Throwaway Style is a monthly column dedicated to spotlighting the artists of the Pacific Northwest music scene through the age-old practice of longform feature writing. Whether it’s an influential (or overlooked) band or solo artist from the past, someone currently making waves in their community (or someone overlooked making great music under everybody’s nose), or a brand new act poised to bring the scene into the future; this space celebrates the community of musicians that makes the Pacific Northwest one of a kind, every month from KEXP.
This month, Martin Douglas follows the story of Black Ends—Seattle DIY rock scene stalwarts—from the very beginning of their musical lives to today, on the doorstep of releasing their full-length debut, Psychotic Spew (out October 11th on Youth Riot Records).
Tucked away in the vast, mostly residential section of Greenwood, Avast! Recording Company has been perched on the corner of NW 80th St and 6th Ave NW since 2005. When it was located in Ballard, it hosted the recording of some of the all-time-great Northwest rock albums: Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped, Unwound’s New Plastic Ideas, and Modest Mouse’s The Lonesome Crowded West, just to name a few. Since establishing its Greenwood studio in 2008, a good number of Seattle’s name-brand musical talent has put in work there. The space that formerly served as Avast's Studio A is now its own studio, Recreational Psychoacoustics Lab, run by Eric Padget, who recorded overdubs on Black Ends' forthcoming Psychotic Spew. It's also where the band practices after hours from time to time.
I meet Black Ends singer/guitarist Nicolle Swims out front while they’re unloading their car. We make our way to one side of the building… only to discover this side’s closed off by a fence. Walking nearly the entire perimeter of the studio, we engage in normal music scene acquaintance chit-chat before discovering the back entrance.
I’m at Avast! specifically to take photos for this feature – a handy excuse to check out the studio. Before taking shots of various instruments in the studio, I greet a freshly clean-shaven Ben Swanson (bassist), explaining to Swims and me that he had to shave off his mustache to better play a recently acquired harmonica (which caused a painful facial hair-yanking incident, inspiring him to break out the trimmer). Drummer Billie Jessica Paine is running late, so I don’t get any shots of the full band during this quick, after-work jaunt.
Thankfully, I have a performance shot of the band, taken at the Crocodile during a last-minute opening slot for Chastity Belt back in April (the show was sold out and a startling percentage of the audience showed up early for Black Ends). All in all, visiting one of Seattle’s most storied recording spots is far from the worst way to spend 20 minutes on a Thursday evening.
In 2018, I received an email from a band called Black Ends, who described their music as “gunk pop.” I listened to their EP Sellout, and my initial impression was that they sounded like tune-yards if it were revealed that Merrill Garbus had the world’s biggest vinyl collection of Nirvana live bootlegs. It was great. It also made me wonder, “What the fuck is gunk pop?”
When I wrote about Black Ends for a Salish Sea/Puget Sound regional scene report for Bandcamp Daily, I also asked the question, “What the fuck is gunk pop?”
Black Ends were once an in-studio guest for KEXP’s Afternoon Show. They played four songs from their stellar 2020 EP Stay Evil. In the post-performance interview, Larry Mizell Jr. asked the band directly, “What is gunk pop?” (Unlike when Larry goes on the air, I have no restrictions from our friends at the FCC on my language.) Swims—singular in nearly every category one could possibly be as a musician—said something to the effect of it being melodic music, only a little gunky.
Self-categorization is a clever marketing tool. The “Black Ends is Gunk Pop” shirts have traveled far and wide; bright primary colors on a black, long-sleeved tee. It reminds me of the many times I wrote about L.A. DIY stalwarts No Age and tried my hardest to make “Ambien punk” happen.
Labels and categories are neat little boxes for people scared of complexity. They take you and put you in said “little boxes” so you’re easier to keep track of. For instance, I don’t mind being categorized as a Black punk rocker, because even though it’s a dramatic and laughable oversimplification, “punk” fits my style and ethos pretty well.
Categorization makes your stuff easier to sell, too; which I’m sure is the motivation for a lot of people in this world. The music industry is full of hustlers and hucksters, clout chasers and gatekeepers, unrepentant capitalists and fake radicals. The tricky part is there are bands out there that make some pretty great music. It takes a certain savvy to make moves in this business, and being able to properly categorize oneself well has a lot to do with it.
So does dumb luck, but maybe I’ll write about that another time.
It’s why a lot of people lumped Nirvana into the grunge movement when they barely dipped their toes in the sound on Bleach and turned away from it almost immediately. Proximity. It’s why there’s been a “garage rock revival” every 15 years since the genre’s inception, even though there have been wonderful garage bands around for the entirety of that style. Garage was supposedly dead while the Gories, the Mummies, the Trashwomen, Dead Moon, and a whole network of garage punks had legitimate cult followings.
