomplishment. And to make 1,000 episodes focusing only on things you like or that interest you—without cravenly chasing downloads—is a laurel wreath atop that accomplishment.

Not long before Kreative Kontrol turned over the odometer, Band Name Bureau spoke to Khanna from his home base in Canada.

Band Name Bureau: How did you come to be a music fan? Can you give me a little overview of your musical journey?

Vish Khanna: I was 5 or 6 years old and my cousin Anand—it was the early ’80s—would play Love and Rockets and the Police and whatever was going on. Depeche Mode. U2 in particular, I remember. But he had this Beatles tape, a compilation called Rock ’n’ Roll Music Vol 1. I was particularly smitten with that. I liked the other stuff because I was already, at that time, starting to see music videos on Canadian television here on MuchMusic. And I was big into the radio, but the Beatles thing really stuck to me. If I recall correctly, that tape has them doing “Twist and Shout,” maybe “Long Tall Sally”—just them screaming, the way they sounded, really spoke to me.

I got so into them that I would read books and get magazines and watch documentaries. There was a documentary that I recorded off of PBS called The Compleat Beatles. The more I read about them, the more I'd encounter things like, oh, Ringo Starr couldn't do a tour because he was sick, and so they had to get a different drummer. And I'd be like, “What? The Beatles got sick? They’re humans?” It didn't occur to me that these people, who were quite iconic, were humans. The more I read about artists and musicians and people I liked, the more it humanized them.

So I was really interested in music journalism because it felt like every time I read or watched something about an artist or someone I liked, I got to know them a bit more, and they felt more relatable. If I really think on it, that's what led me to where I am now.

BNB: It sounds like you were set on a path to what would be called “alternative music” pretty early. Love and Rockets, of course, but even U2 wasn’t mainstream in the ’80s.

VK: I was very fixated on them for a good chunk of time. But then, when the year punk broke in ’91, [I was] becoming interested in Nirvana. Punk music generally made me feel a little resentful of bands like U2. I still followed them, but because they were platformed so much by mass media that, when I discovered punk and underground music… I would've just turned 14 that December of ’91. That's a pretty formative age to be like, “Wait a minute, I think you guys were holding back on me! There's a whole other cultural universe that you didn't tell me about! What's that about?”

I was just at an age where hormonally, I was getting a little angsty, and then to feel like I hadn't been told the full story. I was just endlessly consuming all sorts of media. There's something about really wanting to be informed, even at that age, and be in the know, I guess. I don’t know why or what exactly. I mean, my son has it too. He just wants to be like, “Yeah, I know about that. I read about that. I found out about that.”1

The first bands I saw live were because they were opening for U2 on the Zoo TV tour, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy and Primus. Those were the bands on the bill, and I didn't know who they were. On some level, in retrospect, those were good choices to make curatorially, to be like, “Okay, we have this audience. Let's show them something.” I mean, who knows if they were big fans of either. I could see them liking Michael Franti and Disposable Heroes at the time—they had a Public Enemy vibe.

BNB: Television, the drug of a nation.

VK: Yeah! [U2] certainly could not be less cool now, but there was something about it that seemed both cool, but also why is this band so successful when all this other amazing music is not?

BNB: This is a good time to ask this question, because Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy is such a mouthful of a name. Do you remember when you first noticed a name, good or bad?

VK: So growing up at that time, in the ’80s in particular, I don't know if they ever really particularly resonated with me. What does Crowded House mean? Or INXS was an interesting one. Or REM. I think a lot of bands picked names because of how they sounded, but also what they looked like.

In high school, when we started to be old enough to drive to shows, Sonic Youth, for example, spoke to me. But I remember in high school being into them and my English teacher being, “Sonic Youth, aren't they all in their 40s?” I'm like, “Yeah, they're older, I think.” And he was like, “Yeah, so maybe they should be called Sonic Old.”

BNB: They've never heard that!

VK: We started to go see shows, particularly at a club called the Volcano in Kitchener, Ontario, and that's when I started to notice names like Dayglo Abortions.

BNB: That's a good one.

VK: I think they started to hit me as, you can have fun with them, punk bands. I mean, I was probably slightly scandalized by the Sex Pistols or the Buzzcocks—just seeing someone in high school wear a shirt that said Buzzcocks, which was something that occurred. NoMeansNo was a big band for me, and that is an interesting band name, because I thought of it as a parent saying to a child, “No means no.” But of course it became a term used in the context of sexual assault.

Fugazi was a name that did stand out for me because, when you first heard it, it was almost like a secret. No one really that I knew had heard the music. You just kept hearing [about them]. If we started to go to record stores or we’d read magazines and fanzines, it was just this word, and I didn't know what it meant, but everyone said it, like, "Yeah, that's the band."

When I finally heard [the music], I didn't really think about their name that much, but it was an unusual-looking word, and ultimately, I think a kind of a beautiful word. Then over the years, you are watching Donnie Brasco or The Wolf of Wall Street, and you're hearing people use “fugazi,” like the sort of Italian connotation, and it's jarring. It was jarring to me to watch The Wolf of Wall Street and watch Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey wrestle with how to pronounce the word. I was like, “It's so weird that that word means so much to me, and that band means so much to me, but it also has this other meaning.”

Fugazi is really an interesting term because it's an acronym. They got it from “fucked up, got ambushed, zipped in,” Vietnam slang, yet there's this Italian word. That's a fascinating aspect of that band's name.

I liked puns a lot when I would write songs, even in post-hardcore bands. I think it's the John Lennon fan in me. I just liked silly puns in these angry songs that were full of puns.

BNB: What were some of the names of bands you were in?

VK: I didn't really name too many of them, but one of the bands in high school was called Dioctave, like Divided Octave. I don't know why. I grew up primarily playing music with a couple of different clusters of people, but the most prominent one is likely Dallas Wehrle and Steve Lambke, who went on to be in the Constantines. We grew up playing music together, learning how to play music together.

After that dissolved, we went off to school, university and stuff like that. Initially, Dallas went to a different school in Toronto. I went to the University of Guelph, and Steve was a year behind us. We all convened at the University of Guelph, and we had a band called Captain Copilot. Our friend Rob Pal mumbled it, I believe. I don’t know what we were talking about, but it clicked with Steve, I think, who's like, “Captain Copilot. That's our name.”

The one band that I remember naming was this folk-country community collective idea I had, which was that I would write some songs, but also we would play lots of other people's songs. The premise was that anyone in the community who wanted to could join the band and sing along. So our practices could be like 30 people. The shows could be like that too. I wanted it to be really inclusive at the time. I named it the Crying Out Loud Choir, which I feel like my friend Nancy Ogilvie said at some point.

That band started because someone was putting together a benefit compilation called 60-Second Songs. He would ask everyone to write a 60-second song. I decided to write a song for it in kind of a country-folk realm. We did a recording session in my friend's living room, pretty makeshift—might've been a four track or something, an eight track of some kind. I feel like [Nancy] just said it in that space, "Oh for crying out loud, Vish," or something like that. I was like, “Okay, it's going to be called the Crying Out Loud Choir.”

I don't know if it's a good name or not, but it seemed to work. If I think about it, other than my kids, I name things kind of impulsively.

BNB: Was the naming of your podcast impulsive?

VK: The naming of my podcast, in retrospect, came about because I was working for a media company, and it had gone super well for three and a half years. And then by what ended up being the end of my time there, I was feeling a bit stifled. I was being asked to do things I didn't quite want to do. I was being told I couldn't do things that I normally could do in the older version of the position, meaning stop freelancing for The A.V. Club2 and Exclaim!

I started at that company as a radio host and as a producer, and that part of the job ended, and I just missed it. I liked sharing music. One of the things I most like about what I do is that I'm sharing something I found with whoever is out there. “I like this band. I like this record. I like this book. You might like it too.” I like to spread the word about something that I think is good, and so I felt kind of stifled.

I started back on the community radio station at the University of Guelph. I started a music mix radio show called Kreative Kontrol, and I named it after the Hot Snakes song, meaning I named it with the two Ks that the Hot Snakes song has instead of Cs.

That band really spoke to me. That sentiment really spoke to me. If you look at the lyrics of that song, they spoke to me too. I just was feeling a little hemmed in, and I wanted to say something. And the fact that it was Ks and my last name was Khanna. It's not alliteration exactly, but I liked the way it looked and sounded to have those hard K sounds. It was a little more purposeful.

Then I realized quickly that my interview style tends to get into people's creative motivations, why they do what they do. I'm often drawn to people who do things on their own terms and do things differently. I don't know that I had all of these thoughts at the time, but I certainly have a sense memory of feeling like I need to be proud and take ownership over what I do.

BNB: Episode titles of Kreative Kontrol are always the guest's name, and you never censor provocative names, like put a dash or an asterisk in Tropical Fuck Storm or Pissed Jeans or Fucked Up or whatever. I don’t think the podcast platforms censor them, do they?

VK: Apple does it. Not every time. I don't think they did it with Tropical Fuck Storm, but they will. They have asterisked Fucked Up's name in their feed.

BNB: Podcast analytics are notoriously limited, but have you noticed, if you have one of those names, is there a difference in the reach or how many plays it gets?

VK: I think it only impacts engagement on more censorious social media platforms. Facebook will limit your reach if you've got certain… I mean as we're speaking, it's like if you have the word “genocide” in your show description or “Gaza” or whatever, you will be like, “Normally my posts get 50 likes, easy, on Instagram, and it's doing nothing.” Sometimes the algorithm gets you. They definitely are doing something. I don't know that it translates that much into pod download/stream statistical issues, but in terms of social media reach or website reach, yeah.

But I think the people who follow your show or follow the artists that you're profiling, like Tropical Fuck Storm... That episode, they really got behind it as a band on their socials. So their fans found it and then their fans found me. That is always the sweet spot in terms of community-building and audience-building. I like this band, and I'm going to talk about them. The band seems appreciative or the artist seems appreciative of the conversation. They share it with their audience. Then members of my audience are like, “I didn't know who Tropical Fuck Storm was. This sounds great. The guy sounded really cool. I liked the music.” Those are my favorite messages, frankly, from my listeners. It suggests that they trust me, so they feel like if I'm taking the time to talk to someone, it might be worth their time to check out their work.

Subsequently, Tropical Fuck Storm fans ideally would be like, “Hey, that interview was cool. Who is this guy? I haven’t heard of his show before.” Those are the other great messages. I love that part. It's a roller coaster ride, of course, of will that stuff happen, but when it does, when the worlds collide, if you will, it's the best.

But yeah, sorry, to answer your original question: If you like a band called Tropical Fuck Storm or Fucked Up, then you are potentially more open-minded, and you're going to find the thing despite many obstacles on the internet.

I do think that the bands who put curses in their name probably don't care about the stuff we're talking about. If you give yourself a name that is going to niche yourself, then you're probably in a way not as concerned. If that's your name from day one, you're probably like, “Well, we're going to have limited resonance in the mainstream. Our name has curses in it.” But then Fucked Up or Tropical Fuck Storm routinely sell out venues that are pretty mid-sized to huge, and when they do stuff, it's always in the news. They're not ignorable.

BNB: You're also playing with people's expectations. Fartbarf talks about how if your band name is Fartbarf, people's expectations are very low when they see you. Then it’s like, “Hey, they're pretty good for a band called Fartbarf.” Or you have the situation with Gay for Johnny Depp, which was a way for a band that plays aggressive music to keep out the meatheads.

VK: I mean, potentially you might also draw the meatheads in to find out what the situation is. That's a complicated one.

I don't know why I didn't even think of this, but as a kid encountering the name Dead Kennedys. There are shocking and provocative names and you don't really understand. I mean, yeah, what's the point of that, exactly? Is that going to distract from the music you make? Then you listen to Dead Kennedys, or when I did anyway, I was like, “What the hell? This is so incredible.” But there would be people who may not even push play because of the name. So are you shooting yourself in the foot, or are you drawing people in?

BNB: Have you skipped checking out a band because of a name?

VK: I don't think so. I mean, it's just not how I operate. There's a band out of Canada called the Inbreds. Do you know them?

BNB: No.

VK: So the Inbreds, that's a silly sort of name. And yet the music that Mike O'Neill wrote and sings in that band is super-sophisticated pop music. He is one of the greatest pop songwriters of our time.

