Black Ends: Pretend There’s No Dyin’
From left to right: Ben Swanson (he/him); Nicolle Swims (they/them); Billie Jessica Paine (she/her). (Photo by Anya Kochis.)
July 1, 2021
It’s the start of a summer that can’t possibly be grimmer than the summer before it.
The black-bricked building on the corner of 10th and Pike, just down the street from the previous year’s over-televised chaos, is crammed with vaccinated, unmasked ticket holders. After a year of lockdown it feels like an impossible number of people, too many people. Your brain might temporarily short-circuit from that many people, all crammed in there like a sealed jar of green olives, salty and sweating in the heat.
They don’t acknowledge it but they’re all tight as coils, nerves frayed, anxiously relearning how to be social in such a tight space the way they once took for granted. They don’t realize yet that the music they’re about to hear is perfect for that feeling.
The stage light shines azure as the band enters, prompting exultant, relieved cheering. It probably could have been for anybody; just to be at a show, to experience the familiar ritual of loud music and good company, is its own source of catharsis. But on a bill featuring some of the year’s most beloved local acts, it’s the relative newcomers, the openers, that draw some of the loudest shouts. They watch giddily as a bespectacled Nicolle Swims lifts the guitar from its stand and suddenly summons a fetid dissonance, the tone fluid and curdled like hot milk in the street. Stoic at stage left, Ben Swanson stretches his fingers up the neck of his bass and merges with the sour sound, right as an amplified kick drum floods the PA.
It’s music! It’s music. So simple, but you can’t believe it. It’s good music too: chunky blasts of detuned chorus-steeped distortion and adroit low-end sweeps that touch the top of your diaphragm. The tempos stay unsteady as if ready for an attack, always looking over the shoulder. People in the crowd test the limits of their personal space, some bouncing and jumping and feeling the thrill of someone else’s body heat, but they don’t go too far. They’re adults, and adults stand and look with a civilized appreciation for the performance. They’ve long given up the need to dance, even if within them rests tens of thousands of years of ancestral hard-wiring that craves the physical touch of strangers and would instantly wipe away the memory of those months they spent deprived of it.
(Photo by Rob Moura.)
When the band finishes the last song - a tune about revenge and self-preservation called “Stay Evil” - a roar follows: the crowd is still hungry, and they demand an encore. Rarely do you ever see a crowd clamor for an encore from an opening band. Swims knows they can’t fulfill the request, but they pause to take in the adulation from the height of the stage. Maybe a flash of memory hits, of some vacant open-mic in Alabama or a sparsely-attended house show, or some other trial of disinterest every musician undergoes in the hopes they meet a moment just like this one.
Maybe there’s something else mixed in, something gnawing at the corners of the scene. The audience is mostly strangers, mostly white. You’ve cured these people of their alienation, but how can they possibly reciprocate that feeling?
Doubts that permeate the adrenaline and penetrate the subconscious seep in from a widening gap in the room, a gap that reaches way beyond the usual separation between audience and performer, reaches far far back into the history of the land, its ghosts, and the twin curses bestowed on its people: to misunderstand and to be misunderstood, to suffer in transgression and to suffer at the hands of transgressors, to imply the terrifying notion that there will never, ever be a stage high enough to be truly seen.
At least for the moment there is cheering. It’s a start.
December 20, 2023
Black Ends is the band everyone wants to see win. Over the last six years, that’s the common refrain I’ve heard from the many interviews I’ve had with those tied to Seattle’s underground music. The band manages, somehow, to bridge the gap between the oldheads who secretly pine for the city’s days of yore and the youths who - apart from the typical surface sentiment and simulacra - reject those days out of hand. They want something to call their own, and of the many local bands providing that service, Black Ends feels most aligned with that ancient heartbeat.
You see that acknowledgment among Seattle’s dwindling cognoscenti of music critics, in the writing of Dave Segal and Martin Douglas and Michael Reitmulder. You see it in the growing number of notable young creatives, musicians and otherwise, that themselves acknowledge the role artists of color have had in their own development. You see it in the way Everett True, the UK journalist that Bruce Pavitt and Jonathan Poneman flew to Seattle 35 years ago to strike flint on the city’s music, raved in his personal blog about the band. You see it proudly over the chest of Micah Nelson as he plays guitar next to his father on stage at the Gorge, the name spelled out in primary fridge letters:
BLACK ENDS
IS
GUNK POP.
What is it about them that effects such a seemingly universal enchantment? The question, like all questions involving art and humanity, is difficult to answer. I want to say that it’s because they simply play interesting music, but there’s something more there, an element of destiny in that equation that ties that music into a larger story. You get the sense that a band like Black Ends simply couldn’t be from anywhere else, and perhaps in that acknowledgement there’s an accompanying gratitude for their existence.
At Soundhouse Studios with Evan Applebaum. (Photo by Luciano Ratto.)
Under the towering shadow of one of America’s last monocultural music scenes, plenty of Seattle rock bands wilt for lack of sun. You’ve got to learn how to thrive in the shade here, and Black Ends does it via an approach to rock that is so distinctly theirs that Swims’ quixotic name for it, “gunk pop,” seems to have stuck. Iconized in a particularly effective bit of merch, the term has it both ways. It’s an earnest declaration and it’s an inside joke; it’s self-defeat with the smallest twinge of hope. Just like everything else now.