But I digress. What does this all have to do with gunk pop? I think it’s a fine way to play into the growing mythology of the band that created the term.
The seeds for Black Ends were planted in Moscow, Idaho.
Swims and Swanson both studied music at the University of Idaho. Both musicians agreed the city on a scenic level was beautiful; dealing with other people who lived there wasn’t as pretty. “Ben almost got shot in the head at [the] dorm [we hung out in]. They shot it up, some random people,” says Swims.
I’m sitting with the members beneath a coffee shop somewhere in Seattle’s Fremont neighborhood, where one of its members works. The two founding musicians are telling me at the moment about rednecks shooting up their college residence/hangout spot. I have no questions written down for the band because I have known Swims and Swanson through the music scene we share for years. This story is from the archives of their musical partnership when they were a part of an “unsanctioned music department” on the U of Idaho campus. “We started a little fuckin’ music dorm,” Swims says. “We started it. That was us.” They procured drums and amps from the (proper) music department (with permission) and started having jam sessions.
According to the founding members of Black Ends, everyone in the dorm was either a music or theater major. “This became the practice space in the basement,” Swims says. “Lots of laundry and guitars and stuff. I miss that.”
Ultimately, Swims quit college and moved to Alabama, where they lived for several years. “It was racist as fuck,” they say. “And it was terrible for me. So I moved away.” They later add, “The education system in general is kind of racist.”
The aforementioned shooting incident happened at, as Swanson put it, “Just these big windows in front of our dorm. All of a sudden, we hear a pop, and then there’s a bunch of broken glass all over my computer.”
Swims adds, “The bullet hole was right there,” motioning a point just above their head. Swanson remembers seeing a truck drive away. No suspects were apprehended. Swims speculates that it was a hate crime because that particular dorm housed quite a few of the university’s queer students.
Apparently, Swims’s departure from the University of Idaho’s music department was the stuff of legend. Swims was taking a conductor’s test in front of more or less every eligible student in the program. According to Swims, “I just said, ‘You know what? Fuck this!’ And I just walked the fuck out. I threw my shit on the fucking floor, and I left.” Swanson was one of the students sitting on the floor during the test when Swims stormed offstage; today he refers to the incident as legendary.
“Everybody was like, ‘Holy shit, what just happened?’” says Swims. “I walked back to the dorm. Everybody came in; some people made fun of me, some people were really mean.” Swims didn’t leave U of Idaho immediately after, but says their motivation was completely sapped out.
After Swims’s infamous walkout and subsequent dropping out of the University of Idaho, they moved to Huntsville, Alabama. (“I think it’s pretty poppin’ now,” they tell me at the coffee shop. “It wasn’t that big a city when I was living there.”) In the six years they took up residence in Huntsville, Swims wrote and recorded a bunch of songs and did what any self-respecting musician of the day would do: They posted their recordings on Soundcloud.
Swanson urged Swims to move to Seattle, which Swims was planning to do anyway because… well, there isn’t an overwhelming amount of Black, nonbinary punk musicians clamoring to put down roots in Alabama. Swims and Swanson were already jamming together in Moscow—not to mention they were musical kindred spirits from pretty much the day they met.
Ben Swanson was born and raised in Seattle and played music most of his life. Like Throwaway Style’s featured artist back in June, Power Strip’s Nellie Albertson, Swanson tried piano lessons as a child but wasn’t really into them. In grade school, he really took to the trombone and played it through college; learned bass and played in rock bands in his high school years, played in marching bands, dabbled in a number of instruments. He sang in choirs. Given his amiable, soft-spoken, and dare I say gentle nature in person, Swanson feels like the sturdy, patient hand that serves as the stabilizing force in Black Ends; the glove-in-hand fit to his outspoken, rebellious, livewire musical sibling in Swims.
Nicolle Swims was born in Oklahoma City to a military family. Their father was a DJ who played a lot of R&B and funk music—in the house and at gigs. (“I was scared of Rick James as a child,” Swims half-jokes. “That ‘Give It to Me Baby’ song is terrifying.”) Throughout their early years, Swims lived in OKC, California, Germany, and Federal Way, Washington; the latter I like to compare favorably to the fictional city of Pawnee, Indiana. Swims and her family always lived in a place within reasonable driving distance of an airport.
A saxophone player in the seventh grade, Swims was obviously enthralled by music, but they really wanted a guitar and begged their mother for one. Once a guitar was procured, they quit school band almost immediately, telling their teacher Mr. Larson band class wasn’t their thing and started taking guitar lessons. Before they knew it, they were studying classical guitar at the University of Idaho.