They were an underground band here in Canada and then in the major-label feeding frenzy, I think they signed a thing with a subsidiary of Atlantic. Like a lot of smaller bands, it didn't really go the way they wanted it to, but they were called the Inbreds. I just wonder if someone in their A&R department or whatever was like, “Okay, you've got this great album and we want to market it, but you're called the Inbreds.” I wonder if it ever gave them pause.

There's all sorts of ways where you can create confusion, but I do think sometimes thinking five seconds longer about whether or not you're going to call your band the Inbreds might have some impact on your trajectory.

I just want to be clear: I have no problem with that name. But at that time in the ’90s, if you're the fifth, sixth, seventh coming of Paul McCartney, but your band is called the Inbreds, there's probably something to that in terms of your reach. Even if you make a pop masterpiece that could be played on mainstream radio, it's unlikely that some morning-zoo crew is going to be like, "And that was the Inbreds!"

BNB: When I interviewed Ombigiizi, Adam Sturgeon said that bands from Canada have a reputation for boring names. Do you agree?

VK: I don't think we have a reputation for that. Did he give you examples?

BNB: No, he just said it’s common for Canadian bands to have names that are kind of a shrug. He used the word “milquetoast.”

VK: I've cited a few already, like Dayglo Abortions, NoMeansNo...

BNB: Fucked Up.

VK: Yeah, Fucked Up. Here's one that I didn't know what to make of: Propagandhi. So Propagandhi, if you think of where they went, [they’re a] pretty serious band dealing with real-world issues, getting into sociocultural and political unrest. But they started out as a Fat Wreck Chords band called Propagandhi. I'm an Indian guy first of all, and I'm like, “So their pun on propaganda is to call their band Propagandhi? What are you doing, exactly? What is the point of that?” Then as I say, they evolved into this very politically outspoken and politically conscious band.

BNB: They were that way from the jump, though. That very first record is full of it.

VK: Yes, you're exactly correct. That's a good point to raise, but my point is, is that not completely a joke name?

BNB: Oh, absolutely.

VK: I don't think that's milquetoast at all. It's silly, but it was in the vein of silly, nihilistic punk bands. Nihilistic, I mean, in terms of career nihilism, careerism. You pick a band name sometimes, I think, because it sounds cool to you and your friends. It's some sort of inside joke or reference, but some people pick them ’cause they think it'll look cool on a record sleeve or they're thinking about how it's going to be perceived externally, which is interesting.

Every person who's going to enter the public sphere will be viewed externally, but I think some people are more deliberate about their choices in terms of what's palatable. But yeah, Propagandhi is a weird band name for what they do. Or maybe it's perfect.

BNB: Well, I'll close out by asking you the thing I always ask everybody: Is it better to have an anodyne name that seeps into the background or a bad name that is memorable?

VK: A bad name that is memorable? I mean, I guess as long as you're not offending anyone maybe or purposely trying to troll people. Because that's a lot of what we're living through right now, is just constantly being like, “Is this person fucking with us, or is this how they really feel?” I mean, it's almost like a comedy issue at this point. “Is your name meant to just be playful and funny provocative, or is it because I'm not familiar with these terms? Are you saying something else?” Because language itself is so fractured and people speak in their own codes in their communities that sometimes you're like, “I don't even know what these terms are.”

I think the vernacular changes. I said this on some other thing I was on recently. I do think we're living in a bizarre time for language comprehension, and that subtlety and nuance and satire is missed by more people than I can recall. Everything's got to be blunt. Or the other side of it is some people take everything so literally that they miss the subtlety and the nuance.

POST-SCRIPTS

• I know I said I’d have a regular issue this month, in addition to two interviews (check out Winona Fighter if you missed it), but I didn’t have time to pull it off, alas. The usual nonsense will resume in August.

Listening to “You Look Like a Drunk Phoebe Bridgers,” it’s surprising Winona Fighter ever went by another name.

“Go ahead, I’ll let you take the first punch,” sings singer/drummer/guitarist Chloe “Coco” Kinnon.“’Cause honey I know ain’t got much / And you’re going down / In front of your friends / You try to get up / I’ll knock your ass out again.”

The suit a band with “fighter” in its name, though for several years the group simply went by Coco, Kinnon’s nickname. That the Nashville punk trio—rounded out by bassist/producer Austin Luther and guitarist Dan Fuson—eventually settled on Winona Fighter makes sense, given the fighting spirit that’s so prevalent on their full-length debut, My Apologies to the Chef.

Opener “JUMPERCABLES” only goes seven lines before mentioning beating someone up. On “HAMMS IN A GLASS,” Kinnon sings about sharpening knives and not being able to play nice. There’s the raging aftermath of domestic violence in “I’M IN THE MARKET TO PLEASE NO ONE.” It goes on and on—even in the songs whose titles aren’t in all caps—but you get the idea.

Ahead of the band’s tour, which kicks off tonight, Band Name Bureau spoke with Kinnon about becoming Winona Fighter, being a punk band in country music’s capital city, and causing confusion in the marketplace.

Band Name Bureau: Tell me about the process of going from Coco to Winona Fighter.

CK: I mean, we are artists, but we're also musicians—we just really care about our instruments and our craft and our ability. So a lot of our focus goes toward that, instead of maybe more the artistic-branding aspect. For a long time we were just doing DIY tours and playing in Nashville as much as possible. The thought was always in the back of our head, like, "Okay, eventually we're going to need to settle on an entity name." But yeah, we just went by my nickname from 2017, when I met Dan, until 2022, when we released Father Figure.

It's my band, but it's a band. I never liked going by my nickname, and then also it didn't fit. We would be on these all-punk bills, and it would be fucking Neckbreaker and then it's like…Coco. [Laughs.]

When we started working on the Father Figure EP, it was work on the EP and then also, “Okay, let's hunker down and figure out what we want the rest of our lives to look like in the form of a band name.”

BNB: How did you end up settling on Winona Fighter?

CK: Oh man. It was a lot of Austin and I going back and forth. We were a week away from having to submit the EP to DSPs. We probably have a whole Notes app with 30 band names in it.

BNB: I’m going to ask about those too, but go on.

CK: Austin got stoned one night. He really liked Bilmuri, so you think of the actor, but not really. He liked the pop culture reference.

He mentioned, “Has anyone done anything with Winona Ryder? She's badass. This is a badass, female-fronted project. She's very punk.” He brought up Winona Fighter, which has feminine elements, but then also this tough grittiness to it, which I think perfectly describes us as a whole.

At first I was like, "No." [Laughs.] The next day, I started writing it out, putting it on merch to see what it would look like. After maybe 12, 24 hours, it started to click with me. I was like, "Actually, I do think that's cool, and I do think that will work."

We’re not these diehard Winona Ryder fans. Or everyone asks if we're from Winona, Minnesota—Austin's from Minnesota, but he's not from Winona. So [it’s] just more of what is something that is going to catch people's attention, but also captures the vibe of our music in the band.

BNB: Do you remember any of the other contenders?

CK: Let me see. We wanted to name something Wrestling Moves. We did a whole second EP that we were going to call Wrestling Moves, and we were like, “Oh, well, what if we named the band Wrestling Moves?” It just wasn't the vibe. Austin really liked the name Beijing Beef, so you can probably get the vibe as to why it took so long to get a band name down. [Laughs.]

BNB: Beijing Beef, wow.

CK: We would see something and we'd be like, “Oh, is that a band name?”

For me, some of those punny names are really good, but then some of them are really bad. I was like, “How do we stay on the right side of this line?”

BNB: Do you get much feedback?

CK: For every, I think, negative feedback we get about the name, there's 10 or 15 people who are like, “Are you kidding me? That's a great name!” We were just in this thread where it was talking about pun band names or names of celebrities as band names, and it was like, “What's an example of a good one?” Because they're mostly bad. We were mentioned a couple times.

At the end of the day, again, I'm not as super-bothered with our artistic representation as I am the music and us being a live performing act. I like the name. I can live with the name the rest of my life.

BNB: That's the key, because so many times bands come up with names that were an inside joke. They never expected anything to happen with their band, and now they're stuck with a name that they hate.

CK: I think it's at the end of the Wasting Light documentary for Foo Fighters. The last thing Dave Grohl says is, “If I knew this was going to work out, I would've come up with a better fucking name.” I mean, you do go into this career hoping that it's going to work out and being kind of delusional, but there is that thing in the back of your mind that's like, “Well, this is the name, whatever. We'll see if this works.”

BNB: Is there a story behind Coco being your nickname?

CK: Yeah, it's funny. My dad is a Boston projects kid, and then my mom is from middle of nowhere, Alabama, very Southern. She wanted people to call me Chloe Grace. My middle name is Grace. She wanted that so bad. She wanted not just Chloe, Chloe Grace. But my dad started calling me “Coco” because I think that was maybe just easier for him. [Laughs.] Then, yeah, Coco just stuck. More people call me Coco than they do Chloe.

But I think the hardest thing for me when we were going by Coco was I enjoy having personal life and band separation. Definitely had we stuck with the nickname and dropped the EP and it getting all the traction it did, I think I would've felt like, "Oh, I don't know…" on a privacy level.

BNB: Because that would make you even more front and center.

CK: Yeah, exactly. I'm always into social media videos or X, Y, Z, but we do such a great job of being equal faces in the band—especially now that it is Winona Fighter instead of what my dad calls me.

BNB: Growing up, were there any band names that you particularly liked or disliked? Have you ever avoided anybody because of their name?

CK: Oh, that's a good question. No, I've never avoided anyone because of their name. I've always been like, "Oh, does the band name fit?" My very first punk band, it was put together by this after-school program thing. The teacher named it Dragonfly based off of the Jimi Hendrix song. I was 11, 12, and I was like, "That's not going to work." [Laughs.] 'Cause we were playing punk music!

Any band names I really, really liked... I'm a huge fan of the Wonder Years. I think that's just such a nostalgic and classic name to have.

BNB: Nostalgic because of the Wonder Years as a concept or because it's referring to a TV show?

CK: I think as the concept. I do wonder if they named it after the TV show.1 I think that is a name that in any generation or any decade, it could be a band name. I always thought the Dead Kennedys was clever. That's a great name. I would say the one band... it's just so simple, but the Misfits. I like it, and I get it, and I listen to their music, but when I think of Misfits, I would attribute a name like that more to a Generation X band or a punk band. British, spiky hair…

BNB: Not gothy.

CK: Yeah. [Laughs.] I love '90s grunge, but all of those names are brutal. Well, Nirvana is a good one. That's a good, solid name.

BNB: Pearl Jam is not good.

CK: Pearl Jam's a little tough. Soundgarden. But I can imagine the conversation that went on that's like, “Okay, people have to know this is a band: ‘Sound,’ and then…something.” I think it's funny. I love knowing why bands are named the way that they are.

BNB: You've spoken quite a bit about coming up in the Boston punk scene and not finding a lot in Nashville when you moved there. Is it because it's such an industry town? Or because it was smaller than you were used to in Boston?

CK: Definitely because it’s an industry town, and there just was tons and tons and tons of country music. I would say now there's more of a scene, but it's still very industry- driven. I feel like in the Boston punk scene, it was very much for the love of it. People would come from their blue-collar jobs, their job at the utility company, play, and then go to bed and do it all over again. Whereas in Nashville, the authenticity is hard to find.

BNB: It’s more careerist, you mean?

CK: Yes. [Fewer] people doing alternative rock, punk, metal, whatever it is for the genuine love of it instead of the look of it. The scene's grown, but you still have to kind of search for those little authentic pockets.

BNB: In the behind-the-scenes video you made for “Wlbrn St Tvrn,” you mentioned that you felt disrespected as Winona Fighter found their place in Nashville. I was curious as to what you meant by that.

CK: Yeah, for a long time we were just trying to play as much as we could. We would be on all-country bills and then go up and do our thing, and the majority of the audience was like, "What the fuck is this?" But there would be one person who was like, "Oh, I listened to Blink-182 growing up. This is right up my alley."