To Swims, the descriptive specificity of “gunk pop” was less important than the narrative protection it offered. “I thought it would be cool to label myself first before anyone else could,” they say. That’s fair. In this business, if you don’t write your own story, someone else will write one for you. “I remember someone called us ‘psychedelic folk,’ and I was like, ‘That's insane. That’s so bad.’”
It is, but also, even experienced music writers would be hard-pressed to describe the music properly. “Psychedelic folk” is just one missed dart on the board; over the course of my research, I’ve spotted “art folk,” “math rock,” “noise-rock,” “alt-pop,” and, of course, that dreaded other G-word in attempts to properly classify just what exactly Black Ends is. It’s not that it’s unable to be categorized. Instrumentally and structurally it’s rock, even if it oscillates between its myriad sub-genres at will. But more so than aural identifiers, the defining quality of the music is its intuitiveness, a sense that every part is in its right place. The songs are so spellbinding that the urge to compartmentalize it recedes. It’s not “blues” or “punk” or “metal,” it’s just good organic songwriting pieced together from a century’s worth of musical detritus: forgotten pain and pleasure gumming up the sewer pipes. (Maybe that’s one meaning of “gunk.”)
Swims is sitting on my couch on a mild mid-December afternoon. We’d set up the interview a couple months in advance, but I was still thrown off guard by the knock at my door - without a confirmation and suffering mentally at the time, I wasn’t totally prepared for a chat. Luckily Swims brought the camaraderie, allowing my nerves to soften over time. Housemates occasionally float into the living room either to leave or to eat, briefly becoming facets of the interview without their knowing.
Swims also, surprisingly, brought their partner Devin Wolf, who at the time I had only known as a guitarist/vocalist for death metal bands Tax Evader and Rainbow Coalition Death Cult, of which Swims is also a member. It didn’t occur to me then that he was the mind behind WOLFTONE, whose beats and instrumentals had soundtracked years of Seattle’s 69/50 Collective. He sits patiently next to Swims as they gamely answer my questions on the band’s origins, as well as the yet-unrecorded album.
Nicolle Swims. (Photo by Luciano Ratto.)
Swims was technically born in Oklahoma City, but the peripatetic nature of their family caused them to move around frequently in their earlier years. Eventually they settled in Federal Way, a suburb of Seattle that borders the southern edge of King County. Given that their father spun records for fun and profit, Swims learned the joy of music early. It took a little bit, but they eventually found the guitar and started taking lessons in middle school. (Coincidentally, one of my current roommates learned guitar in the very same class.)
Swims had an interest in classical guitar in particular, which is what led them to study it at the University of Idaho’s noted music program. The experience was a high and a low simultaneously. On one hand, they were immediately faced with a tidal wave of ostracism, much of which was spurred by casual racism. “I had to get the fuck out,” they say, alluding to their walkout from a conductor’s test that prompted their leave from the university.
On the other hand, they met Swanson, the only Seattle native in Black Ends. His love of music was similarly innate: he’d started with piano lessons really young before picking up trombone in middle school, the study of which brought him to Idaho. Before Swims’ departure from the university, the two managed to make their shared dormitory into a jam space of sorts, fostering a little community in the process.. (He doesn’t play trombone much anymore, but you can still hear a little of it embedded in the band’s 2019 one-off “What.”)
Ben Swanson. (Photo by Luciano Ratto.)
Now a college dropout, Swims moved back in with their family, who were then living in Huntsville, Alabama. They tried again at the state college, but their motivation for studying plummeted. “Sometimes I would skip class...I wouldn't really go to school. I went to some classes and then just kind of dropped out over time.”
Trapped in Huntsville with no prospects for an education, they spent much of the next six years making music in their room, struggling to stay afloat while holding out for a little fate. “I was kind of making music because I needed to,” they say of the time. “It was therapy for me and I needed to do it, I needed to get it out. I was having issues and I wanted to write about them.”
Much of what would become Swims’ contribution to Black Ends - the guitar tone, the vocal style, and the unnamable murk grounding it all - was forged over those years. The guitar sound would come from a GarageBand preset. “I think I wrote ‘Sellout,’ and I wanted to put a weird effect on it,” they say. “I found one on GarageBand, and I really liked how it sounded. I was like, how do I find an actual pedal like this? So I went down a rabbit hole - I was probably researching for days and days and days trying to find this specific sound that that GarageBand preset had.”
Eventually they found their quarry: the Subdecay Siren Pitch Vibrato, a pedal that gave Swims’ guitar the sour twang they craved. “I didn't know it was a pitch vibrato, I was just fucking around,” they say. The pedal is a staple of their rig to this day.
I was kind of making music because I needed to. It was therapy for me.”
-Nicolle Swims
At the same time, Swims trained their voice by intentionally studying the voices of others. Thom Yorke, Sameer Gadhia of Young the Giant, Julian Casablancas, Nina Simone, and especially Jeff Buckley: Swims picked voices on gut instinct. “I just studied them until I could sing, 'cause I couldn't sing that well before,” they say.