Swims moved back to Western Washington and they and Swanson started jamming together. One of the first songs they worked on was “Sellout,” a song they still play live today.
Swims considered what they’d call this band for nearly two months. Then, they found a book at the end of their shelf. Black: A Celebration of a Culture. Somehow, that ended up as Black Ends. The band had a name. Milestone reached.
Black Ends released Sellout in March 2019. The release perked quite a few ears in Seattle’s DIY music scene. Revisiting the album after some time, the four-song set revealed itself to be surprisingly twangy. Even the title track had high-fret guitar work on the recorded version that felt like a coat hanger with pickups getting bent in every which direction. The current power trio has reworked and the song stripped down to its essentials to create a legitimate punk ripper. On the live version of “Sellout,” Swims sings like they’re standing in the middle of a tempest, crooning, “I’m a fool, I’m a fooooool.”
“Those were really fun to write,” Swims says about the songs on Sellout. “I had all those songs [fully written] and [jamming with the band,] they came together pretty easily.”
The next year, Black Ends put out what most people would consider their breakout, Stay Evil.
Released during the borderline nightmare summer of 2020, Stay Evil was dedicated to the memory of George Floyd (Swims wrote an essay on being Black in America for KEXP’s website when we premiered “Monday Mourning”) and—as Swims has noted a few times on various platforms—is about the nature of abuse and revenge fantasies people naturally experience toward their abusers.
Some of the EP was tracked during COVID lockdown—a shitty recording in their former drummer’s basement, according to Swims—and the full project was mixed by Seattle recording and engineering legend Jack Endino, who the band gives major credit for making the four songs sound as good as they do. As a matter of personal opinion, I believe the tunes on Stay Evil would shine even if they were tracked on a Panasonic tape recorder procured from a garage sale; that’s how strong they are.
The first half of the EP—the aforementioned “Monday Mourning” and Stay Evil’s title track—are, to this day, the calling cards for the band and two of the very best songs the Seattle music scene has produced this decade so far. “Stay Evil” is a tightly wound ball of manic tension with no release; just unfurling slightly and recoiling over and over for three minutes, musically staying true to its lyrical themes of paranoia and dreams of killing someone who hurt you. Whereas “Monday Mourning” is a masterful song-length emotional crescendo; by the time weekend hits, Swims unleashes a cathartic wail that lets loose all the demons they’ve been keeping inside… temporarily. Pandora’s box snaps shut in an instant as the song comes to a close.
During the throes of the pandemic lockdown, while many people only left their houses to buy groceries and protest the racism embedded in police forces across the United States, Stay Evil became a fitting soundtrack for the cliché of “uncertain times.” And the band who created it generated a curiosity around the region—and beyond—partly inspired by their recordings breathing life into the stifling air contaminated by a then-under-researched virus.
Billie Jessica Paine grew up in Boise, Idaho. As far back as she could remember, she always wanted to play guitar. “I probably wanted to play guitar before I could even talk,” she tells me. “I used to carry around a toy guitar everywhere with me around the house as a kid.” When she was about seven or eight years old, she received her first guitar – her prized possession – along with a CD copy of Appetite for Destruction her mom bought from a thrift store. By her estimation, she practiced guitar “eight hours a day, every day.”
Paine eventually switched to drums by necessity. She says, “All of the bands I would try to start would be four guitar players trying to make a band, so somebody’s gotta learn drums.” It’s a lot like how you’re a part of a middle/high school basketball team and everybody wants to be a point guard or a power forward and nobody wants to be the person who blocks shots or grabs rebounds. The guitarists are the players who try to nail long-range jump shots or hit highlight reel dunks. Drummers do the dirty work on the court.
Never having taken drum lessons, Paine was a natural on the instrument. Being a gifted musician, as Swims could barely contain themselves to note, there’s hardly any surprise that Paine moved to Seattle to attend Cornish College of the Arts. She found it to be a curiosity-driven curriculum that leaves an open environment for students to hone in on their art.
“You know what’s funny? I just stumbled across this message you sent me,” Swims says to Paine. “‘Cause we were doing tryouts.”
For someone who identifies as agnostic, I firmly believe that there’s no such thing as coincidence. A great many different shifts in the universe had to have happened for a person raised in Idaho to join a band—with two people who studied music in their home state—formed in Seattle. Call it divine timing, call it something else. But when Black Ends’ first drummer departed the band and Paine messaged them in the wake of their call for tryouts in November 2022, the hand of fate was pulling these three musicians together.
