“I love this very aggressive music.” That’s what a voice claims at the end of the titular opening track on the new Angel Du$t record, Brand New Soul. The assertion comes from a man on the street outside the Baltimore hardcore band’s jam space—the band was chatting with him one night and captured the soundbite. He has the air of someone who’s maybe hearing hardcore-punk music for the first time, but doesn’t quite know how to describe it. To the average listener, “aggressive” is the first and most frequently used descriptor for heavy music.
But Brand New Soul is more playful than it is aggressive. It’s rowdy and crackling with energy, absolutely, but rarely is it aggressive in the contemporary hardcore sense. Rather than any particular look or sound, the record is about the subversive ethic and steely guts of aggression. And for Angel Du$t, rock ’n’ roll was the first aggressive music. “I think people get really focused on playing a specific subgenre, and I think they lose the importance of what makes rock ’n’ roll significant,” says frontman Justice Tripp. “It’s what you see in the origin of rhythm and blues music and early rock ’n’ roll, which is the soul and the spirit of it.”
Angel Du$t - "Brand New Soul"
Brand New Soul is militantly creative to the point that it often feels altogether untethered from anything resembling genre, industry, or cultural guidelines. Occasionally, it feels like a TikTok speedrun through every alternative and underground rock-adjacent sound of the past 70 years. The thumping sprint of lead single “Racecar” is led by acoustic guitar strumming and flowery woodwind synths. Acoustic also leads the way on “Don’t Stop,” a funky, ’90s-alt-rock-radio chug, and “Born 2 Run,” a swooning gutter-pop dreamscape. When the album closes on “In the Tape Deck,” it’s on a floating, beachy wave of synths and steel-string strumming, drifting out to sea. Over 13 tracks, the record darts between these moods and auras, stitched together with wonky samples, warped voice recordings, and fragmented, distorted notes.
This all plays into what Tripp is saying about genre dogma—that planting yourself in any one spot and boxing out everything else is anathema to real rebellion, real artistry. “When you get really hyper-focused on, ‘We’re playing this specific niche of hardcore punk-rock music,’ you set boundaries for yourself that don’t allow for exploration and true self-expression, you know?” he continues.
“I think people get really focused on playing a specific subgenre, and I think they lose the importance of what makes rock ’n’ roll significant.” —Justice Tripp
Tripp has earned this wisdom over decades. He came up in Baltimore’s hardcore scene, and fronted the iconic hardcore outfit Trapped Under Ice beginning in 2007. That band was celebrated in hardcore circles around the world, and it was also a sign of things to come. Trapped Under Ice’s drummer, Brendan Yates, went on to front Turnstile, the Grammy-nominated band at the head of hardcore’s new wave. (Fellow Turnstile members Daniel Fang and Pat McCrory served as Angel Du$t’s original drummer and guitarist, respectively.)
Angel Du$t's Gear
Zechariah Ghostribe gets some air while Steve Marino riffs, just out of focus, in the foreground.
Photo by Kat Nijmeddin
Guitars & Basses
- Fender CC-60SCE
- Taylor 810ce
- Fender American Performer Stratocaster
- Fender Cabronita Telecaster with TV Jones Power’Tron pickups
- Fender MIJ Telecaster with JBE pickups
- Charvel Pro-Mod DK24 HSH
- 1975 Gibson SG
- 2009 Gibson Les Paul Studio
- Gretsch G6659TG Players Edition Broadkaster Jr.
- Fender Jazz Bass
- Fender Precision Bass
Amps
- 1976 Marshall JMP 2203
- 1977 Roland JC-120 Jazz Chorus
- 1957 Fender 5F10 Harvard
- Gibson GA-19RVT Falcon
- Sound City Concord
- Gretsch 6161
- Fender Vibrasonic
- Ampeg SVT
Effects
- Boss CE-1 Chorus Ensemble
- Roland RE-201 Space Echo Tape Delay
- Custom pedals made by engineer Paul Mercer
- Various Electro-Harmonix Big Muffs, ZVEX Effects, JHS, and Barber Pedals
Angel Du$t has been marked by transience, making it something of a revolving door of East Coast musicians joining Justice Tripp on his mission to make hardcore’s weirdest music. With the launch of their newest record, the band has debuted a new lineup, too, with Steve Marino and Daniel Star on guitars, Zechariah Ghostribe on bass, and Tommy Cantwell on drums. And even though it initially sprang from (and still belongs to) Maryland’s hallowed hardcore communities, Angel Du$t has been angling for something a little different from the start, and its new players each bring fresh perspective to the project.