Swims started making tentative steps toward the life of a musician: playing the occasional Huntsville open mic; recording and releasing demos over Bandcamp and Soundcloud, initially under their own name and then under another that they refuse to share. The final piece of the puzzle, as with everything else, came from the confines of their bedroom. “I had a book on the end of my shelf,” they say, referring to Deborah Willis’ photography book BLACK: A Celebration of A Culture. “It was on the end of my shelf and I was like, bookends, “black ends”...I thought it sounded cool.” They brought the name to Swanson, who stayed in contact with Swims post-graduation, and he pleaded with them in response: come to Seattle. Come make music. In March 2018, Swims finally obliged, and they returned to the PNW to chase the dream.
The going was slow at first, but not for too long. Despite the typical struggle to gain traction as a fresh band, their material was developed and engrossing, and they played like they’d been practicing for years. Some of their earliest shows were with now-stalwart local acts, like Salt Lick and Beautiful Freaks. Others were with bands now left to legend, like Rachael’s Children, who had started playing shows around the same time as Black Ends and grew to be sister bands.
They also earned a huge fan in Eva Walker, a proponent of local music via her stint as the DJ for KEXP’s long-running local music program Audioasis, as well as the intensely charismatic guitarist and vocalist of The Black Tones, a band she shared with her twin Cedric. After discovering Black Ends at a show in 2018, Walker quickly found kinship with yet another Black-fronted punk rock act and soon became a mentor of sorts, as well as their most impactful champion.
In the spring of 2019, Black Ends released a four-song EP called Sellout that, in Swims’ words, couldn’t come out sooner. “I was 23 or 24 when I recorded Sellout,” they say. “I was thinking, 'I need this to be my thing. I need to get something out.' I felt like I was wasting time - I was having an age crisis.” They recorded the songs over two days, tracking the drums one day at now-defunct punk venue Kame House and doing everything else at Padget’s apartment studio the day after. “I don't know why that was in my mind, that I was on that timeline,” they say. “It was like I needed to get this done right now or it'll never be.”
The EP certainly doesn’t sound rushed. “Maybe When” and “Tongues Turned” share a congruent blues throughline, but the infectious title track (with Swanson’s befuddled bass line) and the brooding “Peak” (a song that showcases Swims’ classical picking) are curious outliers that shirk easy definition. Even now, as the band’s definitive introductory moment, the originality is striking.
Just a month after Sellout’s release came, arguably, Black Ends’ breakout moment. Walker had invited the band on the bill for The Black Tones’ sold-out show promoting the release of their debut LP Cobain and Cornbread. On the stage of Chop Suey, they burned through their material to a crowd that, for the most part, wasn’t prepared for them. The one-two punch of the Chop Suey set and Sellout heavily piqued the city’s interest, prompting a flurry of interviews that coincided with even more shows and an initial tour. As the EP earned a spot on a number of high-profile year-end lists, suddenly Black Ends began creeping into conversation as a local favorite, a band to feel genuine excitement for.
That’s how it began; since then, the band has spent most of their efforts spreading their name through live shows rather than recorded efforts. Their last official release was a pair of singles in early 2023 that merely whetted the appetite.
Sitting on my couch, Swims is vocally eager to get more music out. “I’m so ready to not play shows,” they say at the time. “I’m burnt out. I want to write again, I want to get back to recording and writing and making albums. Like, we need an album. It's going to happen. We released those two singles so we wouldn't be forgotten! Like, we're still doing stuff! But we want to release an album that's good, and we can't do that if we're playing too much.”
Our chat lasts about an hour as we bounce between talking about other local bands and the pressures of the attention economy. I forget when it came up, but in the middle of our conversation they run down their influences: Sly and The Family Stone, Nina Simone (“I would love to be a punk rock Nina Simone” they say wistfully), Love and their solitary album Forever Changes. Chief among them, of course, is Nirvana.
“Nirvana's my favorite band of all time,” they admit. “I hate saying it because everyone's like, ‘Oh yeah, okay, Nirvana,’ but I really think Kurt Cobain was a genius. His songwriting was genius, and...they were the first gunk pop band.”
Before Swims leaves, as a surprise fog rolls into the street and obscures the houses around us, I hastily procure a copy of Michael Azerrad’s updated Nirvana biography, The Amplified Come As You Are, and offer it to them on an indefinite loan. I’ve written about it elsewhere, but the book is wonderful: besides being a reminder of an American institution, Azerrad’s added annotations comprise a meta-narrative on the darkness of the musical industrial complex and the collateral that arises in pursuit of a good story. In the subtext, you can faintly discern his apprehension about where he fits into that story, and how he may have inadvertently twisted it in the process.
May 20, 2023
The first time I talk to the full band, I’m outside a popular coffee shop in south Seattle while the three members are being transmitted via Zoom onto my screen from, I’m assuming, somewhere in their respective abodes. Swanson wears over-ear headphones in a room that’s neatly kept and trichromatic: pale-brown wood framing, cream-colored walls, and bright turquoise blinds blocking every window. Initially Swims seems to be sitting at a diner booth in a pink walled room, but randomly between questions they switch their background to a rotation of pallid spaghetti dishes, the starchy strands louse with cinders and cigarette butts.
