Beautiful Freaks: Don’t Heal
From left to right: Peter Bryson (he/him), Tony LeFaive (he/him), Meg Hall (they/she), Cyra Wirth (she/it), James Bonaci (they/she). Photo by Bella Petro.
The first time I saw Beautiful Freaks, I was surrounded by clowns.
No Juggalos in sight, mind. No Pagliaccis either, despite the angst in the air. These clowns were all young punks: in distressed black and white garments, wrapped in leather straps, bare-skinned, visibly kissed by the sting of the tattoo needle. Where there was color, it appeared in the kaleidoscopic hues of their haircuts. Blunt bangs, shags, mullets, domes, rebellious curls, dichromatic streaks, full dye jobs: prismatic riots of color synchronized to the clamor.
Animal House has come to host so many shows that a dirty crater now exists where a backyard once was. A mosh pit teemed cyclonically in the center, its participants as feral as the house venue’s namesake. Most wore costumes in anticipation of Halloween — conventional vampires and zombies crashing into an inflatable Garfield and a cardboard B-MO — but the common thread remained that Pierrotesque make-up: stars, dots, and black isosceles stripes framing the eyes, as though their owners were crying up and down simultaneously.
Some bands threaten to fall apart at any moment. Beautiful Freaks were falling apart every second they played, their triumphant fracturing signaled by the crack of Peter Bryson’s brittle hi-hat cymbals and unsteady snare hits. Standing to the side of the pit, I remember how thankful I was to have earplugs in, to be shielded from the brutal assault of Meg Hall clutching a microphone in powder-blue nurse regalia and ripping their throat open in open confrontation with the Christian god. I remember their partner, James Bonaci, whipping the guitar off of their shoulders and offering it to the masses, who swiped at the strings and pulled at the quarter-inch cable like bears on bloody meat.
Here, I thought, is a punk band soundtracking our unique apocalypse. Punk music originally challenged the idea of decadence, a word whose roots are also in decay. Today we use the word to describe cheesecake, but in the 1800s it entailed a moral judgment: excess and indulgence belying a cultural decline. If the world around you is crumbling, wouldn’t you lean into creature comforts? Sex, pills, food, alcohol, TikTok, YouTube, every quick dopamine hit available? (This was during the heat of the Cold War when the threat of nuclear armageddon loomed every second.) But punks didn’t see decline, because decline insinuates a culture left to be saved. The end has already come, they said as they sawed open windows in the air. We are living in it right now.
Many capillaries have branched off from that vein since then, but Beautiful Freaks are not quite as nihilist as punk can get. They’re certainly cynical — about the for-profit prison system and the support beam of systemic racism; the military-industrial complex and the normalization of gun violence; especially about the imposing threat of Christian nationalism and the harm it continues to wreak on so many of the country’s marginalized citizens — but within that cynicism is a resilience not unlike a rubber coating. Their music may replicate the anxious chaos of our device-addled brains, but it also reflects what those devices try so hard to circumvent: painful, live-affirming reality. The clown makeup is both ironic and post-ironic; the instruments they wield on stage are scalpels, meant to excise whatever screams have metastasized inside us.
“Let it be known on the record that the drummer of this band is dressed like a Staples employee for some reason,” says Hall the moment I start recording.
Bryson, wearing a red polo and beige pants, indeed looks poised to sell me a printer. Bonaci leans forward in a mulberry sweater and counters that Bryson is wearing State Farm garb. The band’s bassist, Tony LeFaive, suggests Target. The debate about whether his pants are brown jeans or khakis evolves playfully between the four, evincing their enduring friendship.
Just about a month has passed since the Animal House show, and I’m sitting with the band in a house on a West Seattle backroad with an address that made it difficult to find. For the headquarters of a DIY punk band, the place is quite cozy. The hardwood floor beneath us is scuffed, and everyone including me is wearing shoes. Around us, the counters and walls are rife with potted plants, paintings, and tchotchkes. Downstairs is even more crowded, crammed with scattered accessories and various memorabilia of unspoken significance. A cyan shelf — half display and half utility for the many touring bands that find shelter here — houses soon-to-be-vintage DVDs and video games. In the corner, shrine-like, a desktop Mac receives all the raw files from demo recording sessions, generated from the insulated practice space in the room next door. Before I leave, they graciously present a few demos meant for the upcoming record, and I can feel their eyes on me as I listen carefully. (They’re very good.)