But then I would say, post-2020 and the whole TikTok boom is when a lot of Nashville country artists and country writers started to see, "Oh, this emo/pop-punk resurgence is happening. Let's scoot over on this." Then we started to be able to put together more alternative bills. But because these people were popping off on TikTok and not necessarily doing the work by putting together these shows or playing these shows, it was definitely tough. There was a very cliquey alternative community for a long time in Nashville of “My video on TikTok got 500,000 views and I'm popping off as a rock person.” Then we would play shows with these people. The scene I grew up in, you learn respect.

BNB: Boston's no joke.

CK: Yeah. If you don't respect the people you're sharing the stage with or those around you, good luck getting back into this scene, my friend.

There were some bands we would play with multiple times, and every time they'd be like, "Oh, well, it was nice to meet you." It was like five times at one point. It got to the point where I called the band out, and obviously people don't like that. [Laughs.]

There was one show we did with these two more-TikTok-famous people. We brought out a hundred people to the show, and maybe there were 120 people in total at the show. But again, they just didn't talk to us, looked over us.

I don't get into the cliquishness or the drama of it. We're all trying to accomplish the same goal here. You may be popping off this way, but we're popping off this way, so we are equals, and we are all in this together. You're not hot shit. We're not hot shit. I think having any sort of ego in this genre or scene is just crazy—’cause it's so hard to begin with, to break through.

BNB: Even on the business side. I saw in one interview where you had a trademark declined because of Wynonna Judd.

CK: Yeah, we applied for, I think, [a] merch [trademark]. I don't know the specific one, but just all around, this is our name, we own this name. We got the decline letter back, and we were like, “Oh shit, probably [because of] Winona Ryder.” My attorney called the trademark office, and it was some kid denied us because of Wynonna Judd.

I guess the spelling doesn't matter, which is wild. It's a different genre. It's a different set of words. I think we just got some asshole kid who needed a power trip. We even appealed and we sent, I think it was, upwards of 50 pages of evidence.

BNB: There's no confusion in the marketplace.

CK: Exactly. Selena Gomez has a trademark. Selena the singer has that trademarked. There were a lot of examples of that, but we had to send our appeal to the same kid who denied us in the first place, and he immediately said, "Nope." So now we have to wait and try it all again.

BNB: That's so bizarre. Well, I always ask this of everybody I interview: Do you think it's better to have a bad name that's memorable or an innocuous name that doesn't attract attention?

CK: Bad name that's memorable, for sure. Now, I mean a bad name that's memorable in the sense of it's not harming anyone or any group of people or anything.

BNB: Why do you think that?

CK: Because people will still be talking about it. It's how I think when people leave hate comments. It's like, “Okay, well, you're still giving the post the attention it needs to thrive.” Some people would say Winona Fighter is a bad name, and it's just like, “Okay, well, it's still in your mouth.”

POST-SCRIPTS

• You can find Winona Fighter’s tour dates here.

• Winona Fighter is one of the bands I recommended when I was interviewed for Sound Opinions, which you can listen to here. I also recommend Ombiigizi, Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers, Bikini Trill, and…Fartbarf.

• Also, hello all of you Sound Opinions listeners! Thanks for subscribing.

• This is gonna be an active July at Band Name Bureau. Also coming soon is a regular issue with the usual nonsense and another one with an interview with journalist/critic Vish Khanna of the great music podcast Kreative Kontrol.

From WBEZ Chicago, it’s…a Chicago post-hardcore band named after the host of This American Life. That’s it, that’s the name: Ira Glass. Not, like, Ira Sass or Chimaera Glass or Ira Glass Houses. There’s a lot of possibility, but nope. Just the name Barry and Shirley Glass bestowed upon their only son back in March 1959.

The decision has a typically banal origin. “I feel like we were shouting out names one time,” guitarist Sunny Betz told The Alternative in 2023. “We could have done a dumb riff on his name, where we spelled it differently or something, but I feel like that’s not the point.”

So what is the point?

“I feel like it does have a political meaning, but I don’t know if I could really articulate it,” added vocalist/guitarist Lise Ivanova. “I grew up with him, having a liberal upraising in a way. He really symbolizes something for me. I don’t know what.”

Maybe in the two years since, Ivanova has settled on the political and/or symbolic meanings of Ira Glass, but the band hasn’t done much press. Their Instagram has a scant three images, and their website must’ve taken minutes to make.

Luckily, they were very chatty with The Alternative’s Elizabeth Piasecki Phelan, who reached out to their namesake for comment. “Even if they picked the name to mock me, I like it. Nice someone cares,” Glass said via email. He needn’t be concerned. “No, no. We respect the man,” Ivanova assured Phelan.

“As a band, in any of our aspects we try not to be gimmicky,” said drummer Landon Kerouac.1 “That’s what we’re kind of worried about. We’re not trying to boost SEO or anything.”

Again, they needn’t be concerned. Naming yourself after a major media figure who’s been active for nearly five decades has the opposite effect of SEO. As the great Leor Galil wrote in the Chicago Reader, “If you’ve got the chutzpah to borrow your unknown posthardcore group’s name from one of public radio’s most famous personalities, you’d better be prepared to get buried in search results.” Exactly. No one’s gonna find this Ira Glass without appending “band” to their search query.

The name Ira Glass is more geared toward IRL optimization. I can picture some aging, liberal tote-bagger happening across an event listing. “Honey, Ira Glass is in town!” they say over their morning açai bowl. “And tickets are super cheap! It’s strange that he’s appearing in the downstairs bar of some place called Subterranean, but that’s Ira! He always keeps us guessing!”

Imagine their surprise when the quartet stoically takes the stage and launches into “Torrid Love Affair With a Family Annihilator.”

As Ivanova repeatedly screeches “His hair / falling all over me,” one of our Glass-heads leans over to the other and says, “Surely Torey Malatia wouldn’t approve of this!”

Salvia Palth

This is one of a handful of monikers used by New Zealand’s Daniel Johann Lines, who found acclaim as Salvia Palth with the 2013 release of melanchole. Lines doesn’t capitalize anything, which tracks with that album title and a name inspired by an iconic poet who famously committed suicide. He’s also released music under his own name and Adore, 1996, which seems like a reference to the Smashing Pumpkins album of the same name (but was released in 1998).

Still, Salvia Palth feels like the best name for Lines’ music, especially for last year’s last chance to see.

“These songs thematically tie in with what people who are still listening to the first album might need to hear: young people who struggle to make meaningful relationships,” Lines said in the accompanying press release. “With melanchole, there’s no real closure, and there’s no real path forward. You’re stuck with this stunted teenage philosophy of vague nihilism that I’m trying to replace with a more constructive philosophy.”

“Well that sounds positive,” you say. “I was expecting a bum-out.”

Oh, you naive soul. The “shattering loss” of Lines’ father in 2020 forms “the emotional crux of the whole album,” he says. “These are platonic love songs decontextualized.”

In the six-plus-minute penultimate track “How Many Will I Make?,” Lines sings, “just walking around my hometown / thinking about your mistakes / how many will i make til i’m perfect?”

Well, that’s better than what Plath wrote about her father, who died when she was 8. One of her most famous poems, the scathing “Daddy,” concludes with this:

There’s a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

And you thought this wouldn’t be a bum-out!

Insane Who Sane

I can’t find much about this Detroit-based DJ, aside from his real name appears to be Hussein, and he was born in Egypt. His bio says he left his home country to pursue music, first in NYC, then to Detroit to immerse himself in “the birthplace of techno.”

As a moniker, Insane Who Sane recalls the comparatively tranquil days of the Gulf War, back when people loved rhyming Saddam Hussein’s name, as captured in a season 12 episode of The Simpsons.

But if you go looking for Insane Who Sane on Spotify, you’ll discover it only recognizes one insane artist from Detroit. Woop woop!

Willem Dafoe Fan Club

Not to be confused with the 1,900-member-strong Facebook group.

Because Willem Dafoe has become as much a meme as a continually working actor, it’s hard to know where these youngsters from Minnesota fall on the Dafoe Awareness Spectrum. I can’t explain why, but because one of them is the daughter of Low’s Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker (RIP), I’m inclined to think they’d be like, “For real, you gotta check out Auto Focus.”

The Mary Tyler Whores

Some bands don’t just telegraph their ostensible edginess, they practically go door-to-door and shout, “CAN YOU BELIEVE HOW OUTRAGEOUS WE ARE?! TRULY YOUR MIND CANNOT PROCESS HOW FEW FUCKS WE GIVE. IT’S ZERO, IN CASE THAT ISN’T CLEAR.”

To wit, the Mary Tyler Whores.2

The interminable, all-caps-in-a-weird-typeface bio on their website does this ad nauseam, proclaiming them “the undisputed batshit-craziest, punchy-punk rock band with a hint of sleaze.” It also claims that theirs is “Howard Stern’s favorite band Name,3 seriously.”

The group formed in Florida around 2000, self-released an EP called Sex Sells & We’re Buyin’ in 2003, then broke up for a long time before reforming in Southern California in 2023. Says the bio with a hint of hyperbole:

“Something about the raw badassery of the music, the snarky lyrics, the hooky anthems, and of course the unrivalled live performance they pro-created together. Shit felt so good, like filthy foul-mouthed, gross hard-core, improper bad taste lustful first-time sex good!”

Mmm-hmm. Their wild-and-crazy bona fides boil down to two things. First, an admittedly crazy-sounding show opening for Iggy Pop in 2001 that involved hamburger meat and someone’s prosthetic leg getting thrown on stage. Second, unremarkable SoCal punk songs about addicts, sex workers, and sex-worker addicts, with titles like “American Sex Fiend” and “White Trash Girl.” It’s the kind of stuff that may outrage the Fox News set, but even they’d probably be like, “Eh, Rancid’s been doing this better for decades. The real problem is Kneecap!”

The Mary Tyler Whores may even be MAGA-adjacent, judging by their affiliation with Trumpy edgelord clothing brand Assholes Live Forever.

That said, vocalist Frankie “Crime” Cassara proclaims “With no discrimination, let your freak flag fly” at the end of that never-ending bio, which announces the upcoming release of their first full-length, As Filthy as We Wanna Be (a nod to their Floridian forebears in 2 Live Crew).4

The band recorded it with Bad Religion’s Greg Hetson in 2023 for release via Golden Robot Records in 2024. Then it was April 2025. Now there’s no date. In May they announced on Instagram they were looking to book a tour, but the only upcoming live date on their site is for an album-release show at a TBA venue in LA sometime in 2025. Don’t hold your breath, everybody.

POST-SCRIPTS

• Judging by that Instagram video, the Willem Dafoe apple didn’t fall far from the Low tree. I only know about them from hearing Alan Sparhawk on Kreative Kontrol, Vish Khanna’s excellent podcast. INSPIRATION LURKS EVERYWHERE, PEOPLE.

• Also, look out for an interview with Vish here soon.

• Speaking of interviews, Coco Kinnon of Winona Fighter will follow shortly.

• What’s Golden Robot Records, you ask? It’s an Australian indie label that specializes in baby bands on their way up and legacy acts on their long, slow descent (Vanilla Fudge, Faster Pussycat, Orgy, Filter). “In just ten years, the [label] has released over 1,000 albums, EPs, and singles,” says its bio. “This remarkable output is a reflection of both the label’s passion and its ability to identify and nurture talent across a wide range of musical genres.” Or maybe it reflects a lack of focus?

When Band Name Bureau hit its 100th issue and fifth anniversary a couple months ago, I did something I’ve never done: I actually promoted it. I even wrote up a press release!

Having received roughly 23 million press releases in my time, I knew the chances of anything happening were slim, but I was thrilled to hear back from a place I really cared about: Sound Opinions.

Hosted by journalists and critics Greg Kot and Jim DeRogatis, the show has been around forever, starting as a public-radio fixture and naturally expanding into a podcast. When I became a podcast devotee way back in 2009, it was one of the first shows I subscribed to. Jim and Greg were the music critics for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, respectively, and I looked up to them as a Chicagoan who also wrote about music. They were, and remain, two of the most knowledgeable guys around, and Sound Opinions is still great.

I was only hoping for a shoutout from Jim and Greg, and instead they interviewed me for an entire episode. It was legitimately an honor, so check it out. It’s very fun.