“This is Billie’s breakfast,” they say, referring to their new drummer, Billie Jessica Paine. She’s sitting outside, maybe on a porch or balcony, occasionally taking casual drags off a cigarette of her own. It’s unclear if there’s a plate of pasta next to her for an ashtray.
Billie Jessica Paine. (Photo by Luciano Ratto.)
Though Swims founded Black Ends roughly seven years ago, and though they’ve seen a number of drummers through their history, Paine’s rhythmic chaos is something else entirely. You get the sense that no two of Paine’s drum takes are quite the same, as though her brain is actively processing the song every time she plays it, her sticks not deciding on what they want to hit until the moment it happens.
That’s exactly what Swims and Swanson wanted from a drummer, considering how she was one of sixteen people who auditioned for the band earlier in the year. “For us it was definitely just a clear standout,” says Swanson of the audition, before adding, “It was a difficult decision for sure, because there were a lot of very talented people. Nicolle and I were both like, wow, why do all these people wanna play with us? They're all so good.”
“She just came along and blew us away and was like, see ya,” Swims says. “And we were like, what the fuck was that?”
Paine is not a born drummer - at least, not in relation to the guitar. “Billie is an incredible guitarist,” says Swims. “It's the craziest thing I've ever fucking seen.” Born in Boise, Idaho, Paine carried a Hendrix-like affinity for the instrument from a very young age. “I used to carry around a toy guitar everywhere with me around the house as a kid,” she said to KEXP’s Martin Douglas in his recent profile of Black Ends. Though she practiced constantly as a child, her desire to play in a band overwhelmed her insistence on playing guitar in one, and she settled for a spot behind the kit.
Swims and Swanson, of course, had no idea about Paine’s hidden talent. “She just picked up a guitar one day in practice and started shredding,” says Swanson, leaving them with the same stunned reaction left by her drumming. “Nicolle and I were just like...what the fuck? Where did that come from?”
“She just came along and blew us away…we were like, what the fuck was that?”
-Nicolle Swims
Paine’s addition to the lineup felt serendipitous. With her the band seemed complete, enhanced, an ideal triangle of complementary personalities and styles. The proof was the ease with which she gelled with the rest of the band. “It's such a different energy than anything I've ever played in so far,” Paine says of the project. “They’re such good people. And then the shows too, it’s such a good feeling to play to the audience who come to our shows. The fans are always the sweetest people.”
“That’s true,” Swims adds. “The fans are always so nice.”
With Paine in tow, Black Ends set out on their first European tour and played venues across the UK, Germany, France, Denmark, and Hungary. The tour - which had concluded three weeks prior to our chat - was a success, even if not all of the shows were worth writing home about. “It was very hit or miss,” says Paine. “There were a bunch of shows in Germany where there were zero people in the audience. And with those you can mess around and have fun, but definitely the big shows, when there are enough people to mash into each other are better.”
One of those shows, at the Shacklewell Arms in London, was an undeniable hit. As the crowd whipped themselves into a frenzy at the end of “Stay Evil,” Swims turned and whacked the microphone stand with the neck of her guitar. Still shredding, they watched as a random audience member patiently set it back up, then gleefully knocked it over again. There in the background was Paine standing on her stool, throwing her arms down on her cymbals in mutually assured destruction.
(Photo by Luciano Ratto.)
“That was a great fucking show,” understates Swims. “It was really fun. I feel like we were in the zone because it was our last show, so we got to go kind of crazy. It felt good.”
It’s heartening to hear that those overseas audiences are vibing similarly to those of the band’s hometown. Perhaps more than anything, the foray to Europe signaled a newfound ambition for Black Ends to push beyond the city that adores it. Playing for friends and locals can be fulfilling, but it’s not sustainable if your goal is career musicianship. Maybe that’s why, when I ask for their feelings around their identity as a Seattle band, they blanche just a touch at the suggestion.
“Maybe, at this point, we could be ‘Black Ends from the United States’,” offers Paine.
“Hopefully we get to that point where people don't just call us a Seattle band,” says Swims. “I mean, I like Seattle, but I’m trying to branch out. I don't wanna be known as a local band, but I do like Seattle and I like the scene here. You feel me?”
August 19, 2024
Until the announcement of the band’s hyper-anticipated debut LP Psychotic Spew, Black Ends had eleven total songs to their name. Then KEXP’s Larry Mizell Jr. premiered “Bent,” the lead single to a record that promised to double the band’s young catalog, and it immediately shot up the station’s charts. For good reason too; the song is an itchy slice of pleasure, taking a simple three-chord pattern and throwing it in a wood chipper as Swims strums frantically against Paine’s demented tom rolls, iced on the verses with a ride bell.
A few days after the premiere, I took a walk up the street and rung up Swims to get their thoughts on the upcoming record. I’ve technically owned it since late May, when I ran into Swims at Oblé Reed’s Retrovision EP release and they graciously texted a sneak peek. They, like me, are stoked for the rest of the world to hear it.