“Some of us come from playing metal stuff, and some of us play blues and jazz and rock,” says rhythm guitarist Marino. “I think for most people, [Angel Du$t] is hardcore adjacent, but I was a fan a long time before I joined, and what I liked about the band was that it didn’t really fit into one specific lane.”
“If it doesn’t sound cool or good or interesting on an acoustic, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like when I plug it in.” —Daniel Star
The influences that fit into Brand New Soul—the title is a wink to updating and reworking music history—are as sprawling and original as the record itself. Tripp’s writing for the album was colored by records from Prince, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie, and Star brought pieces from Bad Brains and Dinosaur Jr. Marino, meanwhile, kept Neil Young at front of mind. The LP’s acoustic-forward character is in part a product of what Tripp describes as a deeply held “spiritual belief” in acoustics and their power, regardless of genre. “People associate them with folk music and weak-ass tracks, but a lot of artists like the Stooges, the Wipers, Greg Sage’s solo music, Blur, and the Feelies all used [an acoustic] as a percussive instrument and kind of pushed the boundaries of how aggressively it can be used,” says Tripp. “It’s been our mission statement as long as we’ve been a band to try to see how far we can do that without sounding ridiculous.”
Angel Du$t’s new record isn’t “aggressive” in the sense one might expect from a hardcore band.
Star agrees. He often thinks about a Tom Morello interview, where the Rage Against the Machine guitarist professed that every riff he brought to the band was conceived and written on an acoustic. “Since then, I’ve pretty much thought that if it doesn’t sound cool or good or interesting on an acoustic, it doesn’t matter what it sounds like when I plug it in,” says Star.
Marino’s background is in solo singer-songwriter music, so relying on the acoustic comes naturally. Double-tracking and hard-panning an acoustic on record is one of his favorite techniques. “I feel like young kids who like heavy music need to be told that acoustic instruments are cool, and it’s not just all about heavy riffs,” he says.
Angel Du$t’s ambitions for artistic fulfillment have earned them respect, but they’ve also drawn anger from punk purists who feel Tripp and the project have betrayed what hardcore is all about. The chief sticking points are usually with melody and aesthetic—Angel Du$t songs often feel on the surface like a DIY-ish version of power pop, and they don’t typically crush the senses with saturated, heavy riffs or blast-beat drums. “I think when Angel Du$t started, there were people who had a perception of me being a tough guy making the most heavy music imaginable, which has never been who I am but a thing I like to do, I like heavy music,” Tripp explains. “So introducing melody and musical things was offensive to that identity, the strict hardcore-punk fans. ‘If you’re not doing exactly that, then we can’t be friends,’ was how a lot of people saw it.
“Everything we do musically is experimental and challenging,” he continues. “Music is a thing that brings people together, you know? But I just think there’s some individuals who miss the point of what music is.”
“I feel like young kids who like heavy music need to be told that acoustic instruments are cool, and it’s not just all about heavy riffs.” —Steve Marino
Star half jokes that he’s hard-pressed to think of a more “inclusive” and welcoming record than their latest. “Maybe I’m biased, but I don’t think I’ve ever heard a record where there’s literally something for every kind of music fan,” he says. “If you don’t wanna hear something super heavy, we got soft tracks. We have awesome funky stuff, we got rap tracks.” Marino admits there were some red lines—an acoustic guitar and double-kick-drum breakdown was nixed from one track. “What could be more inclusive than a double kick with an acoustic?” asks Tripp.
Daniel Star lifts his orange Strat-style shredder aloft. The guitarist is inspired by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello, who once said in an interview that he wrote all of his riffs on acoustic guitar.
Photo by Kat Nijmeddin
Brand New Soul’s outsider punk came to life at Wright Way Studios in Baltimore, with Tripp producing for the first time. Over years of working with vets like Rob Schnapf, he picked up tricks for executing acoustics, samples, loops, and other ephemera in the contexts of “aggressive” music. At times, Tripp would cook up an idea that he couldn’t pull off, but Star or Marino would have the know-how to bring it to life thanks to their varied backgrounds.