My conversation with Beautiful Freaks takes place in late November. A few days from now, they’ll be decamping to London Bridge Studios to record their second full-length album, and then they’ll be playing its songs in full at their next show, where Bonaci will be celebrating their 26th birthday.
The LP, titled We Talk To Birds and scheduled for a July release, features the most explicitly “pop” songwriting from the band so far. Then again, it’s also the most explicit record from the band period. It’s not just the newfound clarity of the vocals, as engineered by Lilian Blair; it’s what Hall and Bonaci outline within them, and the fires they want to start in the process.
“It’s a bummer,” sums Bonaci of the record’s mood. “There's a lot of themes of grief.”
They might be understating it. “Don’t Heal” addresses the everlasting cycle of violence against queer people murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard; Bonaci wrote “Tissue” after hearing about yet another school shooting while facilitating COVID testing in an elementary school; “Because You’re Poor” tackles the deception underneath the military recruitment of America’s impoverished youth. Though the band sprinkles a pinch of goblinesque behavior — “I Have a Skill,” for instance, vents exasperation at the job market in a darkly comedic way — but the seriousness of so much pointless, unjust death overwhelms. (“Grief is just love with nowhere left to go,” goes the nexus-like chorus of the title track.)
Blair, as it turns out, is an ideal match for what the band is trying to accomplish. “Lilian gets it more than, I would say, probably 95% of the producers on earth,” claims Hall. Good producers transcend just sonic duties; oftentimes they can help their clients better articulate what they’re trying to convey in the music. Next to me on the couch-side table, for instance, is a copy of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Blair ordered the band to read the book after taking note of their songs’ subjects, and of the layered ways in which they approach them.
Photo by Luciano Ratto.
Through the new LP, the band is hoping to capitalize on the momentum of their 2022 EP 80HD, and of the infamously wild shows they’ve held in promotion of it. Those shows are not specific to the Freaks — indeed, they’re part of a wide tapestry of transcendent punk experiences sprouting up in the wake of the pandemic — but the Freaks have engendered particularly ferocious showings from the young punk crowd. Chances are that wherever the band plays, a fracas will erupt. Stage diving, rafter climbing, constant moshing; their sets feel like a progression of Seattle’s lapidary musical history, albeit with a radiantly queer veneer.
Beautiful Freaks originally started over ten years ago as a childhood collaboration between Bryson and Bonaci, who met as sixth-grade band kids. Both grew up in West Seattle, a neighborhood with enough geographical hurdles and local staples to create an ecosystem separate from the city proper. Bryson had a basement to play out of, so he invited Bonaci, who played baritone saxophone, over to jam. Their musical partnership bloomed soon after, and they eventually rebranded after the misremembered title of the 2004 Flaming Lips concert film, The Fearless Freaks.
“I wasn't worried about longevity,” reasons Bryson. “We were kids playing in the basement. So I was like, ‘We'll be The Fearless Freaks! Wait, what was it…The Beautiful Freaks?’ And now we’re still rolling with it.”
Though LeFaive is the “newest” member of the band, his history with its members goes far back. Bonaci originally knew LeFaive as the child of their mom’s work friend, but they connected even further after attending a rock camp sponsored by the EMP (now the MoPOP). “Tony covered ‘Say It Ain't So’ and it was hype,” recalls Bonaci, who later invited him to Bryson’s practice space. His preternatural gifts as a bassist destined him for less musty pastures, and LeFaive eventually left the band to learn upright bass at Roosevelt High School’s nationally known jazz program.
Bryson and Bonaci, meanwhile, kept it rolling. Their gigs were few and far between, but as West Seattleites, they wormed their way into occasional sets at the Skylark. Bonaci took the reins on booking, with their intention to keep them grounded in the wider community. “Part of why I've gotten into booking is just to get involved,“ they say before recounting the first show they ever booked: a rock concert benefiting the School of Rock Scholarship Program and featuring heavyweight local acts Helms Alee and Hobosexual.