“I’m ready for it to come out,” they say. “I’m really excited. I think that people will like it, I'm really confident in that. And I actually enjoy what I’m making, which is really nice. I feel like a lot of musicians don't like to say that, but it's true. I like my music. It's okay to like it.”
If Swims felt any pressure to release new music, it was all internal. “I was pretty selfish back in the day,” they say. “Before I released a record, I wanted a little bit more hype, or more people to get our music into their ears. I was pressuring myself for a long time, like, ‘Well, we're a small local band, I want to wait until we have more people like an actual fan base.’ And I kept waiting and waiting. That was also part of the problem.”
Alternate art for Psychotic Spew. (Photo by Nicolle Swims and Ben Swanson.)
Psychotic Spew, like many great debut LPs, fleshes out the technical brilliance and manic-depressive themes that the band’s well-received pair of EPs originally presented. It crams all its most accessible moments - “Bent” and “Pour Me” are among some of the band’s catchiest material - at the outset before lapsing into song structures as slippery as Swims’ signature guitar tone.
“I think there’s a song there for everyone,” they say. “If you don't like one song on there, you'll probably find another one that you'll like.” Their words hold water; perhaps even more striking than the rage is the range, from the mid-tempo crawl of “Pretend 2 Be (Protect Me)” to the fiery “Red Worry” to the familiar rush of “My Own Dead.”
It’s also the band cast in newly upgraded sonics, thanks to a strong cocktail of engineering: recording by Evan Applebaum at Jack Endino’s Soundhouse Studios; additional recording by Eric Padget, who helmed the band’s first EP; mixing by Earwig Studio’s Don Farwell; and a final mastering job via Third Man Records’ Cameron Frank. You almost miss the turbidity of the band’s earlier releases, until you hear the warmth of Swanson’s upright bass on “Black Lullaby” and the crispness of Paine’s ride on old favorite “When I’m Alone.”
Paine’s drumming, similar to Swims’ guitar, is also a signature. Catch her breakdown on “Bent,” with its stop-start frisson, or her jagged rolls over the chorus of “Suppin’ On Strange” like cardiac arrhythmia, or her martial snare conducting “Bye Bye!’s” funeral dirge. She even proves her chops on the axe; that’s Paine you’re hearing on the guitar solo for the apocalyptic “Red Worry.” “She sent it to us randomly and we thought it was incredible,” says Swims.
“That, I think, is the most collaborative we've ever been on a song,” they say. “All of us wrote the intro, every single one of us contributed to that. Ben wrote out the cello parts for that. I brought it in and I thought it was a little bit boring, and I wanted it to have a really cool intro, and so we all tried to figure out how to make it kind of jarring in a really cool way. We got together for two weeks to get that down, and it was different every single time. It was so fucking fun.”
Indeed, the whole process for recording Psychotic Spew was an enjoyable experience. Well, mostly enjoyable: “There was one day where the string on my Strat was breaking,” they say. “The same string, the whole day, every single fucking hour. It was either the E or the B, but we just had to keep changing it and changing it.” Eventually they relented and brought the guitar to Geoff Joynes at The Trading Musician, who solved the problem handily. “There's not a lot of places you can do that anymore,” quips Swims about the shop, which closed its doors in May.
Besides that and some feedback issues (specifically the struggle to get enough feedback), recording went smoothly. “I think that what really stood out to me was...just getting closer with my bandmates and also Evan,” they say. “It felt like I was at home just hanging with friends and making something cool. It was just very, very good energy the whole time.”
“It's such a different energy than anything I've ever played in so far…they’re such good people.”
-Billie Jessica Paine
Contrast that comfortable environment with a record aptly titled Psychotic Spew. The throughline between its songs is a sense of estrangement so thick not even a knife could cut through it. Most of the songs find Swims stuck in some variation of quicksand: despondent, paralyzed by paranoia, and unhesitant to outline what it is they’re feeling.
“I think a lot of this record is about isolation, dissociation,” Swims offers. “When I was writing, I was kind of in a place where I felt like I was...misunderstood, I guess. Some of the lyrics are a bit abstract, but there are some songs on here that are very much about abusive people or relationships, or just feeling misunderstood in relationships and feeling like you're also misunderstanding the person that you're with. Just kind of...people not understanding each other, and of you feeling isolated in the process of that, you know?”
On “Bent,” that means a new definition for a word that usually describes the state of a person but here means the state of the world at large. “Craving propaganda/Wasted my whole mind for it/Screamin’ out the window cuz it's all bent,” they lament, taking a breath before uttering the title with an idiosyncratic diphthong, as pitched-down voices infiltrate the foreground. “Pour Me,” which Swims has claimed to be their favorite Black Ends song yet, undercuts the thrilling grooviness of its swing with a chorus mired in hopelessness (“It’s a waste of time to breathe...to sleep...to be me”). Those poppy moments are poppy in spite of the withering heart at their core, and in fact might even be more effective because of it.