Marino says that on previous records he’s made, he’s typically cornered a guitar tone that’s been used on the whole record, but this time out, each song was treated like a blank slate. Engineer Paul Mercer, who builds and mods gear, brought a collection of amps, guitars, pedals, and farther-flung toys to Wright Way. Star and drummer Cantwell actually slept at Wright Way for two weeks while cutting the record, so they embedded themselves in Mercer’s playland. “He had like an old ’50s amp that he put some crazy fuzz that he built onto, and it was giving these sounds that some of us had never heard,” says Star. “I feel like being so physically immersed in that, and so many decades of technology, was able to bring so many more things out of me that I don’t think I would’ve been able to tap into otherwise. It was a very new and mind-altering thing for me.”
“What I liked about the band was that it didn’t really fit into one specific lane.” —Steve Marino
“You say, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a unique sound here,’ and Paul has a fuckin’ billion guitar pedals and amps that he built or rebuilt or altered that have really cool sounds,” adds Tripp. Marino notes that they put all six of Mercer’s Telecasters, and nearly each of his 15 guitars total, to use. It’s testament to Tripp’s production and Mercer’s engineering that all of these sounds—guitar or otherwise—flow seamlessly and feel cut from the same cloth, even as they ricochet through aesthetics. The brutal pound of “Sippin’ Lysol” collapses into the weirdo indie of “I’m Not Ready,” which in turn gives way to the hyper, upbeat Lemonheads-esque riffing of “Fuel for the Fire,” after which comes a gnarly, enraged cover of the Coneheads’ “Waste of Space.”
Eight tracks in, “Very Aggressive” circles back to the cheeky invocation of “aggressive music,” with a straight-forward steam-engine punk churn featuring Citizen’s Mat Kerekes. It drops to a crawl on the bridge, then the tempo skyrockets back to normal as Tripp bellows, “The sound is offensive to me / Very aggressive, indeed!” On its face, the song is about Tripp’s issue with the idea that aggression only takes one specific form. “You can do a lot to hurt somebody without going up and whoopin’ their ass. In some cases, I’d rather get my ass whooped than some of the alternatives,” says Tripp. “Lyrically, that song is most literally about a passive-aggressive person in your life who sees themself as the good guy, doing things that hurt people but having a way out of it because they can play that role of being peaceful or calm. I think that’s very aggressive behavior.”
But Tripp says the track doubles as a comment on “heavy music” itself and Angel Du$t’s haters. “It’s a statement of being like, ‘This is very aggressive music, even though it’s produced and musical and has acoustic guitars and melodies,’” he says. “It’s a moment to say, ‘Let’s not forget that this is hardcore punk music, it’s aggressive, it’s meant for people to jump off a stage to it.’”
YouTube It
Angel Du$t rip a typically fun and furious set in Jakarta in October 2023.
The Screaming Females guitarist delves into haunting acoustic/electronic songwriting on her solo album Peace Meter, expanding her sonic palette and typically raging approach—but not without the help of her musical community.
Before she released seven full-length albums with her punk band Screaming Females, another four under her solo moniker Noun, and was listed as one of SPIN’s “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time,” singer/songwriter Marissa Paternoster didn’t have much hope for musical success.
“I spent a lot, if not all, of my teenage years being very afraid,” she shares. “I thought because of my gender, and then knowing full well that I was gay, that those things were going to keep me from ever being in a band or just being happy. I felt trapped.”
But the all-consuming urge to play guitar and be in a band kept her going. She absorbed every Smashing Pumpkins riff possible at her childhood home in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and then discovered the anarchic punk women of the ’90s riot grrrl scene—which changed everything. She thought, “They exist, they’re out there. Maybe there is this little, tiny chance that I can find those people too.”
