#100: The 5th Anniversary Midtacular
Five years, 100 issues, 500+ bands, ∞ jackassery
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.
Even in 2020 it felt like there were already too many newsletters. LOL.
The lead story in the New York Times that day? The Virus Can Be Stopped, but Only With Harsh Steps, Experts Say. We were about to learn just how harsh.
No one has said this.
It’s super annoying when artists do this so close to the original’s release.
...amazing work you do here...the world is stronger for your mission...