Being active in Seattle’s underground rock scene for nearly five years at that point, Swims felt like Paine came out of nowhere; they had no idea who she was. And Paine was just as motivated by boredom and inertia as much as being a fan of Black Ends; “I just needed something to do so bad.”
So, over the course of two days, Black Ends auditioned enough people to fully staff an NBA team. “We played these songs maybe 30 times,” Swims says. They recorded all 16 auditions, and even though they listened back to each one, Swims knew Paine was their drummer as soon as she walked out of the room.
Subsequently, Black Ends’s new lineup played dearly departed Central District punk venue Cherry Pit not too long after they recorded the single “My Own Dead” in February 2023. The band then went on their first European tour a matter of days after cutting the single… all in Paine’s first three months as a member.
There was a swing, a sense of jazziness Black Ends’ first drummer had that gave the band a very interesting sound. But Paine is a fantastic rock drummer and songs like “Sellout” and “Stay Evil” all but completely transformed with her providing the anchor.
For a studied and dedicated fan of Nirvana, it obviously meant a lot to Swims for their band to find their Dave Grohl.
After the better part of seven years, multiple drummers, a global health crisis, lowball gig offers, personal setbacks, label inquiries, and being confined to the ghetto of “best local bands” when they are better than a lot of nationally recognized bands with expensive publicists running amok in my inbox—Black Ends are on the verge of releasing their debut album, getting their moment in the sun as the oldest “new” band from the Pacific Northwest.
“It was just different from the EPs,” says Swanson about Psychotic Spew. Black Ends’ bassist notes that the band’s prior material was merely songs they had written cobbled together, whereas they were more intentional about which songs made the cut for their full-length debut. Which songs fit the best together; which were the most cohesive alongside the songs; which were specifically written for this LP.
Paine adds, “[It was a] very interesting way to make songs. [We made] almost an abstract version that’s like, ‘Okay, here’s a version of a Black Ends song that none of us can play because we don’t have ten members or something [laughter].’” She says the process involved paring down the instrumentation so that it sounds complete if only the three of them are playing the songs live.
The reason why it chafes me to hear people dismiss Black Ends as a “local” band—and there is nothing wrong with being a local band; I’ve staked my entire career on just how good and important local bands are—is because the trio has always possessed a greater musical ambition than hobby bands who are only looking to get an all-access pass and free drink tickets. The band is ambitious in a lot of ways, but thankfully they save the most of that aspirational energy for the music. Which is not only downright heroic in an “indie rock” scene thirsty for either monetary or social capital (in most cases, both), but we’ve got far too many artists who want their piece of the pie and not enough who truly want to be great artists.
Psychotic Spew is nothing if not creatively ambitious. Worry not, dear reader; Black Ends didn’t become Radiohead overnight—they’re still in their heart of hearts a rock band. Swims at times even leans into a bluesier sound than in the past (a thread only tugged at subtly on past recordings). The combo of “Pour Me” and “My Own Dead”—the latter a banger about faking one’s own death—carry musical traces of Swims’s one-time home of Alabama. Many of the album’s other tunes cleverly play on the ‘90s alternative tropes that fans and critics are stoked to pin on them. It’s not one of those albums that “sounds like 1994;” it would instead sound just as fitting in 1994 as it would today, and probably in 2054.
As a guitarist, Swims does this cool thing where they’ll take a riff or lick just to the brink of falling out of key—but never outright crosses that line. It’s like when Kurt Cobain would intentionally bend a note as a singer or hit it a bit flat. That melodic sleight-of-hand that’s kinda brilliant if you know what to look for. Paine’s drumming (and the array of percussion she uses, as well as the shredding guitar solo on “Red Worry”) serves as integral to the heft—both physical and emotional weight—of these songs. And Swanson’s bass often splits off from Swims’s guitar and produces immaculate countermelodies. (Even though each member plays multiple instruments on the album, Swanson contributes his talents via a whopping nine instruments.)
Not to mention he wrote arrangements for Lori Goldston, the renowned cellist who is far from coasting on her rep having toured with Nirvana; her 2022 masterpiece High and Low is one of the best cello albums you will likely hear this century.
“She’s a fucking rare talent,” Swanson says of Goldston. “She has lots of input in the studio too. I remember she’d be like, ‘Oh, let me do this one again. You want more layers on this one.’” Swanson raves about her ability to listen and deliver a performance that lines up exactly with the sound of the band she’s working with, in addition to her exalted improvisational ability. Not only does her playing elevate “Black’s Lullaby” and adds to the wall of sound on “Red Worry,” but it’s the undercurrent guiding the boat on “Bye Bye,” a song that Paine notes has too many parts for the band to ever play live.