Marissa Paternoster - Peace Meter [FULL ALBUM STREAM]
Today, Paternoster has long since found her niche, her people, and her voice. This past December she released Peace Meter, her first album under her own name, co-produced by Andy Gibbs (of Thou) and featuring Shanna Polley (leader of Snakeskin) on background vocals and Kate Wakefield (of the duo Lung) on cello. She says it might as well be a continuation of Noun, and that the main reason that it’s under her name is because it’s more searchable, she laughs, but it does seem like a benchmark in her career. The concise, 31-minute, nine-track album is inexplicably new. It’s subtly supernatural, with Paternoster’s haunting vocals carrying through an acoustic/electronic folk realm, articulating an unfamiliar yet comforting sense of calm.
The project was conceived at the beginning of the pandemic when Paternoster found herself alone in her deceased grandmother’s home and began crafting and sharing her work with Gibbs remotely. In the beginning, she wasn’t sure it was going to become anything, but the more the two collaborated, the more she saw it going somewhere. Maybe it’s the quality of her voice, or maybe it’s the delay effects, or the ineffable chemistry between Paternoster, Gibbs, Polley, and Wakefield, but Peace Meter somehow fills a void none of us knew existed.
“I thought because of my gender, and then knowing full well that I was gay, that those things were going to keep me from ever being in a band or just being happy. I felt trapped.”
In March 2020, Screaming Females was nearly at the end of their tour with Canadian rock band PUP when the rise of the pandemic forced them to cancel their final dates in California. The group then drove their rental gear back to Los Angeles from Eugene, Oregon, and flew home—with Paternoster heading to her grandmother’s house in Union, New Jersey, to be close to her father.
She immediately set up her recording gear in the basement and began making music “like I had done for my whole life,” she says. All she had with her was her Screaming Females gear and a Taylor GS Mini that was at the house. This small-bodied acoustic can be heard on the album as part of the colorful mix of real and virtual instruments underpinning her chocolatey, melismatic voice.
Marissa Paternoster's Gear
Marissa Paternoster hovers over her pedalboard with her main axe: a G&L S-500 that’s her electric workhorse. It played counterpoint to her Taylor GS Mini on Peace Meter.
Guitars
- G&L S-500
- Taylor GS Mini
Strings & Picks
- GHS strings (.009–.042)
- Dunlop Heavy Sharps
Amps
- Sunn Concert Lead
Effects
- Fulltone OCD
- Earthbound Audio Supercollider
- Klon Centaur clone
- Boss DD-6 Digital Delay
- Boss Chromatic Tuner
- TC Electronic Flashback Delay
After putting some rough ideas together, Paternoster sent a draft of “Promises”—which ended up being the last track on the album—to Gibbs, a long-time friend, and asked if he could add some electronic drums to it. (Outside of Thou, Gibbs has a serious interest in electronic production.) “I didn’t have any expectations,” she says, “but what he sent back was really beautiful. I was like, ‘Should we do more? Was this fun for you?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, let’s do more.’”
Paternoster says that the album’s production was basically a 50/50 split between her and Gibbs. He took the originally morose, down-tempo “I Lost You” and infused it with a happier, up-tempo beat—it’s the track Paternoster says she’s most proud of from the collection. Throughout the project, “he would even manipulate the vocals. He used them as an instrument that he could add modulation to, which added texture to the songs.” The weird, Cocteau Twins kind of blurred line between analog and electronic instrumentation, she says, was mostly a product of Gibbs’ influence.
“I never felt confused about what I wanted to do with my life until I discovered punk. Then I wanted to be in a band so bad I thought that if I wasn’t in a band I would die.”
Paternoster enjoys effects—a lot of them—to the point where she’s had to limit her options just to prevent herself from going overboard. “If it were up to me, there’d be phaser on everything, and that’s not good,” she laughs. “As I’ve grown as a musician, I’ve removed a lot of flangers and phasers and octave pedals from my board. Now it’s just gain-staging and a delay pedal and that’s it.”
One piece of gear that ended up being central to the album’s guitar sounds was her TC Electronic Flashback Delay pedal. “I do really like this crystal delay function that it has,” she elaborates. “It has a nice little whistle tone as the delay trails off. It’s very dreamy. You can hear that a lot on the record.”
Marissa Paternoster: “My Secret Weapon Is My Unrelenting Anxiety!”