• Semi-related: Sound Opinions producer Andrew Gill hosted and produced an excellent podcast called Rock That Doesn’t Roll, which drew upon his childhood in an evangelical home to examine Christian music. That’s a genre I find relentlessly cringe, but the show is really well done and illuminating. (And indie-rockers will wanna stick around for the episode with David Bazan of Pedro the Lion.)

• BNB #105 will arrive next week. Probably.

• Also coming soon: an interview with Coco Kinnon of Winona Fighter.

• Below are links to the issues with bands I talked on Sound Opinions:

Lana Del Rabies:

Diarrhea Planet:

Ombiigizi:

Bikini Trill:

Screeching Weasel:

Winona Fighter:

Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers:

Fartbarf:

Hoobastank:

Toad the Wet Sprocket:

Ned’s Atomic Dustbin:

Hey sweetheart, take a seat. How’s your boba? Did they give you enough tapioca? Amazing! Hmm? No, no iPad right now. Why? Because we’re spending time together! I want to talk to you, just the two of us. No, you can’t play on my phone. No screens for a while, okay? You can play Roblox later. Right now I want to tell you something important. Are you listening? Look at me for a sec. I’m going to marry your dad.

Does that feel like a surprise? Your dad and I have been spending a lot of time together since he came to see me perform last spring. He was there when I debuted my song “Friendship.” Do you remember how that one goes? Here, let me sing for you—oh hush, no one’s gonna hear me. I’ll do it quietly.

Friendship is the greatest
If they can further your career
Friendship is an endship
If they can’t further your career

I’ll explain what all that means when you’re older. Oh, have I played you my new song yet? It’s called “I’m the Victim,” and it’s really long. Like, if you played “HOT TO GO!” two times in a row, it’d still be longer than that! Crazy, right? Here’s something funny: I even sing about screens in the song!

Funny all the things that the children say
All the Gen Z kids being cringe and fey
As they dance on their little screens, it’s ok
They’re all gonna grow up to be gay

Okay, okay, no more singing. I won’t embarrass you anymore. I promise once your dad and I are married, I’ll won’t sing in public. As much. But you’ll have to get used to my makeup.

Sorry Mom

Way back in 2007, for one of the earliest versions of the Year in Band Names, I wrote about a Milwaukee group called Brutal Dildos. They titled their 2007 EP Sorry Mom, because calling your band Brutal Dildos warrants an apology to your parents.

But who among us hasn’t felt obliged to apologize to our parents for our art? My first “band” was called 12 Inch Breath Mint, and we had a “song” called “Gimme That Whip” that was basically me screaming nonsense over subpar Skinny Puppy mimicry.

“We sort of had the vibe of our band first, and the name was actually one of the things we had before any of our current members or any of our original songs,” drummer Taryn Gangi told the Hartford Courant in 2023. “We kind of had that ‘Sorry Mom, I’m in a band,’ or in this situation ‘Sorry Mom I’m in a loud craft punk band’1 so there are especially more apologies to go around.”

Presumably lots more once the NYC-based queer-punk duo released its debut EP, which opens with a song called “I Fucked Yr Mom.” Four years later, it is the group’s most-streamed track by several orders of magnitude (23.7 million and counting on Spotify). That is a lot of streams for a small band, though perhaps it’s cold comfort to Sorry Mom’s parents.

They probably haven’t been excited about subsequent songs like “Molly Sells Molly By the Seashore,” “I Saw Jesus Hanging on a Basketball Hoop,” “Enema,” and “Hit the Back.”

Sorry Mom’s music is a lot more nuanced than those jokey-titled outliers would imply, but try explaining that to mom and dad. And nuance doesn’t go viral, now does it? Who’s ready for “I Fucked Yr Mom AGAIN”?!

My Mom is Here

The sentiments behind Sorry Mom and My Mom is Here couldn’t be further apart. In the former, mom is presumably displeased and demands an apology. In the latter, mom has shown up to lend her support. It’s easy to picture parents coming to see My Mom is Here, and not just because that is literally on their Instagram.

No, My Mom is Here play nice music for nice people, or as they describe it on their YouTube channel, “rock fusion music.” This is more proof that bands aren’t always the best at describing their music, because “rock fusion music” sounds way too proggy for My Mom is Here’s easygoing soul. Better to go with Glide magazine’s writeup of their song “Didn’t Sleep Tonight,” which throws around words like neo-soul, jazz, cabaret-style vocals, warm horns, and funky keys.

My Mom is Here’s press kit explains the disconnect though, saying, “My Mom is Here is what happens when jazz kids form a rock band.”

There we go: jazz kids. It all makes sense now, because only jazz kids would a) use the word “fusion” and b) consider My Mom is Here a rock band. Listen, I know I’m a Gen Xer who grew up with genres informing way too much of my identity, but My Mom is Here feels rock-adjacent at best.

Counterpoint: Who cares?

Dad Brains

I don’t know why it took until seeing the artwork for me to get this.

According to their bio, Pat Pedraza would “shout out lyrics and thoughts that would swirl around” in his foggy dad brain while running errands shortly after his daughter was born in 2017. As a veteran of the irritatingly spelled early Vagrant Records band No Motiv, he knew lots of other punk dads, and soon Dad Brains was a thing.

Dad Brains’ bio was clearly written early in their lifespan, because it says the group will try to release an EP every Father’s Day. So far they’ve only managed 2019’s Dadditude and a couple of songs. Hey, fatherhood is demanding. They did manage to deliver a Christmas-set, parenthood-themed parody of Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized” last December, though.

While I am very much this band’s target demographic—I had a secret cassette dub of that Suicidal Tendencies album and remember when “Institutionalized” appeared in 21 Jump Street—you gotta appreciate their dadication dedication to a bit.

Party Dad

Hey, if you’re a guy who looks like this…

…and you’re a DJ who specializes in “cult and outsider disco and funk tunes,” you could do a lot worse than calling yourself Party Dad. It’s not as if Charleston City Paper bestows the title DJ of the Year on any rando who’s made the rounds at Faculty Lounge, Recovery Room, and Upper Deck. “Pfft, Upper Deck closed in 2018,” you scoff. THIS WAS BEFORE THAT, JERK. If Band Name Bureau knows anything, it’s the comings and goings of bars in Charleston, South Carolina.

And anyway, Tay McNabb, a.k.a. Party Dad, apparently lives in NYC now, far away from the cozy confines of Recovery Room and the PBR that flows like water therein. “The #1 seller of PBR in the WORLD” blares its Instagram bio. “Can I get that on merch?” you ask. Yes you can.

Recovery Room may claim PBR supremacy, but the Faculty Lounge boasts an “extensive selection of dad beer.” (Because who doesn’t want to pay too much to drink Coors Light ironically?)

Now that we’ve all come to know Party Dad through the old haunts, what would a three-hour Party Dad set sound and look like? Feast your eyes about, old boy.

Real MILFs Not a Scam

Not a scam, but if their Bandcamp were secretly installing malware on my computer, I wouldn’t be surprised. Unsurprisingly, that and a (less sketchy) Soundcloud are the extent of Real MILFs’ web presence.

The outfit’s ultra-processed, pitch-bending, mostly unintelligible hyperpop could soundtrack your local schizophrenic’s psychosis. When I want schizophrenic music, I’ll take Wesley Willis, thank you very much.

POST-SCRIPTS

• The caption for the PBR underwear proves my bona fides as someone who spent way too much time with PBR cans in his 20s.

• If someone asked me what the dudes from No Motiv were up to these days, I’d probably say something like, “Playing in other forgettable SoCal punk bands?” because I’m the worst. But Pedraza is a prolific voice actor, including the voice of Good Luck Bear in several Care Bears specials!

• I checked in on Brutal Dildos in BNB #10, with fun results.

• ALUMNI NEWS: Your Grandparents (BNB #30) have a new album, The Dial. The press release says, “Your Grandparents are fascinated with time. It can neither be created nor killed; there’s never enough of it, but it can stretch on forever. Time is a form of currency that can be saved, spent, and gambled away. It can be wasted. Wounds heal, the flocks march from field to fold, and, in the end, it makes fools of us all.” Track four is called “I Got High One Day.” You don’t say.

• The first rule of Band Name Bureau, as I have often pointed out, is NEVER CHANGE YOUR (SILLY) NAME. Yet roughly 30 years in, Me First and the Gimme Gimmes are now going by Spike and the Gimme Gimmes. I always liked the name Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, and I’m puzzled why they’re deciding to foreground singer Spike Slawson now. I also didn’t realize the legendary John Reis of Rocket from the Crypt (and a million other bands) is playing with them now. Weird!

• Here’s a name I’ve always loved: Tropical Fuck Storm. The Aussie psych band has a new album, Fairyland Codex, dropping next month, and I’ll be chatting with them for a future edition of BNB. In the meantime, here’s the bonkers album art.

To skim a list of J. Robbins’ various projects over the past four decades is to open up numerous thematic cans of worms. Jawbox. Burning Airlines. Channels. Office of Future Plans. Report Suspicious Activity. Government Issue. Rollkicker Laydown. None segues into the other thematically, and the names don’t imply much sonically. (The exceptions on both counts being Government Issue and Report Suspicious Activity.)

That makes J. a perfect subject for the Audit, wherein Band Name Bureau talks to an artist about the project names in their discography. And it was the perfect time to chat because of his upcoming live dates, which kick off this week in Chicago opening for Bob Mould.1

To continue the “Kyle Ryan in the ’90s” theme established by the Ean Sicko Audit: I first interviewed J. in 1994 for my friend’s video zine. He politely, if grudgingly,2 indulged us after a Jawbox show, which you can see here—sans interview, because I would cringe myself to death otherwise. I have since spoken to J. many times over the years, and it’s always a great chat.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length, blah blah blah.

Jawbox, 1989-1997, 2019-2025

Band Name Bureau: You did a great interview last year with Norman Brannon for Anti-Matter. At one point, you mentioned how Jawbox lyrics are word salad, something you and I have talked about too. You elaborated with Norm, saying you consciously avoided revealing anything too personal out of “a fear of being too easily understood.” I feel like some of your band names have flowed from that same instinct.

J. Robbins: Really? [Laughs.]

BNB: Yeah, Burning Airlines. Office of Future Plans. I could be reading too much into them, but I'm curious about your process.

JR: I don't know if I have a process, really. Jawbox, we just got that name by flipping through Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, which is a dictionary of sort of weird colloquialisms from around the world, I guess. We were just opening it to a random page and putting a finger down and seeing what came up. I just liked the word. I thought, “Oh, it's got some cool letters in it.” Like a nice, angular X. [Laughs.]

It means a number of different things. Sometimes it means an open sewer, sometimes it means loose talk around the kitchen sink when you're doing the washing up. I used the word to mean television in one song.

The main thing about coming up with a name, honestly I think, is getting over the hump. It's getting it out of the way, because the magic of it is that sooner or later, you just get used to using it. At one time, Butthole Surfers was a rough go! [Laughs.] Then sooner or later, it just is the name of the band, and you’re like, “Okay.” [Laughs.]

Burning Airlines, 1997-2001

JR: I actually have to credit [bassist] Bill Barbot with pitching that one to me. It just comes from our mutual love of Brian Eno, because it's from his song “Burning Airlines Give You So Much More,” which is just a weird fantasy about traveling. It's like traveling first class in a crashing jet, as if the crashing is a feature, not a flaw. I was so relieved, because Bill literally showed up at my door and goes, “How about Burning Airlines?” I was sold. I didn't have to think about it.

But then it was interesting later, because I know that name is from Brian Eno. Brian Eno's music means a lot to me personally—those first four or five Eno solo records are very important in my musical education, my musical makeup. But I don't think anyone necessarily hears it in songs that I've written. The sound of the band has very little to do with Brian Eno in any way that anyone can hear. And then of course, it got us in trouble after 9/11. Couldn't have a band at that point.

BNB: I remember hearing you had to cover up the name on your gear cases. But you're doing a Burning Airlines set at Best Friends Forever fest in October. It's still a ways out, so I don't know how much prep work you've done. Do you play any of those songs in solo sets?