After Bryson and Bonaci received acceptance letters into Western Washington University, they endeavored to keep the band going into college. For that purpose, they recorded a ramshackle demo called Electric Astronaut and moved to Bellingham.
“That's when we started taking it seriously,” says Bryson. Bonaci agrees that the real effort began “when we turned the ripe old age of 18. We still didn't have any money or support, but we just decided we were going to do it anyway.”
Their prospects were stymied at first by a back injury that sidelined Bonaci for a semester, but by early 2017, the duo started earning respect from a handful of established acts. One of their first Bellingham shows took place at a Planned Parenthood rally in March 2017, alongside The Black Tones, Acapulco Lips, and Naked Giants. “Eva Walker really stuck it out for us,” says Bonaci of the Black Tones’ singer and former host of KEXP’s Audioasis. “I used to loiter at the School of Rock because I couldn't afford lessons but I didn't want to go home, and Eva would just let me hang out and chill.”
As Western students, Bonaci and Bryson ingratiated themselves with the college’s vibrant musical community, garnering additional members in bassist Joey Schmidt and horn player Maxwell Lemke. Their living quarters likewise adopted two other roles: a house venue known as Luigi’s Mansion and an ersatz recording studio they dubbed Play Along. “Imagine the worst college house you've ever imagined,” deadpans Bonaci, “and then multiply it by Bellingham and seven roommates.”
I saw them live before I was in the banD. I was like, what the actual fuck is this? I love it, but what is this? And that seems to be people's reaction, still, to this day.
-Meg Hall
Beautiful Freaks put together Cameo Artist in those squalid, shag-carpeted chambers. Resourcefully recorded by Schmidt via a cheap mixing board and a handful of broken mics, the band’s debut album bears the fascinating allure of outsider music, and it doesn’t fit cleanly into any box. “That album captured the chaos we were interested in at the time,” recalls Bryson, “with horns and clarinets and vampy, ‘out-there’ songs.” Its hour-long length and rudimentary mash of glam, metal, jazz, and punk make the album quite inaccessible, but it hides gems for those intrepid enough to dive in. Cacophonies like the psychotic “Juan de Fuca” and the vicious “Barnyard Animals” foreshadow the band’s current iteration, while others — like the cabaret groove of “Peppers and Berries” with its soft rotten brass, or the shambolic multi-part epic of “Eclipse Music” — feel like the product of a different band altogether.
Cameo Artist, in all its intoxicating weirdness and bristling DIY energy, earned the band a legion of local admirers and a KEXP live session in 2019. Still, even at the time, they acknowledged the record as a learning process rather than an announcement of arrival. “I feel every band is gonna have their first album be an outlier,” reasons Bryson. “You gotta rip the tab off in some way.”
While the band’s founding members mostly lead our chat — Bonaci with their quick wit, Bryson with his genial lisp — Hall is a comparatively laconic figure. More than anybody in the room, they come across as the group’s representative Punk, prepared to vocalize their malcontent with the world at large, and with the one immediately surrounding them.
It’s as much visual as it is verbal. As a hairstylist at a Capitol Hill salon aptly named BANG!, Hall is partially responsible for standardizing the common coiffure of their musical community. Others in their circle come to them routinely for cuts or touch-ups, which Hall advertises on a separate Instagram page. (“It's called getting ‘Megged’ now,” remarks Bonaci.) Their hair also changes frequently, and today it’s a jet-black fountain streaked with fuchsia that’s cut short in the front and pours down to their shoulders — the mulleted, androgynous hairstyle they’ve come to perfect.
Hall, like their bandmates, shares a background in jazz. “I’ve been doing music since I was a kiddo as well,” they say. “I started doing jazz band and shit.” Though they don’t speak much about their childhood, they don’t need to. Hall provides a quick summary on “If God,” a particularly anthemic cut from the upcoming record that the band has included in their sets for years. Over three verses, they outline their experience growing up as a queer kid in Piedmont, Oklahoma. “I was on the worship team,” they say, the term hitting like black comedy. Fittingly, most of Hall’s lyrics are in conversation with that foundational religious trauma.
