It's *BRAT* Summer, Baby!

It's rare that heavy metal (or at least, proper underground extreme metal) crosses over into the mainstream. We're too loud, too weird, too gory, and too sonically abrasive to be easily absorbed into the broader cultural discourse in the same way that pop stars, rappers, and various indie darlings are readily gobbled up. And when metal news does break containment, it's usually a bad thing for everyone involved. The sheer amount of subcultural knowledge and deep lore required to truly grasp all but the most surface-level events means that outside commentators invariably end up saying something cringy, clueless, or both.

Worse, metal generally ends up coming off even weirder when exposed to the harsh light of mainstream scrutiny. Remember when the singer of Iced Earth was arrested for storming the Capitol, or when a former member of Cannibal Corpse was found to have a cache of weapons and a variety of mysterious skulls in his house? How about when the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy Osbourne, burbled out a bunch of anti-union bullshit? Not a great look for the team!

However, there is a rarer and endlessly sillier occurrence that I really love: when metal bands inadvertently end up caught up in political or cultural events through no fault of their own. Consider Isis, the mid-2000s post-metal stalwarts who formed in 1988—way before a certain extremist group—but found themselves (and anyone who bought their merch) in a wildly unenviable position once 2013 rolled around ( but don't worry, they've returned as Celestial, and are doing just fine now). Remember when Mastodon was supposed to be the hot new social media site, destined to sup on the bones of Twitter? Mastodon the band is a good 20 years older, and remains much more user-friendly.

My favorite recent example of the phenomenon (femininomenon?) concerns a certain pop princess, and a certain New Orleans grindcore band. brat, the latest album by Charlie XCX, is a certified juggernaut that seems to have a stranglehold on seemingly everyone in the world, up to and including VP Kamala Harris's presidential campaign staffers. When I first started seeing green-tinted "brat" memes floating around on Twitter, I assumed they were none of my 36-year-old business, and was mostly correct, but then started to wonder how "brat summer" was impacting a musical entity I do care about very much–BRAT, the self-described "Barbiegrind/bimboviolence" outfit I'd recently seen tear it up at Philly's First Unitarian Church.

Charmed by their tongue-in-cheek approach to DIY deathgrind and undying devotion to millennial pink, Mean Girls-themed merch, and not giving a fuck, I did a quick profile of them for Decibel, but was left wanting more. Luckily, this newsletter exists, so I had an excuse to slide into the band's IG DMs and see if they were feeling chatty.

Vocalist Liz Selfish was generous enough to agree to do a quick interview for Salvo about how their very own BRAT summer is going. I caught up with them when they were en route to This Is Hardcore Fest in Philly, which I sadly missed. In between bouts of lost cellphone service (bless West Texas), we chatted about avoiding drama, the unglamorous reality of DIY touring, and the whole Charlie XCX thing. Guitarist Brenner Moate chimed in, too, so we got some double brat action.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity—make sure to catch BRAT on tour, they're relentless!

LIZ SELFISH: I'm so sorry I missed your call - we've had, like, two hotels on this tour where we've gotten there, and there's been bedbugs. I was just on hold with the hotel booking company for half an hour, trying to get a refund, but I think we got it sorted out.

SALVO: Aw man, I remember those days. That sucks extra hard because hotel days are supposed to be the special nice days where you're like, hell yeah, we get a hotel!

LIZ: It's funny, because now we we're more paranoid about hotels than we are with staying at peoples' houses! At this point, we've tried to stop crashing with random people as much, and pretty much just get hotels most of the time, because we've had some dark experiences

Tell me about one of them!

LIZ: The worst places have definitely been when you just show up at someone's house and it's like, trashed. We've stayed at a couple of those, where you go in and the house is trashed and it just smells like cat piss. We stayed with this guy in Maine in the summer, and it was so hot in there, and they had A/C but wouldn't let us turn it on. He's like, Oh no, you guys can just crack a window. Everyone's just sleeping on leather couches, and he was like, "Let's go eat donuts!" and we're like, just please let us sleep.

