I can’t be the only one who frequently fantasizes about what it must have been like to wander, either unknowingly or with a passing interest, into a Lower Manhattan club during the good-old/bad-old days of New York City and endure the sonic suckerpunch of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks with 16-year-old Lydia Lunch at the helm, bowl-cut, jet-black fringe falling over her baby-cheeked face, only revealing her blood-red lipstick-smeared sneer, shrieking at the top of her teenaged lungs, “Little orphans running through the bloody snow!” over an eardrum explosion of guitar and a lunatic with a drumstick. What was it like to stumble into the Peppermint Lounge after a few and dodge tooting saxophone-wielding psychopath James Chance as he hurled himself into the audience, a whirlwind of fists, a microphone cord, and a brass instrument? And what would it have been like to reemerge back onto the filthy, garbage-strewn Downtown streets, ears ringing, mind reeling after withstanding the clanging avant-garde-classical-turned-rock-and-roll of Theoretical Girls?

Well, after watching perfectly named New York-based band Genre is death at the itty basement venue Bowery Electric as a part of the local New Colossus Festival’s goth/dark wave/post-punk showcase last Saturday, I have as much of a reality-based answer to these daydreamy questions as I ever will, unless someone invents a machine that allows me to time-jump into Julia Gorton’s grubby no wave photos. Shocking, thrilling, deafening, Genre is death are an aurally violent visionary twosome that embody a surprising yet much-needed throwback to the best snarling, audience-alienating nihilism of no wave (no wave also being a rejection of genre though it eventually became one). The duo, made up of Ty Varesi on guitar and Tayler Lee on bass, with both trading off on vocals that range from detached murmurs to throat-tearing screams, opened their set with a stink bomb blast of fetid feedback, a misanthropic intro akin to cranking up everyone’s favorite easy-listening record, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music. That’s one way to stop the crowd’s chattering.

With no live drummer in the band, Genre is death relied on programmed drums, at one point asking Bowery Electric’s sound tech to juke them up even more. The tinny sound added an oddly accurately timed artificial quality to the atonal abuse bursting from the duo onstage. While sometimes the songs’ lyrics were hard to suss out over the destabilizing din—Ty’s shredding, squealing guitars and Tayler’s thunderous, core-shaking bass—the ones that I caught were amusingly flippant, defiantly embracing vapid influencer culture—“This is a life…STYLE”—reminiscent of Sonic Youth’s breezy irony. Sonic Youth is an easy comparison, perhaps too easy, especially since Tayler, at times, exudes a similar distant ice queen cool to Kim Gordon, her eyes trained to the ceiling rather than the crowd like she’s in need of an exorcism.

Genre is death at Bowery Electric as a part of the New Colossus Festival (blurry mood photo by me)

Granted, it’s a real challenge not to geek out and play comparison games with the band’s sound, proving, once and for all, to everyone within earshot just how wide your knowledge is of no wave and post-punk. This is particularly tough to avoid when listening to Genre is death’s debut album Talk, a quickie 21-minute audio barrage, released late last year, with a cassette (another anachronism) released at the show last Saturday. With guitars that haven’t been this off-tune since Glenn Branca, particularly on the jangling title track, seething scorn straight from Lydia Lunch’s bile-soaked spit, and lyrical curios over wonky guitars that even Mark E. Smith would (maybe) approve of (My favorite? The furious song “Hot Rats” that goes, “He likes hot chicks! With big tits! I like hot RATS!” Who doesn’t?), the duo clearly know their progenitors. Even their additional collection of four Talk Demos features a sleazier, narcotic version of “Images” that could have been recorded with The Birthday Party’s Rowland S. Howard.

While surely Michael Clark should be choreographing some assless leotard-sporting dance to Genre is death’s music just like he famously did with The Fall decades ago, playing music snob romanticism with a current band, though tempting, is a tad unfair. Genre is death transcends these influences on Talk anyhow, both with the astonishingly thick muddy recording that perfectly captures the experience of their live performance, except with the added ability to turn the music down, and their completely cracked lyrical imagery. Many of the lyrics focus on malignant image consciousness turned malleable identity and the craving to, like Charlotte Gainsbourg memorably said of her work with Lars von Trier at an Antichrist screening I attended, be made into an object. Take the song “In of It” with the repeated, “I am an object inside an object. I am the object in of it. And I like it a lot!.” These vague wants are sometimes not even fully articulated, such as “Essential Things”‘ “I want to know…essential things.” What are those? At times, these desires turn into all-consuming envy like on the Single White Female stalker anthem “ID,” in which Tayler takes the reins on the vocals and fixates on another, “I want what you have. I crave a sense of identity!” before exploding into pure, hot psychosis: “Make me YOU. If I’m you, then I’m COOL!” Though I enjoy the vapidity of lines like “I love you…I need a drink” from “You,” the best moments on the album are those when the simmering hostility transforms into full-blown fury. The second song “Burn Quick,” features both vocalists hollering, “Can’t you see what you’re doing to me? It makes me SICK!,” a line that reminds me of both the newspaper headline “People Around You Can Make You Sick” from Pink Flamingos and the relentless ire in Nick Zedd’s homicidal punk nuclear holocaust anti-classic They Eat Scum (which itself demands to be revisited especially given a prominent “mutant disco” “Y.M.C.A.” moment)

There’s certainly a conversation to be had here about how a New York band (by way of Atlanta), after so many years of tired Boomers telling us the city is dead and gone and has no place for young musicians (and other creative people), let alone ones producing the kind of free-flowing wrath that leaked out of the original short-lived no wave set, have been able to successfully revitalize this level of defiant and demented (and pleasurable) audience torture. But spending time cooking up sociopolitical theories and explanations seems way too easy. I mean, why wouldn’t everyone be ready for no wave nihilism again in 2025? Look around. Obviously. And the audience was certainly ready for it at the Bowery Electric last weekend. Even though, at one point, Genre is death stopped their resounding, pounding dissonance to repeat, “Repulse the audience,” the audience seemed more gleeful than repulsed, later putting down their cellphones to open up the floor to an arms-flailing, punchy moshpit. Genre is death responded in kind with Ty leaping into the fray during the final song of their relatively short set, hunched on the ground over his screaming guitar.

And what did it feel like afterward to reemerge back onto the filthy, garbage-strewn Downtown streets, escaping the hot bricked basement stuffed with people’s beer breath burps? Other than my ears feeling fuzzy as they did for another 24 hours, it felt pretty good.