They didn’t meet Bonaci and Bryson until they moved to Bellingham to attend Western, where they joined their brother Dylan’s band Foxing Gloves. The two bands eventually crossed paths. “I was like, what the actual fuck is this?” Hall says about the first time they saw Beautiful Freaks live. “I mean I love it, but what is this? And that seems to be people's reaction, still, to this day."
At some point in late 2017, Hall fell in love with Bonaci, and the two started dating. Soon after, they joined the band primarily as a backing singer but also with a handful of instruments in tow. “You showed up with a clarinet and a sousaphone,” Bonaci says to Hall. “You showed up with something to say.”
Their presence on Cameo Artist is relatively slight with just a few vocals hidden in tracks like “Pop Song,” but their move into a lead role revealed a pitch-perfect voice that could abruptly morph into a scream with the power to level buildings. Amid the band’s shifting cast, with members like Schmidt, Lemke, and interim bassist Montana Siddle coming and going — Hall remained a permanent member. Today, they’re as inextricable from its DNA as its founders.
Whatever ways in which Beautiful Freaks were planning to develop, they sped up dramatically as the decade concluded. The catalyst, as it was for many of us, was grief. There’s the George Floyd protests, the violent end of the Trump administration, and the hundreds of thousands of deaths from a pandemic that shuttered venues and forced the band into stasis. But on a personal level, the 2019 murder of Dustyn Hunt by Chuck Heller — the allegedly racist father of his girlfriend — sent shockwaves that still reverberate within the community he belonged to. Outraged, the band joined protests and spent the rest of the year raising awareness of the injustice. Days before our conversation, Heller was acquitted of the charges and walked free. “Five years later, after that protest and calls and all this stuff…still no justice with that,” says Bonaci, shaking his head in disgust.
in the interim, plenty of external influences had begun seeping their way into Beautiful Freaks’ music. Just one example: at the beginning of 2020, Bonaci, Bryson, and Hall had all found their way into backing Tres Leches, the legendary punk act co-fronted by Alaia D’Alessandro and Ulises Mariscal. “We would leave Freaks rehearsal and then carpool to Tres Leches rehearsal,” says Bonaci, who also contributed to two tracks on the group’s most recent LP, Fosil.
Photo by Luciano Ratto.
It’s quite likely that the buzzsaw guitars and righteous urgency of their moonlighting gig trickled down into their music, especially considering both bands earned SXSW showcases in 2022. “It was a triple header,” recalls Bryson. “We had to do two Tres Leches sets and then the Freaks set on the same day.” (This was during the rise of non-fungible tokens, a phenomenon that the Freaks made a meal out of. “We ran around in business attire and I harassed tech bros trying to get them to explain NFTs to me,” they say.)
The band’s lineup had also changed significantly, in part because of the band’s graduation from college in 2021 and their move to Seattle. A spinning wheel of players eventually landed on Stephanie Jones, who played in Bad Optics and led the inchoate quartet that Zookraught used to be. As a Freak, she leaned fully into the band’s mentality, donning the requisite cosmetics and contributing gamely to the racket. It’s tempting to hypothesize that her time in Beautiful Freaks may have influenced Zookraught’s transition from an outré experimental rock act a la Velvet Q to the incendiary painted trio they’ve become.
Then there’s Cyra Wirth, an adventurous multi-instrumentalist who eventually joined the band as an auxiliary guitarist. Though she’s not a part of our chat, she’ll later rejoin the band next year. “This should go without surprise, but we're super hardcore Cyra stans,” says Bonaci. They met Wirth when she was one-third of Forever Chemicals, a currently defunct band that also featured the man behind Liam’s Neighborhood. Running sound for the trio, Bonaci found themself impressed not only with the band’s music but with their genuine concern for the audience. “There was a girl outside that seemed like she was having a medical emergency,” says Bonaci, “and they went with me to help her. It was great.”
By 2022, their sets had gotten louder, harder, and more abrasive, and they’d started to attract a devoted Seattle-based following. Bryson started actively documenting each of their sets on Instagram Live, but he wasn’t the only one; several hungry photographers had also started to document the scene, and house venues like Evil House and Animal House had also begun hosting local shows. The Freaks leaned into the snowballing effort, and it led to a series of barn-burning summer sets that reestablished the band as an anchor of Seattle’s burgeoning queer, experimental hardcore scene.