BRENNER MOATE: We stayed at this place outside Roanoke, Virginia at a friend from New Orleans' parents' place. After the show to this house, we're driving up a dark dirt mountain road and we pull up at this house next to a barn. It's pitch black and we see, the cherry of someone's cigarette, sitting in the darkness of the barn, and this big old dude just walks out and he's like, '"on't worry, you're in the right place." We thought we were about to get shot or something. We were in hillbilly heaven. It was great.

So it turns out that it's an old log cabin from the 1800s and the guy's mom turns out to be like an old hippie lady. She was very nice, and was telling us about how the cabin was built by freed slaves in the 1800s; that part was very cool, but it turned out she was not planning on letting us sleep in the house. She set up a tent outside. This is Virginia in July, and even at night it's still very hot. There was also this camper that she said we could stay in, and we go look in there, and there's no furniture, it's falling apart, there's mildew and mold everywhere. And then she's also like, "there's this guy who stays here sometimes, he lives in the school bus out back," and we go look in the school bus.

It's also super gross, really smelly and moist. It was also just trashed, and had old food in there and a bong, and it was really dirty. So our options were sleeping in the tent, sleep in the dirty camper, or the dirty school bus. Also, the plumbing didn't really work, so there was an outhouse, and if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to use the outhouse and, like, cover your shit with ashes. We were like, "Oh, man, what have we got ourselves into?"

LIZ: And somehow, Dustin and Hennessy finagled their way to sleeping in the house, which was also really hot, and then Brenner and I slept in the tent outside, because it was at least clean. It was pretty rough, but we woke up in the morning, and the whole place is just beautiful. We were in the woods in Virginia, and it's very pretty, so that made it kind of charming. But yeah, if we had known that there was no plumbing and we had to sleep outside, we probably wouldn't have stay there.

Chalk it up to the DIY experience!

BRENNER: Yeah. We love camping and stuff like that, but if you're not prepared for it, it's not ideal!

LIZ: If someone says, "Hey, you can stay with my parents," you usually expect there to be running water! But at least we got a good story out of it, and it was very unique. It wasn't just staying in someone's dirty apartment.

I feel like people who haven't spent time in the music industry trenches don't quite understand that that even though people pay attention to your band on the internet, and you've been doing all these cool tours and you have a rad new record out on Prosthetic, it's not automatically glamorous to be in a band like yours.

LIZ: Yeah, it doesn't mean that you're making money! It's two very different things.

You're still out on the Summer Slaughter right now, right? How's that been?

LIZ: ...Interesting. It's been fun. I'm sure you saw everything online about what everybody's thought about the tour, and we're definitely feeling some of the effects of that with the turnout, but like for us, these are by far the biggest venues we've ever played, which has been really cool. We played the Aztec Theater in San Antonio yesterday, which is a massive venue.

You guys, through no fault of your own, keep ending up in these situations when someone else is getting yelled at, and you happen to be in the same place at the same time, from Summer Slaughter to the Escuela Grind tour I caught you on a few months ago...

LIZ: Yeah, we've kind of noticed a trend of that lately, which not great! But you know, we're in the mix, that's for sure.

How do you keep out of those complicated situations when they erupt around you? Being caught in the eye of the storm has got be kind of stressful for a newer band that's just now blowing up and trying not to get into trouble.

LIZ: Yeah, we're fairly lucky in that we're not very combative people with other so we try to just be easygoing and keep our heads down. Trying to, anyway! We just try not to get involved with things that don't concern us, if possible, but there's only so much, you can do.

Speaking of being involved in things, how is your brat summer going?

LIZ: It's great! I've been trying to remember to say that on stage every night, I keep forgetting about it. We're like, constantly tagged in brat summer memes, which is great. I've also seen a lot of people be like, "Wow, every time I keep hearing people talk about brat, the whole time I thought they were talking about, y'all, like, I didn't realize this was a mainstream pop album!"

Though you could totally release a new merch design in that green color, and I bet it would pay for a new van.

We thought about it. We were like, "I don't know, should we do a brat riff?" I don't know if we missed the boat on it, though...

[Ed. note: I swear we did this interview before they dropped this exact design!]

It seems like you guys are on an upward trajectory, where you're continually getting opportunities that put you in front of different crowds and bigger stages. Did you expect for things to pop off like this? I'm interested in what it's been like for you to figure out how to thrive in this wild moment for heavy music.