Sound familiar? Let’s just state it outright; the Nirvana influence is strong here, and Swims doesn’t try to hide it. It’s not so much the ersatz universality of Nevermind as the coarse-edged Bleach, which, according to Swims, is “my favorite album of all time.” And that connection transcends the sound; it’s spiritual as well. It’s in the invisible presence of Bleach engineer Endino, who didn’t work directly on Psychotic Spew but did offer his studio for the recording, besides directly with the band in the past. It’s in the fact that, on top of the Bassman head and Mesa Boogie cab that Swims usually plays out of, they also employed Endino’s Fender Twin Reverb that Cobain used across the record.
In a similar vein, Black Ends also brought on Lori Goldston - the cellist known to the greater public for her role on-stage Nirvana’s Unplugged set but a prominent figure in Seattle for much longer - to lay weeping strings over much of Psychotic Spew’s back half. “We met Lori a while back through the scene,” says Swims. “We were writing music and Ben was thinking about cellos going well with some of the parts, so we asked her if she wanted to play.” She improvised a touch, but much of her parts were composed by Swanson, and they add a lachrymose richness to songs like “Black’s Lullaby” and “Bye-Bye!”
Black Ends with Lori Goldston. (Photo by Kate Richardson.)
Then there’s the album art, shot at Ballard’s Golden Gardens Park and features Swanson’s sheet music, a pair of bargain-bin ‘45s flecked with pink slime, the single art for “Bent” drawn by Swims years ago, and a whole lot of dirt and worms. At its center is GermMayne (“Like germ man,” Swims clarifies), a doll equal parts adorable and unsettling that the band discovered at a neighborhood curiosity shop and that Paine suggested they use for the cover. The artist, Jessica Geiger, was originally inspited by “the individual’s struggle to survive and find meaning in an increasingly overcrowded, impersonal society.” In the context of the music, GermMayne bears more than a little resemblance to Cobain’s visual art, both the dolls he crafted in Tracy Marander’s Olympia apartment and the eerie drawing that graced the cover of Incesticide.
It’s all observation and pontification, anyway. Swims is vehemently not trying to be a wannabe Kurt Cobain; they just love the band enough to have been heavily influenced by their work. They even speak fondly of a particularly auspicious moment during the sessions: “While we were recording, Krist Novoselic drove up in his Tesla.” they say. “I didn't know how to say hi to him, so I just kind of waved, but it was pretty cool. We thought it was a good omen, you know?”
July 7, 2020
Given the gravity of his death and the context within which it occurred, Cobain’s name carries a sanctified air in Seattle. The legend goes that Cobain suffered for his art, got famous because of it, and then succumbed to the pressures of that fame. The reality is far more complicated, but the simplest version of that legend remains powerful, and it evokes a perverted romance that has corrupted so many young, disillusioned artists since then. What an alluring metaphor: to die at the hands of the people that unceasingly tormented you in your life.
The bitter irony is that Black people die in America all the time in similar, if far more literal, circumstances. Their stories don’t inspire the same kind of romance.
Every city in the U.S. has a contentious history with its Black population. It’s in our nature. Seattle might have been less ostensibly racist than others, but the regional effects of redlining and “de facto segregation” still reigned, corralling Black citizens into certain areas of the city and keeping them in the same cycle of penury and persecution as usual. But perhaps more salient than the relative paucity of Seattle’s Black representation is its overwhelming white representation and the suppressing effect it wreaks. It can’t help but create that sense of “otherness,” that resulting demand for assimilation rather than coexistence, that has defined Seattle’s racial dynamic for as long as memory permits.
We try, of course. Seattle boasts one of the most aggressively progressive subcultures in the country, and there’s a significant prerogative toward addressing and correcting that dynamic. But for every vocal push toward anti-racism or recognition of the unceded Duwamish territory across Seattle’s myriad area codes, there’s a equivalent, if even stronger, pushback from a population that would rather the work be conducted in ambience, in the margins, lest any uncomfortable confrontation ruin their evening plans. (“Don’t interrupt the sorrow/darn right,” mused Joni Mitchell facetiously on a song about women’s rights, right around the time she considered donning blackface on one of her album covers.)
When Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on a late spring day in 2020, it caused a country already stir-crazy from three months of quarantine and reeling from years of high-profile racial reckoning to flood the streets in protest. Harrowing scenes of police brutality popped up everywhere, but Seattle in particular morphed into a hotbed of passionate protestation, sensationalist coverage, and bad-faith conservative commentary. The turning point occurred after a week of daily clashes outside the city’s Police Department in Capitol Hill, when the police abruptly relinquished the area to demonstrators, allowing them to set up a police-free autonomous zone that spanned ten blocks of the neighborhood. Aside from drawing the ire of then-President Trump and his cronies, the zone’s status as a highly visible platform constituted an opportunity for demonstrators to educate the general public about the history behind American police brutality and, perhaps, even imagine a scenario where their abolishment could become a reality.
In early June, on a makeshift stage constructed at the corner of 12th and Pike, Nicolle Swims stood in red-paned sunglasses and performed a short set of songs for the zone’s audience. At the center of their set was “Monday Mourning,” a tune about waiting around for life to end. The verses count the days down (“Monday morning I become a star/Won’t you wonder where I’m are”) while the choruses are just wordless railings, the last few rages against the dying of the light. The whole time, the crowd quietly hung on to every word.