JR: Some of them. I mean, when I started doing solo acoustic shows, I played a lot more of them, but as I've written new songs, they sort of fell by the wayside. They don't really translate that well. Some of them do okay, some of them don't. In the J. Robbins Band setting, when Pete [Moffett] is playing drums, we kind of feel like Burning Airlines songs are fair game, really.3

There's a few that I wouldn't touch. There's some, like "Meccano," the one that Bill sang. Obviously we're not going to do that, and there are some where [bassist Mike] Harbin contributed... I mean, I feel like the songs with Harbin we wrote collaboratively, but there are tunes where I wouldn't feel comfortable playing them. But for the most part, the Burning Airlines stuff, I feel like it's me and Pete, if we like the song, we should play it. But I think there's only been three or four that we've put into the set from time to time.

BNB: Which ones?

JR: "Wheaton Calling," "Pacific 231," "The Escape Engine." I guess that's it. Then I've done a pretty different arrangement of "Outside the Aviary" in my acoustic sets.

I'm actually in the middle of baking the tapes from the Burning Airlines records so that I can transfer them to digital so that we have access to the original tracks, because Brooks [Harlan, bassist] wants to make sure that he is 100 percent accurate in what he's going to play. I need to refresh on that because a lot of the guitar writing is pretty nuts. It's pretty different than a lot of what I would be inclined to do now.

BNB: I was curious what you've noticed going back to that stuff. It sounds like you've noticed nutty guitar parts.

JR: But I always knew that it was a thing that I was trying to break away from. I wrote some overly intellectual guitar parts. Sometimes the song ended up… not being an afterthought, but I'd kind of write myself into a corner and write beyond my ability to play. Then I’d have to work up to being able to execute what I wrote and being able to sing something on top of it. All of that was really, really cool. But then periodically I'd go, "Isn't there supposed to be a song here?" [Laughs.]

When I started doing the solo records, I put my guitar into an open tuning that I thought sounded cool. I started writing way, way simpler. Just trying to get the guitar out of the way of the song, figure out what the song is trying to do, and then go back and retroactively flesh out parts that have a little more depth to them. That's just much more fun. It's just bashing away on something, really, that is physically simple to do, but sounds rich enough that it excites my ears, but it's physically not crazy. Physically, it's much easier to get to.

So it is wild to go back to Burning Airlines stuff and be like, “Oh my God, I never stop here.” It's like everything all at once, all the time.

BNB: In the years I've been talking to you, you've always been on this mission to simplify. I think it came up when I spoke to you around Identikit4 in 2001.

JR: Yeah, a lot of times in band world, you show up with a part—some kind of cool-sounding guitar part or a cool-sounding bass riff or whatever—and you go, “I wrote a song. Here's my song. Hey, we're playing my song!” But of course the song—in a band like Jawbox or certainly a lot of Burning Airlines stuff, to some extent—the song is the sum total of what the individuals are putting together. It's an ensemble creation, and everybody's part is the identity of the song, which is all really cool. It's great. But I also like song songs. I just really wanted to write from the perspective that the song comes first, and if you wrote a really good song, you could play it a lot of different ways and it would still retain its identity, its fundamental character.

Channels, 2003-2006

JR: I wanted it to be Channel, because I liked the idea of a verb to channel something. That's what I really was wanting. But then I found out that there was a Richmond band called Channel, and that really bummed me out. I was like, “Okay, fine, Channels.” It's a present-tense verb. But it's also supposed to flip back and forth between that—the present-tense verb of channeling something—then also meaning a noun. Like the channels of information, the channels on a tv, that kind of thing.

But really, it's another case of a fairly instantaneous call because part of the magic of that band was, it's the most intuitive band I had ever done up to that point. A lot of stuff just came out of the three of us. We were psyched about it and went, “Where did that come from? Fucking awesome!” I think we all were riding a wave of enthusiasm about our collaboration, and that was really nice. So it wasn't a name with a whole lot of thought behind it. It was just like, “What are we going to call this thing? Channels? Sounds good. Okay.”

BNB: I remember when I spoke to y'all for Punk Planet, the cover accidentally referred to you as “The Channels.” I remember you were like, “Oh, yeah, Janet [Morgan, bassist] had suggested the Channels.”

JR: I think I remember going back and forth about whether there should be a “the,” but I like it without a “the,” because then it gets to be verb.

Government Issue, 1985-1988

BNB: This was an ongoing concern when you joined, but I always thought that Government Issue was a perfect '80s hardcore name.

JR: Oh, it's such a good name. It's such a great name and great logo. That logo, the stencil with this sort of off-kilter stencil lettering. It couldn't be better. It's iconic.

BNB: It's such of a time and place—I mean that in a complimentary way. When you look at that, especially the logo, you know exactly what it is. Although, as you mentioned in that Norm interview, you guys got more adventurous in the later releases, like with the electric sitar. I love those albums all the same.

JR: I don't want anyone to think I'm shitting on GIs, because I am super proud of those. Both the GIs records that I played on were recorded in one weekend and mixed in the next weekend. So considering that, they sound fucking awesome, but every now and then, there are things that make me chuckle. The sitar makes me chuckle. The beginning of the song "Man in a Trap," there is this kind "grrssh" sound that's supposed to evoke a jail door slamming or something like that. It's a washing machine lid. And when you hear it, it pretty much can't be anything but a washing machine lid. [Laughs.]

Rollkicker Laydown, 1992

JR: The story of that record is that when GI broke up, we had two new songs, and I thought they were really cool. If we hadn't have broken up, maybe we were going to enter a new phase of musical growth that would've been really cool. But instead, I think the wind was already going out of the sails for Tom [Lyle, guitarist] and John [Stabb, vocalist] at that point.

So the band broke up, but I was just haunted by those two songs. One of them, the one with the kind of "Tomorrow Never Knows" beat, that one was pretty much done musically. The other one I remember thinking, the song isn't quite gelling yet, but man, when it does, it's going to be really cool. So I was sort of haunted by those tunes.

Then a couple of years into Jawbox, I was living in the WGNS house, which WGNS was a recording studio in DC. It was Geoff Turner's recording studio. It was in a kind of cramped basement in Arlington, and it was a basement of a group house. I was living in the attic.

I'm still obsessed with these songs. I'm in touch with Tom, Pete's in California, but I know that he's coming back. John had a new band. I was just like, these songs never quite got together, but I love them so much. If we could record these songs… It's not going to be a new band, because Pete's in California, and Tom doesn't want to do a band, and I have Jawbox, but let's capture this. This is the best shit we ever did together. And I want to sing it. John had written vocals for those songs when GI played them, but I just felt like I had a mission.

Geoff Turner recorded them in the basement of the GNS house. What was cool is we got Iain Burgess to mix the tunes when he was working with Jawbox on our second record. That was just super cool. Iain was a fan of GI's. He was a fan of Tom's guitar sound, of course, and of Pete's drumming. He was super fun to work with. Those songs turned out really great for being recorded in a basement with the drums in the corner in front of a fucking sink. [Laughs.]

The name was… Tom was working at the Washington Post at that point, and I guess the rollerkicker laydown is a part of the printing press. It either pushes out the new role of newsprint or pushes out the old one when it's reached the end.

Report Suspicious Activity, 2005-2017

JR: That started as a Vic Bondi solo record that he contacted me about producing. The way that he reached out, it was unclear. I thought that he had a rhythm section and he just wanted me to record. I wrote back to him for clarification, and I said, “Do you have a rhythm section?” He said no, and I said, "You have one now!" At which point he was like, “Oh great. Well, then this will be a band.” But the first record is all Vic's songs.

The subsequent records with Erik Denno getting into the mix, there's always one or two songs that I wrote, and the rest of them would be Vic's songs. But sometimes we'd take them apart and reconfigure them in pretty different ways. It was cool. Once Erik was involved, Vic would have a song and then he'd be like, "I don't know. I think I can hear Erik singing this. I'd rather hear Erik sing this than me."

So it was a super, super fun project. Initially, the first idea of the project was it's a Vic Bondi solo record called Report Suspicious Activity. But then when we decided that it would be a band, we just took that as the band name.

BNB: That name captures the time well: post-9/11, the Iraq War happening, the awfulness of the Bush administration.

JR: God, what's really fucked up is we had T-shirts that say, "Why not invade Canada?" on the back.

BNB: Oh no! [Laughs.]

JR: I found one recently in the basement. I found a little stash of these shirts, and I was like, “Oh my God. These haven't aged well.” [Laughs.]

Office of Future Plans, 2009-2016

JR: I read an interview with Armando Iannucci in which he referenced Dick Cheney's office where he drew up the schemes for the invasion of Iraq and everything else. It was purposely given an incredibly boring, innocuously bureaucratic name that if you saw this name, you'd fall asleep just thinking about it. No one would ever ask what happens in the, I think it was called the Future Planning Commission. It's so vague and bureaucratic-sounding that you just forget it before you've even said it. That was part of an effort to obfuscate what it was really about, which was… evil, right? [Laughs.] I think in In the Loop, I can't remember what they called it in the movie.

BNB: The Office of Special Plans is what the Cheney one was actually called.

JR: Right, okay. So Cheney's thing was Office of Special Plans, and then the thing in the movie, I think, was the Future Planning Commission.

I'm not especially a devotee of metal, although some of my absolute favorite bands are metal bands—I really love Gojira. I love them. But I'm not a metal guy per se. One thing I've always loved in the metal world is these super-antisocial band names, like Disemboweler or whatever. A name that's just dripping with evil and violent intent. So Office of Future Plans was a twisted version, was a J. version, of the most metal band name you could have. Because it's this innocuous, bureaucratic name that is designed to obfuscate your evil intentions. That was my theory behind that name.

Then also sometimes I would think about it, and I'd be like, yeah, this is also a nod to the fact that you have a lot of dreams and ideas about what you might do, but then you've got to go and execute them. You've got to actually make it happen. And making it happen is the harder part.

Every band is an Office of Future Plans when it starts. [Laughs.] You're just like, “What are we going to do? Where are we going to go?” Maybe you make it happen, and maybe you don't.

BNB: The Office of Future Plans page on the Dischord site says the band was “hoodwinked” into existence because the Bomb asked you to open for them in Baltimore.

JR: Yeah, it sort of happened backwards.

When our son Callum was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy, one of the things that happened for me was I was like, “How can I presume to carry on putting my energy into music?” This is a wake-up call. I have to grow up and put aside this selfish shit and just concentrate on what is really important, which is figuring out how to take care of this child and be a good father.

It probably wasn't more than six months, but there's this period of time where there wasn't brain space or time or anything to be thinking about music. That was an incredibly complicated time in my life. But I eventually figured out how to start making time to just play guitar for half an hour late at night when everybody's gone to bed. Then songs started coming out. I would do little Pro Tools demos and stuff, and just figuring out a way to make time to create again.

Suddenly I was like, “Holy shit, I'm a whole person again.” Now I recognize that this is an essential thing for me to do in some form. This isn't going to be anything but me making demos of these songs. Then once I started, I was like, “Gosh, I love these songs. What am I going to do with them?” At that time, I was like, “Well, I'm never going to make a solo record. That's ridiculous.” [Laughs.] I was just really uncomfortable with the idea.

But I thought, I have this recording studio. I have these talented friends. I ended up starting to record the songs with Darren [Zentek, drummer] and Brooks and Gordon [Withers, cellist]. It sort of felt like a band, but I didn't really know where it was supposed to be going. I was just like, we'll record these songs and flesh them out. It felt really great. It had a band kind of social glue that was really working. Then the Bomb was coming through town, and they were like, “Do you want to play?” I was like, “Oh, okay. We're a band.”

J. Robbins, 2014-

BNB: You and Norm talked a lot about vulnerability in that interview. So I'm curious: Do you feel more vulnerable putting music out under your own name?

JR: Yeah, but I think that's good. That's what I want. I'm quite proud of what we did in Jawbox, but the creative mechanics of that band and my proclivities… For example, it's like pulling teeth for me to write lyrics. It's very, very hard. It's a struggle. I end up thinking like, okay, it's a necessary struggle, but it's not something that flows with ease. But in the end, I'm like, it's good for me. When I arrive somewhere that I'm happy with, I'm like, okay, that was a trip that was worth taking.