LIZ: It's been awesome. We're just trying to make the most of it and take the opportunities that we're getting. Summer Slaughter has been a very different tour from anything we've been on, not just because of the venue sizes and the caliber of the tour, but stylistically. We're pretty different from most of the bands on the bill, so it's been kind of cool just to get in front of an audience probably would never have heard of us. For the most part, it's been well received; we've only had a couple times when it was like, crickets in the audience. At most of the shows, people have been really into it, and said some really nice things after we played.

It seems like the newest generation of kids don't care about genres as much, or at least, not as much as our generation did when we were coming up. Is that something that you've been seeing as a musician and as a music fan over the past few years?

LIZ: Yeah, definitely. I feel like when I was a teenager and going to shows, they were a lot more separated by genre than they are now. Different scenes and communities didn't overlap as much as they do now, and I mean, there's still definitely some of that separation that exists, but it's definitely gotten more communal.

So we need to gatekeep harder, is what I'm hearing. Anyway, I've written before about how dope your merch is; how have the kids at Summer Slaughter been reacting to your designs?

LIZ: People like it! It's not going quite as good as our normal tours, but I think it's hard when there's nine bands, it's basically a traveling fest. People love the BIMBOVIOLENCE shorts, I feel like that's always the big seller.

People with big asses like grindcore too. We're a very underserved demographic in this community

BRENNER: We need to put that on a shirt.

Yeah! "Thick bitches like grind." We can workshop it. Anyways, what are you guys doing once you get off of this wacky tour you're on now? What's the next step besides taking a very long shower and a nap?

LIZ: After This Is Hardcore and the rest of Summer Slaughter, we have about three weeks until we go out with GWAR. We have like six dates with them and then we're doing some headliners around it.

BRENNER: We're also playing Hopscotch Fest in North Carolina, and the New England Metal and Hardcore Fest.

That rules, and is also so weird. I love that so much for you, and it really is kind of the way that heavy ass bands are finding success now; there's been such a shift towards these genre-agnostic bills.

BRENNER: Yeah. I mean, we will play in front of any audience. Doesn't matter. Like, we keep saying we want to play The Gathering of the Juggalos, that would be awesome.

Oh man, they would eat you up.

BRENNER: We know! We want it to happen!!

For now, you've still got to get through a few more dates on this nine-band festival tour before you make your next move. Have you had any opportunities to take time off or go explore, or has it just been a constant slog of chasing the tour bus?

LIZ: Actually, there's been a lot of off days on it, but we booked a lot of headliners on those off days. But we did have a true off day in Lexington. Dustin went fishing at this little park, and we just hung out, so that was really nice. But we haven't gotten to do any sightseeing stuff or anything so far, like we've been able to do on tours before, just because the days are so long.

BRENNER: We're there from noon till 1130 at night every day. We're just in a van and a trailer, we don't have a Bandwagon or anything we can really all sleep in. So that part has been a new experience, because we've never had a load-in that was earlier than, like, 3pm or 4pm. We're playing a headliner in El Paso today, and our load in isn't until 6pm; it almost feels like an off day.

Sounds like an excellent way to start winding down your brat summer. Before I let you guys get back to your drive, how would you define brat? What is brat to you in BRAT's context, the context of all in which you live and what came before you?

BRENNER: Somebody who don't give a fuck.

LIZ: A bitch (positive)!

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Catch BRAT on tour:
(remaining SUMMER SLAUGHTER tour dates w/ Veil of Maya, Brand of Sacrifice, Gideon, Left to Suffer)
08/09 - Sayreville, NJ @ Starland Ballroom
08/10 - Reading, PA @ Reverb

(w/ GWAR)
09/12 - Buffalo, NY @ Town Ballroom
09/13 - Cincinnati, OH @ Bogarts
09/14 - Indianapolis, IN @ The Vogue
09/16 - Pittsburgh, PA @ Mr. Smalls
09/ 17 - St Louis, MO @ The Pageant
09/18 - Little Rock, AR @ The Hall
09/22 - New England Metal and HC Fest*

Snag BRAT's latest album, 'Social Grace' here, and subscribe to Salvo for more hard-hitting metal journalism about class war and shaking ass. Hollise Murphy forever.