With the October release of Black Ends’ long-awaited debut, one stage of the band’s career reaches its logical culmination. But the funny thing about life is that when one stage ends, the door opens to the next level. Again, this is just Black Ends’ debut album; there is, hopefully, a lot more road left for them to travel.
It’s pretty wild to think that as long as they have been fixtures in the Seattle rock scene, dating back to when they were playing basement shows with the dearly departed Rachaels Children, or backyard shows with fellow punk scene stalwarts Flesh Produce and Beautiful Freaks, or sharing side projects and cigarettes with Maya Marie, that Black Ends still have a lot to show the rest of the world.
Psychotic Spew is that proverbial swing for the fences; Black Ends’ first attempt at impressing their vision for music onto a crowded field, an oversaturated marketplace, a music world where you could listen to new music every minute for the rest of your life and still not hear all of it.
But the gamble is part of the fun. Seeing how you measure up against infinity is the challenge, the thrill, and for some, the driving purpose of being an artist to begin with.
There was a point not too long ago when Tacoma’s rap scene was the most active and energetic music community in the region. And while some artists move away and others do other things, a few stalwarts remain. Hilltop’s Seaan Brooks has been one of the top talents in the scene since he dropped When All Else Fails in 2017. On WELL BE ALRIGHT, his fifth album, Brooks burrows deep into relationships on “Follow Your Lead” and the great 2023 single “Situations.” Alongside his sense of humor peppered throughout the ups and downs, the death that surrounds him and the jokes he uses to help get through it, is the album’s final third. On “Poor Man’s Dreams,” “Forever,” and “Bible,” Brooks employs the classic, Tacoma-style existentialism that puts his work one notch above many of his peers kicking around the South Sound. His is the wisdom only earned by having been a knucklehead running the streets.
I don’t think I can describe Grape’s third album better than he described it himself. From his Bandcamp: “I made this very quickly after my partner's last hospitalization, had to tap back into the joy that music can bring. This is my feelgoodest project yet!” There’s not a more fitting word to describe Grape’s third album of 2024 than “joyous.” A little less rap-centric than last year’s excellent CABERNET SAYER but in line with the dance-oriented numbers on February’s EATING OVER THE TRASH, much of the Portland artist’s 43rd(!) album carries elements of early 90s house and EDM before it became the province of frat boys. Elsewhere, his word-drunk rap style bounds all over a multifaceted array of sample-free beats. On “36 Hours,” he checks all his ashtrays before leaving the house to prevent it from burning down. He browses eBay for sneakers on universe-opening closer “Tropical Cyanide.” On “State of Mine,” he states, “I care less about art than my loved ones.” Old Grape God has diverse styles of music blooming from his fingertips, and the compulsion to share that gift as much as possible. Escapements finds his diverse array of styles sharpening to a fine point.
One day I will write at length about the chaotic, hysterical glory of the Gobs—it’s been months since the last time I covered a great release coming out of Olympia, which is far too long in my opinion. What you need to know is that the punk band from Washington’s capital city has been on a mean run; worst one yet is their third straight classic of 2024. Opening with a song that has arguably the title of the year, “Adopt a Baby (To Score Some Chicks)” uses the most classic of rock ‘n roll bass lines at warp speed to carry out their, uh, warped sense of humor. Underneath the blurry audio quality are four exceptional punk tunes, brimming with personality, played as fast as possible.
There’s no possible way to determine how a band will grow. One of the things I like to brag about is that I saw Lemon Boy’s first show; a backyard gig for a DIY makers-and-vintage market. Now, the duo of Yasiman Ahsani and Nicole Giusti (along with Ethan Geller on drums) has turned into a full-fledged identity, with a polished debut album containing loads of personality. Eat. Skate. Die. is a collection of nine mostly hilarious pop-punk songs about being trapped at Guitar Center and a clever song about not being comfortable with yourself called “Piss Baby.” The delightfully vulgar “Sugar Daddy” is like if Chappel Roan did the pop-punk pivot like Olivia Rodrigo. All in all, Eat. Skate. Die. is a very promising debut, rife with A+ jokes and surprising cultural insight.
Martin Douglas speaks to the Seattle-based experimental musician about the various parts of the region they’ve lived in and how that influences the process of making their far-reaching music.
Martin Douglas has witnessed the future of Seattle's punk scene and spoke to its prinicpal songwriters.
The Seattle trio, led by the talented Nicolle Swims, release the first single from forthcoming EP Stay Evil and Swims pens a short but searing essay about being exhausted and Black.