[In Jawbox,] some of those songs I wrote, but most of it was the four of us putting pieces together and negotiating our way into making something that adds up to a song. Maybe I would be the traffic cop of the arrangement in the end, because I would be singing. But the reality is I'd always have melodies before I had words. The words were getting written at the last minute, and the words are collaborative.

I know when I don't really know what I'm trying to say. It's almost like the meaning, the thing I'm trying to express, is sort of hidden from me. Maybe somebody else got the last word about the arrangement, and I feel like it could have been stronger if it was a different way.

[With the J. Robbins Band], I'm comfortable with the idea that anyone might hear my songs and think they're not very good. If you don't like it, then it's not for you. That's okay. But it's really important to me to know that I did the best that I could do, and that whatever is in front of you, I took it as far as I could take it.

So in that sense, it's like, okay, it's a J. Robbins record. I just am really grateful that I have a forum in which to do it, and that anyone has an inclination to check it out.

The choice of calling it J. Robbins is somewhat of a pragmatic choice, because I love band names. I love the creation of this entity that's like a… What's the word? Egregore.

BNB: I don't know that one.

JR: It's a cool word. It's like a witchy kind of word. I'm going to look it up just to make sure I'm using it right. Egregore: “In Western Esotericism, a non-physical entity or thought form that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a group, influencing their beliefs and behaviors.”

So I'm not using the word exactly right. But yeah, “believed to be formed by the shared beliefs and emotions, worship and intentions of a group of people.” So like punk rock, there we go. [Laughs.] Or also, unfortunately, MAGA. It's a thing that doesn't have a physical existence, but it has real-world impact.

Anyway, I love the idea that a band is this new entity that is created from the inspirations of the individuals who are involved, but it's not any one person. It's the synthesis. I love that you give it a name and then it goes on and has kind of autonomy almost.

But then there's just the practical reality of it, getting older, and people peel away and they don't have the same priorities. You have arguments about what kind of music you're trying to make, and you have misunderstandings or people not being on the same page, and things you want to do and not everybody can do it. I do think it's very hard for me to imagine being in a band with a capital B. This is something I've said a lot before.

The band has an existence and you change a member, and suddenly it is a different chemistry. Maybe it's the same band. Maybe it's not. I mean, in some fundamental way, it's not, and I would just always feel bad about it.

But I'm at an age and at a stage where I want to do whatever. If opportunities arise, and I can afford to do them, I want to do them, and I want to feel okay about it if I'm collaborating with people. Of course, I'm not going to play with someone who's not my friend. I'm not going to play with somebody who I don't care about.

For example, last February, when Basilisk came out, Brooks could not come on the tour. So Matt Dowling played bass on that tour, and it was fine. I mean, I greatly prefer to play with Brooks because the J. Robbins Band is a band, and Brooks is a member of the band. But there's an understanding that it's fluid if it has to be. If it's the choice between doing something that I think is worthwhile, and maybe not everybody can do it, I can still find a way to do it, and I don't feel like I'm stabbing anybody in the back. [Laughs.]

BNB: To wrap up, I’ll ask the question I ask everybody: Do you think it's better to have a bad name that sticks out or an innocuous one that fades into the background?

JR: I mean, a bad name is rough. Like we were saying at the beginning, a name just becomes a word. Whatever the name is, it's a word you end up using. The band is going to really stand or fall on the quality of what it does. A great band can make a not-good name into cool name by being a great band. So that's where I fall on that question. [Laughs.]

Fcukers

Where: Coachella, Electric Daisy Carnival

On the surface, “Fcukers” looks like something kids would type in chats to get around content filters, but its origin is less juvenile. Back in the early ’90s, British clothing brand French Connection started branding itself as “fcuk,” which naturally caused monocles to shatter all over Great Britain.

Decades later, fcuk clothing found its way to multi-instrumentalist Jackson Walker Lewis, who co-founded Fcukers with vocalist Shanny Wise in NYC. As Lewis told Rolling Stone:

“I had a French Connection hoodie at the time. To me, the name Fcukers perfectly encapsulated the vibe that she and I were going for, in the sense that we were both like, ‘We don’t give a shit. We’re not going to have a music career. Who cares? We’re going to do exactly what we want.’”

And that they are. As a Rolling Stone headline put it last month, Lewis and Wise are having more fun than anyone right now. Fcukers’ ’90s-indebted electronic music—think house beats and breathy trip-hop vocals—came on like 3-MMC in a club kid’s bloodstream. The group quickly went from a zero-fcuks-given lark in 2022 to the toast of Hipsterland.1

Their first 10 shows took them to four continents. Über-hip label Ninja Tune released their debut EP, Baggy$$, on its Technicolour imprint. James Murphy and Junior Sanchez remixed them. Fancy-pants French fashion house Celine flew the duo to Paris to DJ their Fashion Week party.

Fcukers’ Instagram is full of blurry candids, unsmiling selfies, startling live clips, and photo shoots for places like The Face and NME, so it’s ideal if you’re looking to feel hopelessly square.

Surprisingly, neither Wise nor Lewis were well-known pre-Fcukers. Both slugged it out in the indie-rock world for a bit, Lewis in another BNB-appropriate group called Spud Cannon and Wise in the more generically named outfit the Shacks. They didn’t really know anything about house music, either.

How #blessed are Fcukers? Wise can film herself lip-synching on an NYC bus, release it as a music video, and it’ll rack up more than 300,000 views. Expect the hype to kick up several notches when their full-length drops this year.

Lana Del Rabies

Where: Prepare the Ground

Wave Chapelle

Where: SXSW

Organ Fairchild

Where: Borderland Festival

You could infer numerous genres from these names. I can’t say I expected Lana Del Rabies to look like this…

…but it fits. Multimedia artist Sam An mixes “industrial, gothic noise, and metal with experimental elements” to explore “the esoteric brutality of what it means to be human in a world consumed by the threat of apocalypse.” The perfect soundtrack to 2025, in other words.

A few years back, An announced plans to abandon the Lana Del Rabies name, but it didn’t stick. “I was surprised to find that a lot of people cared about the LDR project after I tried to change it,” she said in an interview. She must’ve forgotten the first rule of Band Name Bureau: Never change your name. Maybe she kept it for consistency’s sake when she released a collaborative song with Brigitte Bardon’t.

Disregarding the first rule of BNB is Milwaukee hip-hop artist Wave Chapelle, who originally went by Astro. Some time in the ’00s, back when everyone loved Dave Chappelle, he switched it up.

“I pretty much got my name from just kicking it in the studio with the homies. We would always come up with these names like ‘Trill Cosby’ or ‘Xanny Glover’ and whatnot. This was around the time I got hip to the ‘Wavy’ term.2 I was using it a lot in my raps, and I said this crazy line where I ended up calling myself Wave Chapelle, even though I was going by a different rap name at the time. So the homies just started calling me Wave—Chapelle of course came from Dave Chappelle, who is my favorite comedian hands down.

I wonder if that’s still the case? The above quote is from 2016, before the comedian launched his “Trans People are Hilarious Freaks” comeback. Wave’s Instagram is full of support for the liberal candidate for Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, so hopefully he found some other comedy heroes, like Tony Hinchcliffe.

Then there’s Organ Fairchild, the outlier among these three. I was wondering how anyone under 45 would know the sexpot star Falcon Crest,3 and then I saw a photo.

These dudes definitely remember the actor’s heyday, but they weren’t planning to pay her homage like this. As guitarist Dave Ruch told WXXI:

“We wanted to name the band ‘Organ Freeman,’ after Morgan Freeman, but we discovered there’s already an organ trio in Los Angeles with that name. We were batting around some other names, and we all remembered Morgan Fairchild from posters in the 1970s. It was just a way to get ‘organ’ in the name, and also have a little fun. But we do get a lot of comments from people who have no idea who she is and think it’s a great band name.”

Why does “organ” need to be in the name? IS THIS SOME PENIS THING, CREEPS?

No, Organ Fairchild self-describes as “instrumental organ trio/funky adventure seekers.” While I consider the latter grounds for immediate dismissal, other people don’t seem to mind. Organ Fairchild’s 2024 album, Songs We Didn’t Write, debuted at No. 1 on the radio chart compiled by Relix and JamBands.com. Far out!

The accolades continue. “Voted NY’s Top Emerging Band in 2021”4 blares the landing page for Organ Fairchild’s website. “Those guys, emerging?” you say. “From what, cataract surgery?”

Har har, you ageist! No, Organ Fairchild has only been a band since 2020, so they were still “emerging” in 2021. That said, the trio has known each other since 1983, when they played in Buffalo’s premier Grateful Dead cover band, Wild Knights. For whatever reason, they never wrote originals together until 2020. Their first show so displeased God that He unleashed COVID a month later.

Popes of Chillitown

Where: Bearded Theory

This is an A+ Simpsons reference from one of the show’s best episodes, season eight’s “El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer.”

Popes of Chillitown have six members, so you know what that means. “We all started playing loads of reggae, reggae turned into ska-punk, which turned into punk, and over the years turned into drum n bass/metal,” frontman Matt Conner said in an interview. He’s kidding about that last one, though plenty of people would prefer “drum n bass/metal” over ska-punk. Most people would prefer anything over ska-punk, come to think of it.5

Hans Gruber and the Die Hards

Where: Camp Punksylvania

Ska-punk haters will want to skip Hans Gruber and the Die Hards too. Their “live shows are filled with pits, sock puppets, conga lines and confusion,” per their bio, which notes the band also bounces around from “Boston hardcore to Colombian cumbia, Southern gospel to crossover thrash.”

I first wrote about these guys in the 2017 Year in Band Names, and they fall under that classic band-naming convention I call Such and Such and the So and So’s. While this name elicits knowing chuckles, I’d argue it’s a bit on the nose.

These names work best when they’re more—apologies for this—IYKYK. Die Hard fans know Hans Gruber is the villain played by the inimitable Alan Rickman, so you don’t need “Die Hards” in the band name. There are so many options: Hans Gruber and the Bearer Bonds (what they were stealing at Nakatomi Plaza), Hans Gruber and the Mystery Guests or Hans Gruber and the Mister Cowboys (from Gruber’s dialogue), Hans Gruber and Yippee-Ki-Yays…I’ll stop now.

This is getting long, so let’s speed through these last few, eh?

• Hard Maybe (Capitol Hill Block Party). Perhaps I appreciate the name of this Seattle neo-soul outfit because I feel a kinship to the spirit of “hard maybe.” Hey, it’s better than a hard no.

• What So Not (Bonnaroo). Does this sound like an EDM name to you? I was picturing smart-alecky indie rock, not this:

• Genital Shame (Prepare the Ground). This name really lands vis à vis the group’s self-described genre, “trans woman black metal.” The same goes for songs like “Hermaphroditic Image” and “I Met Kerri Colby.”

• It’s You! It’s Me! And There’s Dancing! (Seattle Pop Punk Festival). Speaking of trans artists: This Portland punk group self-describes as “some kind of guitar music” and takes its name from “You! Me! Dancing!,” the signature song of Welsh indie outfit Los Campesinos.6

• Eep-Oop! (Seattle Pop Punk Festival). Bio: “Seattle’s okayest pop/punk band.”

• Pro Wrestling the Band (R4A Fest). Bio: “Pro Wrestling the Band are a five piece rock and roll band. The bar staff love them.” When you win over the staff, you win free drinks.

POST-SCRIPTS

• Does it drive the copyeditor in me crazy that Wave spells it Chapelle, not Chappelle? Yes, yes it does.

• Coming later this month: the Audit with the legendary J. Robbins, going through the many evocative monikers in his discography. Jawbox. Burning Airlines. Office of Future Plans. And more.

For 20 years, Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher have been on a specific mission: to celebrate, as they put it, “videos that time forgot, dredged up in dusty thrift stores and estate sales throughout North America.”

Joe and Nick began the Found Footage Festival with live tours, where they screened a continually updated rotation of clips at bars, theaters, and music venues. It has since expanded into a highly active YouTube channel (anchored by their weekly show, VCR Party Live!); Rewind-O, their streaming service that’s “like the Criterion Channel for long lost VHS”; and a massive archive of VHS tapes and DVDs that has provided clips to The Goldbergs, The Tonight Show, and others.