When asked if Peace Meter is a result of Paternoster’s personal evolution as a songwriter, she shares that the real change in her life has been that she now has access to a broad network of friends, contemporaries, and peers whom she admires, and who want to work with her. “I never had that before,” she comments. She hates having the album under her name, because she says she needs other people to make music—and the project gave her the opportunity to reach out to them.
Paternoster has always felt that art was her calling, even when she was just a child who loved to draw. “There was no question in my mind that someday I was going to be an artist,” she expresses. But that aspiration shifted when she entered her teenage years and found music. “I never felt confused about what I wanted to do with my life until I discovered punk. Then I wanted to be in a band so bad I thought that if I wasn’t in a band I would die.”
TIDBIT: Paternoster’s new album is a classic Covid project—recorded remotely and crafted via file sharing. However, thanks to her haunting vocals, a wide sonic palette, and her emotional songwriting, it’s far from standard fare.
While riot grrrl taught her that she was capable of being a punk rocker, she says that the biggest influence on her guitar playing was undoubtedly Billy Corgan. Smashing Pumpkins’ Siamese Dream is still her favorite album, and it was that type of music that she used to teach herself to play when she was in high school—alongside the songs of bands like Bratmobile and Bikini Kill. Though technically demanding guitar solos didn’t exactly fit her tastes, she did feel as though she needed to learn how to improvise, despite being a songwriter at heart.
“In the early ’00s, most of my peers who played music were men,” she shares. “And I thought that if I could rip a solo in a way that would impress these young boys, they might let me play in their band. But my focus has always been on songwriting, making interesting sounds, creating engaging art, and not really on shredding or whatever. I really don’t care about that at all.”
Rig Rundown - Screaming Females
When describing why she makes music, Paternoster delves into the topic of mental health. She lives with anxiety and depression, and, as she puts it, has had frank and open discussions about her mental well-being since she started going to therapy at age 14. “[For me, making art and music is mostly] born out of the compulsion to quell my anxiety in some way. And it’s been that way ever since I was very, very small. It was my coping mechanism for everything and anything.” She continues, “Your mental health affects your body, it affects you, and it affects absolutely everyone around you. It’s important to take care of yourself because in turn you take care of everyone around you.”
“My focus has always been on songwriting. Songwriting, making interesting sounds, creating engaging art, and not really on shredding or whatever. I really don’t care about that at all.”
Paternoster brings that self-awareness to all aspects of her life, including collaborating with fellow musicians. Working with others comes naturally to her, as she’s been doing it essentially from the beginning, but she does confess to having some shortcomings when it comes to bandleading. “I have a tendency to be a bit bossy when it comes to logistics,” she says. “I don’t want to let that intensity go, but I also don’t want to waste time worrying. You have to leave some things to the chaos that is our reality.
In her room: Paternoster created the bones of her new album alone, in the home of her late grandmother. Then she shared the files with co-producer Andy Gibbs and her other collaborators, vocalist and Snakeskin leader Shanna Polley and cellist Kate Wakefield.
“To be honest, I never really wanted to have full control,” she admits. “There is a lot to be said about relinquishing some aspects of creative control to people that you trust and admire. When you trust people who you know already do good work, they’re probably going to show up and do good work.”
Aside from being motivated by anxiety and compulsion, Paternoster describes how she often finds inspiration in silly simplicity. “I’m a big fan of like, general tomfoolery,” she comments, telling a story about how she’d seen two separate giant carrots graffitied on buildings in Providence, Rhode Island, where she’s been staying. It gave rise to a lot of questions. “What happened that night? Why did they paint the carrots so big? Why have they never done it again? Who are they, where are they, can we hang out?” she says, laughing.
That playful spirit ties into a sense of humility both about herself and her musicianship. She reflects on the one music theory course she took in college, during which she “mostly took naps,” and the pros and cons of being self-taught. “I mean, at age 35 I still am often like, ‘Man, I wish I could take guitar lessons or singing lessons.’ I think that would be really fun, but I only have so many hours in the day.”In the meantime, she feels that sticking with music might be a good idea. “This is my comfort zone … and other people tell me that I do this well, so I think I ought to do it more.”
LAVA Broken Roof Sessions: Marissa Paternoster (Screaming Females/Noun)
A creatively executed all solid-maple dreadnought sings with sweet sustain and in mellow moods.