BRAT’s hot-pink hell

A punk walks into a BRAT show. As his eyes adjust to the pink and red lights washing over the bandstand, he sees Liz Selfish stalking the stage like a lioness circling her prey, punctuating her pursuit with cheer kicks and burlesque shimmies. There’s a moment of aural confusion, too: Is that Britney Spears’s “Toxic” playing through the PA? Before he’s had time to process it all, the synth violins disappear into blast beats and pulverizing guitar, and Selfish replaces the sweet seduction of Spears’s vocal line with her own hellacious growls.

This aesthetic, dubbed “Bimboviolence” by the New Orleans band, is polarizing by design, demanding respect and disregarding those unwilling to give it. Our punk is left with two options: Stand in silent judgment in the back, or get in the pit.

BRAT comprises Selfish, guitarist and chief songwriter Brenner Moate, bassist Ian Hennessy, and drummer Dustin Eagan, who also programs the pop interludes threaded into the band’s sets. He puts almost as much thought into these as he does his actual drumming — which is tight, explosive, and metronome accurate. “It’s definitely a process,” he says. “Tempo matching, energy matching…”

“I have a lot of opinions on the samples, too, because this is my area of expertise,” Selfish cuts in.

A product of early pandemic boredom, BRAT formed in New Orleans in winter ’20–’21, when Moate and Selfish — romantic partners since before the band’s formation — were singing karaoke at home. “I was doing an A Day To Remember song,” Selfish says, “and I tried to do the lows, and it actually sounded pretty good, so we were like, ‘Yo, let’s just start a band.’”

Building on this initial premise, they recruited Hennessy (Moate’s bandmate in Cikada), and Eagan, who had just moved to the city from the bayou town where he and Moate both spent their formative years. Their sound — a pummeling but playful take on powerviolence and grindcore — swam into focus naturally. They released their first song, “Chain Pain,” in late June 2021; played their first set, at Creepy Fest in Parasite Skate Pawrk under the I-10 freeway, less than a month later; and dropped their debut EP, Mean Is What We Aim For, just a few weeks after that.

Three years later, I’m sitting with BRAT in the green room above Reverb, a well-appointed rock club in Reading, Pennsylvania. They’ve just played their final set of Summer Slaughter, a month-long touring festival for which they’ve just caravanned with seven other bands behind the bus of its headliners, Chicago metalcore outfit Veil of Maya. “A tour like this is a grind,” Hennessy says. “Everything is part of a machine, and if you’re not part of the machine, it’s a problem.”

We’re actually in Veil of Maya’s green room — a separate, more private space next to the general one — but other acts still wander through from time to time. Most are friendly, though one guy looks at me suspiciously and comments on the length of our interview before walking into the bathroom and growling at himself in the mirror without closing the door.

Summer Slaughter been an arduous run — BRAT’s hardest tour yet, they tell me — and they’re happy to be headed homeward, despite the brutal humidity that awaits them back in New Orleans. Moate will return to his family’s machine shop, where he now sells the parts he used to make; Hennessy will pick up what A/V production shifts he can during the notoriously slow season; and Eagan will sweat it out in restaurant kitchens.

“I’m cooking, sweating, and I live in an old-ass shotgun house that’s poorly insulated, so I go home and I’m sweating, too,” he tells me. “Summer is really miserable, so touring — leaving — is pretty much the only way to beat it.” When I catch BRAT a month later at TV Eye in Ridgewood, Queens, they all seem happy to be back on the road.

Louisiana’s notoriously grueling summers have inspired some of the most pungent metal to ever offend the listening public, with legendary sludge bands like Eyehategod, Crowbar, Exhorder, and Acid Bath capturing the essence of life at the fringes of a sinking world. BRAT’s music — fast, thrashing, decidedly unsloppy — is as far from sludge as it gets (within the confines of metal), especially with the top-40 tracks thrown into the mix.

Still, they play tribute to the genre on “Slow Heat,” a centerpiece of their live set and of their March 2024 debut album, Social Grace. Though only two minutes long, its shifting tempo and the towering intensity of Moate and Hennessy’s central riff make it feel colossal. The song is set in New Orleans, but the scenery might as well be hell. “Same difference!” they reply, almost in unison, when I ask them to compare the two locations.

Elsewhere on the LP, they’re all sharp edges and high octane. Bookended by the pure catharsis of opener “Ego Death” and the slowly evaporating constraint of “Social Grace,” the 10-track project is a show of force but also of rigorous technicality and sharp production sensibilities. Bimboviolence on its own is just a catchphrase, but BRAT have more than enough firepower to back it up.

Ever since the karaoke night that first spawned BRAT, Selfish has worked tirelessly on her vocals and performance style, perfecting the low-register scream that shocks the uninitiated at her shows and the moves that serve as an exclamation point for the act — inspired by cheerleading movies, middle school dance recitals, and the stagecraft of David Lee Roth, she says.

The rest of the seasoned hardcore heads in BRAT are no less committed to the bit. “Growing up, I was a punk kid, and if I didn’t think something was punk enough, I didn’t listen to it,” Moate tells me. “But in my early 20s, I realized that was lame. The thing about this band is not liking what you’re expected to like. We can play grind and also dance to Britney Spears. You can do both.”