It’s a peculiar media empire, but one whose mission is simpatico with Band Name Bureau. I hadn’t thought about that until the Found Footage Festival came through Chicago in December for its 20th anniversary tour. I’ve been a fan since 2005, which is coincidentally when I first started tracking band names at The A.V. Club.

So I connected with Joe and Nick via Zoom ahead of their spring tour dates. Considering the photo above, you won’t be surprised to learn Joe showed up with half his scalp shaved—the latest incarnation of a long-running gag he and Nick have for their driver’s license photos (see below)—but also wearing T-shirt for a Cribshitter, featured in 2007 Year in Band Names.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length blah blah blah.

Band Name Bureau: You have featured a ton of music-related videos over the years: instructional ones, performances, home-video releases, and so many Branson-based performers. Do you have a favorite type of clip?

Nick Prueher: I think for me, it’s anybody performing on public-access TV. I know Joe was just gifted a bunch of Peoria Public Access featuring this local longtime music teacher who’s been in Peoria since the ’30s teaching music. She brings on people from her church, and they just belt out hymns and old standards, and even modern songs, without a tuning fork, without much formal training, and with questionable accompaniment. But I love that. Stairway to Stardom is another talent show that ran from the late ’70s all the way up to the mid-’90s in New York, and that featured a lot of aspiring singers and songwriters performing.

I think before there were the elimination rounds on American Idol—the people that they cast specifically because they’re not super well-trained—that’s what you had.

Joe Pickett: The William Hungs.

NP: Yeah. You had a lot of public-access people giving it their all. To me, that has that feeling of “homemade,” or there’s a lot of heart to the singing. It’s almost like the Shaggs or something, listening to an album like that, but you get the video.

JP: We watched all of that Peoria Public Access on our Patreon show, and there’s one kid on there that was so bad. It’s a kid singing, so of course he’s not going to be great. But he was remarkably awful, just screaming the lyrics and just no rhythm and completely tone-deaf. I mean, he’s 7, so cut him some slack.

NP: Sounds like you’re not! Sounds like you’re not cutting him some slack from your tone.

JP: [Laughs.] I’m not, really. He was so bad. But no, it was at a Shaggs level, I would say, where it was almost remarkable how bad it was. He had a very unique sound to him.

I was going to say, with home movies, you usually just get lip-synching or stuff like that, but there’s one that we got called “Jeff’s Bird’s.” It’s this guy going around with a camcorder, and his name’s not Jeff, and you don’t see any birds in the video. I don't know why I was labeled “Jeff’s Bird’s.”

NP: I don’t know, either.

JP: But he finds a rabbit, and he goes up to the rabbit and he starts to sing a song that he made up to it. Just very short, but it has haunted me. It’s stuck with me. It’s become a staple of the show. He sang a song that goes, “Here comes the Easter bunny hopping down the trail, hippity hop. Don’t stop. I’ve got your Easter eggs.” And then he goes, “Alright, I gotta go.” And he hits stop on the camcorder. It just, [chef’s kiss]. It’s so good.

NP: We play it every Easter. We feel like it should be the next Here Comes Peter Cottontail.

JP: Here’s another genre that I love: They used to have these kiosks in malls or Six Flags or something, where you’d go in and have the green screen behind you. You would lip-synch, and they’d have maybe a box full of props and wigs and funny, big, oversized sunglasses that you could wear. People would sing those songs. They’re always the same, but they’re one of a kind. They’re unique. It’s like a thumbprint.

NP: I think the last genre that we explore pretty extensively on our YouTube show are local commercial jingles. These were, again, a lot of times not professional songwriters, but really putting a lot of soul into a commercial for Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center. [Laughs.]

JP: There are some jingles that really are catchy, and they’re really good. We did a little research. I called up one place for, oh, I can’t remember—some dentistry. I was like, “Who did your jingle for that?” And they’re like, “Oh, it’s this guy named Otis.” He’s from Dallas, Texas. We looked up Otis, this son of a bitch. I would say most jingles that you hear are Otis’. I want to write a screenplay about Otis, this guy who was the jingle master—and you know it when you hear it. When you hear an Otis, you know it’s an Otis.

NP: Yeah, Otis Conner is his name, and he is from Dallas. But the thing is, there is some controversy about him too, because we found out that he would resell the same melody. Because there’s no centralized database of jingles [Laughs.], you might have a Dr. Tammy Bailey Dentistry jingle, but it would have the same melody as a Jim’s Carpet Cleaning Service in Des Moines. It’d be the same melody, but just with different lyrics. But they don’t have to know that.

BNB: Do you think there are more video releases from Branson performers, or do they just over-index in the Found Footage collection?

NP: No, I think what we found is that oftentimes, especially in the ’90s, the souvenir of the show was the VHS tape, and sometimes it was the actual performance they had just seen. They were speed-duping them somewhere in a control room. Then, the key thing was you could get it autographed. So most of the Branson videos—and videos we find from cruises, too—are signed by the artist because that was the videotape souvenir.

I think why we find a lot of these is because the last holdouts for VCRs that still use them were essentially old people [and] nursing homes. That’s a key demographic for Branson audiences. So I think in Branson, VHS tapes were viable far into the late ’90s when DVDs had taken over.

JP: There’s one that we watched recently. Like Nick was saying, they crank it out. They record it, and then they make the VHS afterwards, so you can buy it, and they advertise, “You will be in this video!” So there’s this one part—I think it’s right up top. It’s before the performance even starts, where they just pan the entire crowd for about five minutes. They get everybody who’s in the audience. Everybody’s waving at the camera so they can say, “Hey, you were in this video, and you can buy it afterwards.” And it’s just five minutes of silence. They don’t put music over it. They just pan the audience, and you just see people waving at the camera. It’s the craziest thing.

But we really don’t see anything from any other regions. Vegas? We have some Vegas videos, but Branson seems to be the one we see some from. Where’s Shotgun Red from, Nick?

NP: Nashville. Those are from cruises, I think, where he would perform on cruises. So that was another thing where you have a captive audience of a lot of older people. Sell ’em a souvenir VHS tape, and they scooped them up—and then [dropped them] off at thrift stores usually very quickly.

JP: Like Nick said, we have a lot of autographed Branson videos too, because people get them autographed and they’re like, “You really want this? Let’s take it to the Salvation Army.”

We have a Volume 11 show of the Found Footage Festival. For a while, we wanted to tape it in Branson because we got kind of obsessed with Branson last year, and we watched a ton of Branson videos. We’re like, “Oh, maybe in the offseason, maybe in February we could go there and rent a place.” We found one place that was pretty cheap, but our show wasn’t ready at that point. So down the road, we want to do a Branson show badly.

NP: I want to do all the tropes, have a big, patriotic ending where we’re playing patriotic videos, but having a flag unfurl. I want children to play our kids to come out and sing and do a little tap dance with us and make it the full Branson version of the Found Footage Festival. I want to have our YouTube co-host George come out with buck teeth and a big tie like the Baldknobbers.

JP: Maybe we can get a special appearance from Yakov Smirnoff. We got his phone number for that, actually. Our assistant called him and asked if we could rent out his place during the offseason. He said sure, but he wanted like $50,000 for it.

BNB: To take a step back, what do you love about these videos? Why do you do this, do you think?

NP: I think the main appeal for us is that it’s this sort of unvarnished look at our history. It’s the Howard Zinn People’s History of the Videotaped United States. It’s warts and all. I’ve said this before, but the way people remember our cultural history usually is with the American Film Institute’s list, or looking back at Oscar lists, but that’s a very varnished, rose-colored—

JP: That’s the good stuff! [Laughs.]

NP: Yeah. What I think is far more interesting is watching amateurs who had a lot of ambition—questionable talent, but a lot of ambition, really giving it their all and putting it on videotape. You see mistakes. You see trends quicker than you would anywhere else. A lot of mom-and-pop operations got in on VHS when it was the gold rush, after Jane Fonda’s Workout sold 2 million copies. So any half-baked idea or weird concept ended up on a tape because it was market saturation. Everybody had a VCR, and because of that, we never run out of material.

A lot of it is interesting in ways that, with internet culture, it’s not as interesting. Because there’s a self-awareness now, and everybody knows that anything they put online or on their phone may be broadcast to the world. Whereas we found a video called How to Identify Machine-Made Marbles. We found it, but they thought this is only ever going to be bought and watched by marble collectors who want to be able to identify which are hand-blown versus machine-made. So that’s why it’s fun for us, is to take a video that was made for a very specific audience to be watched in a specific context and put it in a theater or a rock club somewhere with a bunch of other weirdos.

JP: Yeah. I would say the main reason at this point is that we’ve been doing this for 20 years. We have no choice. We have to do this. What else? We have 14,000 VHS tapes. I think we have 3,000 DVDs, and what are we going to do with them? We have no choice. We’re stuck with this job forever. But the thrill of it is really the hunt of it all.

BNB: I do think there’s something about the unvarnished aspect, where the ambition and lack of self-awareness meet questionable execution. I think both the Found Footage Festival and Band Name Bureau celebrate that intersection. It’s stuff that I call accidentally transcendent, where people are maybe trying to do something artistically, but they don’t succeed in the way they intended.

JP: Well, I think that that speaks to most people. I have those videos that I made. We had a public-access show in high school. I can’t even watch it anymore. It’s so cringe-inducing, but we were trying to be something. But I like watching the trying. I like knowing what they are going for.

My favorite movie in the world is American Movie. Every time I watch it, I just get inspired. I just want to grab a camera with my friends and go out and make a movie. Because Mark Borchardt had limited resources. I think he’s very talented, but at the time, he was still learning what he was trying to make, and just to watch that process, I don’t know. It’s inspiring to me.

BNB: Mike Schank, RIP. I think Jack Rebney is a good example. He was doing this overwritten, overloaded Winnebago industrial film. But the outtakes, even though they were assembled to show what a dick he was, became meaningful in a way that no one would have expected. That’s fascinating.

NP: In the best videos for us, the pathos comes through. We’ve watched the finished Winnebago video without the swearing in it. It’s a little flowery and goofy, but it’s not nearly as funny as watching the parts that went wrong and the frustration—and it doesn’t hurt that Jack Rebney is just a poet when it comes to swearing. Everybody’s had a bad day at work, but very few people can express it as eloquently as him. So you get this window into this guy who has a short fuse, but a big vocabulary. I think that’s why we love news bloopers too. These people have this veneer of professionalism, and to watch that come crumbling down is so entertaining.

This isn’t what you’re asking, but it made me think of Andy Daly was in a music video. What was that video he was in, Joe, that was based on John and Johnny?

JP: Yeah, it’s based on John and Johnny. What’s that band? They’re a big band, something brothers. Levitt Brothers?

NP: Avett Brothers?

JP: Yeah, that’s who it is.

NP: There’s no way this wasn’t based on John and Johnny. So yeah, we have a home-shopping video a friend of ours found. I think it was a 1986 regional home shopping channel called America’s Value Network.

[The Avett Brothers] must’ve seen the video on our website or on YouTube or something, and they copied the graphics. Then Andy Daly plays basically one of these hosts, John and Johnny, from our home shopping tape in this video called “Slight Figure of Speech.”

BNB: Before we finish, I wanted to ask what I always ask in these interviews. You’re music fans and experts on weird stuff: Do you think it’s better to have a bad name that’s memorable or an innocuous name that doesn’t attract attention?

NP: Look at Joe’s hair. What do you think? [Laughs.]

BNB: Wearing a Cribshitter T-shirt, on top of that.

JP: Right! [Laughs.] I always think of the band Diarrhea Planet. Is it true that they lost a bet and that somebody else named their band that? That’s the legend that I had heard.

BNB: I believe it was the result of trying to come up with a terrible name on purpose.

JP: I always used to listen to that Sirius XM channel XMU, and I think they had some song that was on regular rotation. That’s where I heard of ’em. But I remember the DJ was always complaining about their band name. I think she was embarrassed to say their band name or was just like, “Don’t judge ’em on their band name.” But that said, I remember Diarrhea Planet. I couldn’t remember the Avett Brothers. Remember I called ’em the Levitt Brothers? That’s a mundane name. Avett Brothers, who’s going to remember that? Diarrhea Planet? Any day of the week.

BNB: What do you think, Nick?