(Photo by Emily Pothast.)
A week later, Swims released the single in preparation for Black Ends’ second EP, Stay Evil. In a vacuum, the EP is just one of many releases caught up in the COVID pandemic, but the dire context of the protests changed things. Swims dedicated the EP to the memory of George Floyd upon its announcement, along with an essay published by KEXP’s Martin Douglas, about being Black in America.
“Being Black in America feels like a death sentence. To be constantly bombarded with news of Black death everywhere I look -- to always be paranoid and on edge that something evil is going to happen to me or the ones I love at any moment. To be left belittled and shoved down in this world is almost too much to bear.
At the time, I had a podcast called The Tape Deck where I interviewed local artists about their work, and even though I was struggling to motivate myself to make more episodes, I was galvanized by what I had heard from the band, the same way probably everyone has. I reached out to Swims and asked if they wanted to be on the show, and they accepted. We recorded the podcast a week before Stay Evil’s release; it was the first time I’d ever interview Swims.
I cringe listening back to the episode. It’s not that we didn’t cover interesting topics; we got the chance to speak about the EP and its title (“The reason I wrote it was to basically get back at your abusers - stay evil to get even”), and we talked at length about a whole bunch of records we recommended to each other. We even touched a little on that performance at the autonomous zone. “I was having guitar troubles,” they said at the time, “but it wasn’t really that important for it to sound good. I was just trying to make a statement.”
I cringe because of my voice, or rather the overwhelming presence of it. I know it was my nerves, but I want to grab that man out of the room and shake him and tell him to STOP TALKING. It’s the worst sin an interviewer can commit. The episode is too much of me and not enough of Swims, and wasn’t that the whole problem anyway? That some excited white voice was occupied drowning out the Black voice they’re trying to platform? Wasn’t that a big part of why it had all devolved from a serious push against institutionalized racism to a chaotic, endlessly misconstrued distraction?
Growing up with mostly White people around me felt lonely and invalidating; like I didn’t have a voice unless it was whitewashed and stomped on a bit before I could open my mouth. I had no one to relate to and self hate consumed my every move. Being Black in America feels like a death sentence. As if I am meant to be rotting at the core of who I am; judging & filling myself with doubt because that’s what this white world has taught me to do. Being young and Black in white suburbia was having to submit to whiteness unknowingly. Having to work harder than my peers and still getting the short end of the stick; When I didn’t want the stick to even exist at all.
The truth is that, for the four separate times I’ve spoken with Nicolle Swims about their art - on the podcast, and at the coffee shop in May, and on my couch in December, and on my screen in August - I’ve never once breached the subject of how being Black, and the multifaceted weight of American racism, factors into it. It’s my cowardice, but it’s also a failure to properly do my job, because Black Ends has always been about being Black. It’s not the entirety of their art - Swims purposefully keeps the lyrics open to interpretation, and they’re primarily concerned with the mechanics of depression - but that perspective is inextricable from the music they make.
In that way, it’s hard for me to listen to a song like “Suppin’ on Strange,” which launches from verses of dejection - “I’m in the trenches again” - to a chorus that frames an attempt at gaslighting with a pained smirk (“Bad timing/To put you up against the wall”), without it evoking a flash of racially-charged violence. Same goes for “My Own Dead”; it presupposes self-destruction as the fulfillment of a cosmic wish - “Take what you want for me, I’ll fake my own death...don’t be so angry” they say, tongue piercing the cheek - but even if its sarcastic screed against mental subjugation is wide-ranging, the specificity of “death,” and the names it conjures, inevitably narrows it.
Like Cobain, Swims has an uncanny ability to make their pain universally relatable. But until paparazzi started rifling through his garbage, Cobain was rarely actually persecuted. He had no reason to be, save for his outsized fame and for the causes he took on in advocating for the marginalized groups he himself did not belong to. He may have personally felt a distance from other people that curdled into a generalized misanthropy, but like the way he’d imagine himself to be a lost alien as a child, that alienation was a comforting fantasy, escapism as a coping mechanism. Part of what defines whiteness, after all, is the embarrassing wealth of places you can escape to.
Being Black in America feels like a death sentence. I’m so tired. I’m so spent from picking myself up again. Trying to love myself harder to show them I am not afraid. I can love myself into the ground and no matter what, there will be wicked people lurking waiting to hurt me (side note: I looked up synonyms for evil just now and the word ‘black’ was there -- I know it sounds ridiculous but everything just hurts honestly). A white supremacist badged or unbadged roaming the streets looking for their next target. Looking to attack me or someone who looks like me merely because we exist. That will always be fact until we dismantle and rip apart white supremacy at its seams.
Swims, like most other Black humans in America, can’t escape to such a fantasy because they live in that state of “otherness” every day. Even in a city like Seattle, with its frequent diversity initiatives and ostensible progressive culture, you must still walk around and interface with a population that doesn’t look like you, nor shares your experience. You shake the hand of the friendly person in front of you, the ghosts in the garden passing subcutaneously from their palm to yours, and you can’t help but wonder who they really are, if that veneer of friendliness hides razor-sharp teeth that wouldn’t hesitate to flay if given the chance, for how can someone love what they can’t possibly understand?