New tracks, like the warped pop of “CROCODILE” and the cataclysmic “CYNIC” unfurled with a heightened exigency and a more explicitly bloodthirsty aura. The latter in particular resembled an endurance test and instigated the wildest behavior, drawing out bruises on bodies and signaling impromptu stunts from the band’s members. At Lawnstock 2022, it caused Bonaci to smash a bright yellow guitar into pieces. Under the 1st Avenue overpass, it found Bryson watching his drum kit disintegrate piece by piece. At a last-minute set at Capitol Hill Block Party, Wirth spent the whole song flailing on the concrete floor, desperately summoning feedback, and dragging her guitar alongside her like a teddy bear.
Photo by Kevin O.
The band collected a handful of these new songs, recorded them in their practice space, and mixed them down to make *80HD* — an EP that, like many great EPs, hailed a declaration of transition. “SWISS FAMILY MANSON” may be as hobbled together as anything on Cameo Artist, but it’s also immediately sharper with its gunky opening riff and red herring of a tempo. It is five or six different song parts sewn together, and yet it unravels naturally, brutally climaxing and then brutally recovering. The romantic “MALICHI” attacks with needles and then settles into an atmospheric breakdown a la Sonic Youth; “72 HOURS IN PARIS” mashes a tense instrumental with a nauseous verse-chorus trade-off like a child mangling fistfuls of Play-Doh.
On October 28, the band held a release party for the EP at Easy Street Records in West Seattle. The location couldn’t have been more perfect for the band’s founders, who grew up in the area and frequented the shop in their teen years. Painted and garbed in rainbows, the band tore through a set of almost entirely new material to a packed crowd of admirers.
Tony LeFaive didn’t make the show, but he made the after-party. It was there that he finally reconnected with his old bandmates. “That was the best part of that entire night,” says Bonaci, who was sufficiently sozzled at the time. “I looked out and I thought, ‘There's no way that that's Tony. I haven’t seen Tony in six years. There and behold…”
Unbeknownst to the band, LeFaive had forged a parallel path in the local music scene, forming Vehicle Collector with drummer Luca Cartner and befriending fellow musicians like Wirth. Though he missed the release party, he marveled at how much the band had developed. “I was on a walk with my dog just listening to the recordings,” recalls LeFaive “thinking, ‘Wow, there’s just so much energy in this music, and so much passion in this music. I hadn’t heard anything like it before. I was like, this is it. This is a project I want to be a part of again.”
After Jones left to focus on her other bands, LeFaive reclaimed his role as the Freaks’ bassist. He’s been playing with them ever since. “It's pretty epic having Tony in the band,” says Hall, “because I was telling his partner the other day that I listened to these two hype him up for five years about how insanely talented he is all the time. And he exceeded the hype. He continues to exceed the hype, constantly. Just so brilliant.”
Bonaci agrees: “Having Tony back in the band so many years later,” they say, “with our musical trajectories having gone all over the place but realigning here…it’s very exciting.”
At some point during our restless conversation, the topic of clowning finally comes up.
It’s become a dominant aesthetic of the band — Bailey Taylor’s painting of a disgruntled clown graces the cover of 80HD, and the band dolled up in rosy cheeks and stark white faces for many of their 2023 sets. “I feel it's kind of an evolution of really impressive costume makeup,” Bryson explains, “with people doing Instagram looks with big winged eyeliner and designs. Then it was the stars and the drops, and I think eventually it morphed into people choosing clowning as a makeup art form.”
As mentioned, it’s not related to the much-maligned, much-misunderstood Juggalo movement fostered by Insane Clown Posse. When I talked to Luciano Ratto, who’s followed the band with his camera since that first overpass show in 2022, he offered another explanation.
“A big reason for the trend is The Garden,” he said, referencing the LA-based experimental rock duo comprised of twin brothers Wyatt and Fletcher Shears. They’ve been cranking out albums since the early 2010s, but it wasn’t until 2018’s Mirror Might Steal Your Charm that the duo adopted the monochromatic jester face paint they’re now known for. “They're huge in Seattle. Every time they play a show, it's sold out. People love the Garden here for some reason.”