NP: Yeah, I mean, my favorite band is Anal Cunt. So you do the math. [Laughs.]

POST-SCRIPTS

• Check out the Found Footage Festival 20th Anniversary Show (tickets here):

  • 3/20: Vancouver, BC

  • 3/21-22: Portland, OR

  • 3/23: Seattle, WA

  • 4/17: Grand Rapids, MI

  • 4/18: Ann Arbor, MI

  • 4/19: Hamtramck, MI

  • 5/2-3: Toronto, ON

  • 7/19: Brooklyn, NY

  • 11/8: Lapeer, MI

• Don’t forget you can now support this nonsense at Buy Me a Coffee.

Let’s not make a big deal out of this.

I had the idea to start Band Name Bureau in early 2020, after people kept asking about doing another Year in Band Names. A newsletter felt like a better format, because it took forever to assemble that beast every year at The A.V. Club, and a newsletter could be mine.1 I announced it in February 2020, with plans to launch on April 1, 2020.

We all know what happened between February and April.

Regardless, BNB #1 arrived on April 5, 2020, and has kept on keepin’ on for five years and 100 issues. Maybe it’s just my Chicago and/or punk roots, but my reaction to that is basically, “Hey, neat.” Pause. “Did I tell you about Governor Vomit yet?”

That said, 100 issues is definitely something. Thanks for reading, as always.

First-ballot BNB Hall of Famers

In 2016, I did a 10-year retrospective for the Year in Band Names, plucking my favorite names from each year I’d done the story. Band Name Bureau is only five years old, but these artists are locks for the BNB Hall of Fame, to be erected on the former site of the Mutiny in Chicago’s Logan Square sometime in the future.

Beercan Pentagram

Prepping for an upcoming interview had me thinking about the whole point of BNB. Not like, “What am I doing with my time?”—though, fair—but what excites me about digging through band listings during my limited free time? Considering I write about bands like Captain Asshole, this will sound highfalutin, but bear with me: I love what I call accidental transcendence. On a fundamental level, all of these bands—even those encased in a protective shell of irony—are making art. What they create may not be good—the quality is beside the point, really—but sometimes they inadvertently accomplish something kind of magical.

That brings me to Beercan Pentagram, a metal band from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, that we met back in BNB #46. First, they had the perfect name for a metal band from Wisconsin. Second, they had an album called A Triumph of Poor Taste. Third, they had this photo:

What makes it kind of magical are the 23 Busch Light cans paired with one Milwaukee’s Best Light can. I love it so much. Of course Beercan Pentagram would only drink the cheapest, shittiest beer while writing thrash tracks like “Spinespiders.”

A Triumph of Poor Taste came out in December 2019, but Beercan Pentagram didn’t play a release show until March 23, 2020.2 Footage from the show remains on the band’s Facebook, but Beercan Pentagram mostly went quiet after that. Just after BNB #46, they posted for what would be the last time:

I decided to reach out to get the story, and the band promptly responded:

Hails Ryan! We are not physically active/ our vocalist suffered from liver failure and has been unable to perform for quite some time now.

When I read that, a sound involuntarily erupted from me that surely disrupted the other patrons in the café, but holy shit. LIVER FAILURE UNDID BEERCAN PENTAGRAM. Yes, it’s a life-and-death matter, but it’s also thematically perfect? Rest assured, everyone: Vocalist Howard is doing well and undoubtedly tired of people pointing out the irony. In the meantime, you can find the other members of Beercan Pentagram throwing down in a thrash/death-metal band called Dead Soul Symphony. Their beer preferences are unknown as of press time.

Healing Potpourri

Band Name Bureau didn’t even have 10 issues under its belt when we met Healing Potpourri in issue #9. Life has never been the same. In the 20 years I’ve been writing about band names, seldom have I felt outmatched, but the aggressive softness of Healing Potpourri stunned me. Their debut album is called Blanket of Calm, with an opening track called “Dream Vacay.”

Continuing the theme, their second album is called Paradise, and its release inspired BNB #57’s rundown of soft names. Healing Potpourri have been quiet since the release of their Aquarium Drunkard Lagniappe Session in May 2023, though they still play shows in their hometown of San Francisco. Let’s go, Healing Potpourri: The world needs your calming blanket now more than ever.

Smoking Gives You Big Tits

I highlighted this punk outfit from the greater Manchester, UK, area in last year's music festival preview. Vocalist Helen Taylor couldn’t have been more charming in this interview, wherein she explained the origins of the name. The story goes that guitarist Jonesy would put blank stickers on top the warning labels on his cigarettes, but Taylor would just write new warnings on them, including “smoking gives you big tits” (a truly worrisome concern for a straight cis man). Taylor and Jonesy were on their way to a gig and needed a name, and Taylor’s most recent warning happened to be fresh in her mind:

“If it had been another day we could quite easily have been called Smoking Makes You Dead Cool and Distracts People From Your Face, Smoking Makes You Have Big Hairy Balls and Smoking Makes You Smell Like Mild Regret and Pies.”

I was smitten, even when Taylor went into the mundanities of how the band formed:

“When we came out of lockdown we asked Andy if he fancied a jam; we were thinking who to ask to play bass and our old friend Ben Shepherd came to mind. Ben ran the jazz band that Jonesy and I were in and we have been mates for years. Actually, Jonesy is still in that band! I left (or was fired? Can’t remember now), then got drunk and called Ben a ‘jazz cunt’ on Facebook and we didn’t speak for a year! Obviously, we are speaking again now.”

Jazz cunt! What a wordsmith. Sadly, Smoking Gives You Big Tits played their last gig in October 2024—with new BNB faves Goodbye Blue Monday—but will continue as a studio-only affair. “I think we have two songwriting settings: daft or angry,” Taylor said in that interview. Guess we’ll have to see which we get later this year.

The BNB Bump

It has been said that the readership of Band Name Bureau is small but disproportionately influential, akin to the Velvet Underground of Substack.3 The acclaim that has followed some BNB alumni bears that out.

• Black Country, New Road. OK, these British post-punks were on their way up when BNB #38 featured them in November 2021. Their debut, For the First Time, had dropped in February of that year, earning glowing write-ups in places like NME and The Guardian. Maybe the glare was too much, because frontman Isaac Wood abruptly quit the septet in January 2022. Perhaps because there are so many members, Black Country, New Road quickly rebounded. Their first post-Wood album, Forever Howlong, arrives next month, supported by a tour at a bunch of big venues across the UK and North America. Expect another batch of glowing write-ups around Forever Howlong’s release, beginning with this Ian Cohen interview in Pitchfork. YOU’RE WELCOME, BLACK COUNTRY.

• Teen Jesus and the Jean Teasers. The Australian punk outfit appeared in BNB #48 in April 2022, right before the release of their debut EP. Their first full-length, I Love You, dropped in 2023, followed in 2024 by a “deluxe edition,” I Love You Too.4 Things really took off for them last year, with a run of dates opening for Pearl Jam in the U.S. and Australia and an ARIA Award—the Australian GRAMMYs—for Breakthrough Artist. This spring, they’re heading out for another stint opening for Pearl Jam in the States. YOU’RE WELCOME, TEEN JESUS.

Alumni check-in

• The same issue that introduced us to Beercan Pentagram also debuted—and took its name from—Strangely Shaped By Fathers. I noted the verbosity of Dan McKee’s one-man punk band, which had an 1,800-word “about” page that neglected to explain the name. Three years later, McKee showed up in the comments and posted a link to a blog explaining it. That blog is 1,600+ words, so the TL;DR version is that the name comes from the lyrics of the first Strangely Shaped By Fathers song. It’s worth a read, though, because he reflects on how family dysfunction affects you as a child and continues to shape you as an adult, even after your parents die. As McKee says in his BNB comment, “Insanely, I’ve continued with this self-indulgent ludicrosity to this day. If anything the self-indulgence has got worse. But it keeps me sane.” First, +1 for “ludicrosity.” Second, hell yeah, Dan. Keep at it.

• Lots of BNB alums have new music coming out. BNB OGs Middle-Aged Queers are releasing their third album, Theatre of Shame, going three-for-three with the Mötley Crüe inspiration. It’s out now.

• Back in February 2023, I wrote about YHWH Nailgun and a video interview they did that was so boring it was basically performance art. As if getting ahead of that, the press release announcing their new album, 45 Pounds (out March 21), describes them as a “dynamic Brooklyn-based ensemble.” It continues, “Their music is a visceral blend of styles that reaches toward an absolute essence.” I have no idea what that means.

• When we met Poptropicaslutz! in June 2022, the press release described them as “hyper-punk,” but the one for their new album calls them “genre-fluid”—so keep your cis-genre expectations in check, people. But they remain title-casing-phobic, because they stylize their name poptropicaslutz!, the new album is called the new 925 (out March 28), and its debut singles are “mdma keeps the doctor away” and “tryna get that kate moss 2025.” If you find those titles annoying, you won’t feel any better listening to them.

Back in 2022, the group hadn’t said much about the origin of their name, but they attempted to be clever in a 2023 interview:

“We were in a monastery and a monk came up to us with a premonition that we’d be in a band called poptropicaslutz! and achieve world domination.”

The real answer is they needed a name, and this one popped into their head. Considering they’ve been described as “the epitome of nostalgia” and have a song called “I MISS 2007,” it’s surprising Poptropicaslutz! haven’t name-checked Poptropica. The online adventure game was popular with kids around the time the ’slutz were kids themselves. And it debuted… in 2007.

Which is better?

In every BNB interview since 2021, I’ve asked the same question: Is it better to have a bad name that’s memorable or an innocuous name that doesn’t stick out? Here’s what everyone has said.

River Butcher: “It fades into the background. I think I have to go with that because I think if your band name sticks out as being bad, that’s a big hurdle to get over.”

Tony Thaxton, Motion City Soundtrack: “I would for sure say it’s better to have the unobjectionable name, because while I will remember the bad names, if it’s really stupid—and this is probably shitty of me, but I’ll just fully admit it—it kind of makes me not even want to bother checking you out.”

Iona Cairns, Shit Present: “I think the way that we connect the music with the name completely transforms the name, doesn’t it? Bands where you don’t know what they sound like, it’s quite easy to forget their names. But when I know what they sound like, there’s an association. It’s really hard to think of the name in a vacuum, so I don’t know.”

@theJacobGivens: “There’s two band names that I don’t think are good band names, but they’re in my top rotation of bands: Jimmy Eat World and Death Cab for Cutie. I think both of those band names are kind of lousy, but they’re not easy to forget. Jimmy Eat World, the first time you hear that, it’s not a name that I was able to lose quickly. Neither is Death Cab for Cutie. So in that regard, it’s just forgivable because you’re like, ‘Well, it’s not my favorite name in the world, but it’s something.’ Whereas if you had a name that wasn’t very good, there was nothing memorable about it at all, then I think that would be a lot harder.”

Joseph Grillo, Her Head’s on Fire: “Somewhere between the two? You don’t want it to be innocuous. You don’t want it to be so forgettable.”

Adam Sturgeon, Ombiigizi: “Bad’s fine. I think a lot of what we’re talking about is, sometimes in Canada, there’s a milquetoast temperature. The band names feel the same, and you can just get lost in that for sure. Anything you can do to set yourself apart is great, I think. You find your people. If it’s weird and polarizing, someone’s going to like it. Hopefully.”

Ean Sicko of Sicko and the Subjunctives: “I really think that the latter is better… You can let the art tell people what it is instead of sort of wrestling with the implication of the words that you put for the name.”

The count: 3 for anodyne, 2 for bad, and 2 unsure. HOWEVER, I’ve done two interviews that I haven’t published yet that will change the standings!

POST-SCRIPTS

• Speaking of, keep an eye out for these interviews: Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett from the Found Footage Festival (coming this week), a BNB Audit with the legendary J. Robbins of Jawbox, Coco Kinnon of Winona Fighter, and more.

• Special thanks to Dan Henrick for the illustrations. If you’ve read the Year in Band Names (or seen the AVC’s Stand Down series), you’ve seen his other great work. You can find him at Cat Suit Studios.

• New thing alert: You can now support BNB on Buy Me a Coffee. Coffee money feels appropriately low stakes for this endeavor.