At times, an old way of hating myself will seep into my brain and swallow me whole. Thoughts like ‘If I were white, I know I wouldn’t have to work this hard. I wouldn’t have to be this tired.’ I find myself so sapped of thinking this way. It’s so gross and asinine that this world has made Blackness so hated and so shunned that we can hate ourselves like this. I refuse to do this now. I am so unbearably worn out but I will not hate myself whilst fighting for my will to live. I will not consume myself with the self hate I grew up in. I will love myself until the end of days. My Black Joy will roar through the depths of my soul and spill out onto the streets. I will paint the world with it.
And you still have to navigate that world, even when its omnipresent miasma enervates you to the depths of your psyche. If you’re a Black punk musician, that means maintaining a constant distance as you figure out who gets it and who doesn’t. It means having to work mostly with white musicians, the consolation being that the ones you choose to work with at least understand your point of view and want to help realize it. It means performing to mostly white crowds and, if they like you enough, basking in the adulation of a group of people that have accepted you, at least for the moment. It means feeling the slow subtle pull of assimilation and waving goodbye to that part of you that never really got a chance to grow, to eternally grieve its absence and wonder if its return would make you feel more complete, or at least less empty.
Whiteness has consumed America since the very day it was stolen. Nothing has changed -- They’ve only just gotten better at hiding it. Shoved racism under a rug and pretended the room was clean; smiling in our faces as if it never happened. Slavery has transformed into prisons. Doctors and nurses are still ignoring our pain. Police kill us everyday. Being black in America feels like a death sentence but I refuse to stop fighting.
I would hope that the reason why Black Ends is the band everyone wants to see win is because they truly understand the magnificence of what they’re witnessing: a gifted musician, supported by two other gifted musicians, making art that casts a loaded and personal pain in such a ubiquitous light that anyone - not just the people who share Swims’ experience - can relate to. The fact that they do it through music that sounds both connected to the past and representative of the future is a marvel in an era where most are content to resell the first and call it the second.
These protests happening now are necessary for real change but something must be done differently -- history is just repeating itself because America has never changed. It’s always been corrupt and deadly. We must work to completely abolish the systems that are against us. Abolish prisons. Abolish police. Build society from the ground up and destroy white supremacy. This is lifelong work. It will not be easy work but it has to be possible. It has to be possible. It has to be. We need to believe it so that we can change it. We must work together to fight for real change and we must have hope."
And I have written enough about it by now, because I’ve made it too much about myself and all my words are needless hot vapor anyway, and to be frank I’m already committing the same mistake I did that afternoon in July 2020, when I tried to platform a Black voice and ended up swallowing it whole.
(Photo by Luciano Ratto.)
September 19, 2024
It’s the end of a summer just like any other.
The black-bricked building on the corner of 10th and Pike, just down the street from an intersection that hides its scars well, is crammed with unvaccinated, unmasked ticket holders. No one cares about it, really. They’re all too excited to see each other, and to support the bands they’ve been following for the last couple of years. A waist-high wall of aluminum barriers separates the 21+ crowd, in line to order overpriced drinks and lose themselves, with the kids and young adults that are already in that headspace, ready to crash into each other at a moment’s notice.
The stage light shines azure as Swims enters from the right, alone, in an unbuttoned long-sleeve shirt over a band tee and a beaded necklace that tightly clasps the neck. The entrance elicits a shockwave of volume through the crowd. It isn’t just for anyone; it’s for the most recognizable act on the bill, the veteran whose presence has jolted countless venues before.
Slowly they pick up their guitar, tune, and softly strum a pensive two-chord figure that’s almost drowned under the ambient din of the horde. They draw out the drama because they know what’s coming. Paine and Swanson join them on stage and, together, they dive into the bombastic repetition of “Bye-Bye!” It’s an ideal song to begin a show.
Everything afterward is sweat and heat. The kids up front have no qualms or insecurities about moving; they greedily take every chance they can get to start a pit, and half the set finds the crowd communally undulating like a sea anemone. They’re egged on by Paine, who subconsciously pushes the tempos to breakneck paces. When the band launches into “Sellout,” someone from the crowd suddenly gives a physical order, and the center becomes a tornado of bodies that grows and grows and eats up more of the people in it. Alongside the band, a demon in a monster mask thrashes interpretatively to the music, staring down the performers like a walking shadow.
There’s no encore this time, but the song that ends the set, “Pour Me,” works just fine. The opening riff sends an electric bolt into the front half of the venue, sending it into overdrive. Swims wears a smirk as the song catalyzes into a false ending, then holds down one more riff as the band crashes through the outro.
A roar follows, and they pause to take in the adulation from the height of the stage. Maybe a flash of memory hits, of some empty venue in Germany or a dorm room in central Idaho. Maybe all of them hit at the same time, a timeline compressed into a moment that forms its own nodule for some future place at some future time, on a stage even higher than this one.
In the green room the monster mask lay discarded, the inner lining clammy with human heat.
It’s still there. It may always be there. But it’s a start.