“For some reason” resonates with me, though maybe it’s because I’m a few years too old to be Gen Z. Their music is certainly unique, a rare feat at this junction of rock music, but to me, The Garden has yet to back that creativity with an equivalent sense of purpose. From the outset they’ve claimed a neologism for their ethos, “vada vada” — “Pure creative expression,” described Wyatt in 2011, “that disregards all previously made genres and ideals” — but the term feels less profound than provisional, a product of necessitated personal branding.
Put more charitably, the ideas they flirt with make an excellent canvas on which others can illustrate their interpretations. But though The Freaks, with their heavy political bent and comparative rancor, seem to have made the concept their own, they hesitate to adhere to the practice fully.
“We weren't a clown band. That was a misnomer,” deflects Bonaci. “We just really liked this picture of the clown, so we did it, and then we kept doing it for a while. We kind of got bit by the clown a little bit. Now everyone's doing the clown thing, so we only bust it out every once in a while when we want to.”
Whenever they do, however, it’s a good time. “I feel like I play better when I am in clown makeup,” says Hall, and then jokes, “Maybe it's just the energy of the clown taking over me.”
It also tends to elicit bizarre reactions from strangers. “The most fun part about doing the clown look is getting gas after the show,” says Bryson. “There is no better feeling than pumping gas at 2:00 AM in full clown makeup. It is the most fun thing in the world. Someone will pull up next to us and be like, ‘What the hell is going on over there?’?
Later, Hall recounts the time the band left a Garden show in clown apparel: “We got on the bus and some guy was just like “No no no no NO!” and grabbed his bags and ran off.” (“He seemed genuinely upset,” Bonaci adds with a tinge of regret.)
Whatever their reasons, the clowning is merely one facet of the cosmetic self-expression within the scene to which Beautiful Freaks contributes. As mentioned, they aren’t the only ones doing it: riot-grrl revival act Mold Mom, led by Sofiiak and current Audioasis host Kennady Quille, has been clowning for years; the three members of Zookraught adorn their faces with signature runic patterns that their audiences have come to replicate at shows; and, having embraced metal and alternative in her music, TeZaTalks dons the stage wraith-like in a white visage and heterochromatic contacts like the lost fifth member of KISS.
It could be just another trend. Every generation’s youth lay claim to them. But the side of me that’s all too readily to over-intellectualize is tempted to see something more in it. It’s not just the fact that makeup and its capacity for self-expression effectively modernize this rung in the ladder of Seattle’s punk eras; it also dovetails with the femininity and queerness specific to this one.
Clowns, after all, have long belonged to a subversive form of performance art. “They represent a reversal of the normal order, providing an opening to the chaos that underpins life,” wrote Rizz Obolensky last year in the London-based LGBTQ+ magazine QX. “These beings have a foot between both worlds: grounded in this one but connected to a ‘beyond’. This provides a perfect opportunity for social commentary.”Behind the grease paint and the comically overdrawn lips lies the freedom of gender-nonconformity — a blurry line that both Hall and Bonaci, who identify primarily as non-binary, already straddle in their daily lives. Clowning, fittingly, makes perfect sense in a community seeking to escape the tyranny of the gender binary in a cathartic, joyous fashion.
There’s another, perhaps unintended side to it whenever I recall the constant presence of cameras at these shows. Whether we subscribe to it or not, the embedding of social media into the social fabric has turned our every engagement into a thespian nightmare. In our continued usage of platforms that rob us of our privacy and strip our neuroreceptors raw, we also come closer and closer to becoming machines ourselves.
Perhaps acknowledging that dynamic, in costume and makeup, represents another form of rebellion. Perhaps it is to say: I am inevitably commodified, a statistic, a demographic, a target for your ads. I am human. I am a real person. I am queer and sad and fucked up in ways that only my friends can understand, and no, I’m actually not here for your quick dopamine fix. Here we are now, entertainers.
I’m paraphrasing this. I remember vocalizing these thoughts to the band and then feeling a little sheepish afterward, like somebody caught in a social faux pas. Maybe the feeling is unwarranted.
But right as the conversation carries on, like a pinball slamming into bumpers, Hall turns to me and meets my eyes.
“It’s both,” they say quietly, head tilted. “And it’s neither.”
