BRAT: This Is Bimboviolence

“Our main mission I guess is just to have a good time.” Brenner Moate is far from the first to say that sort of thing about being in a band – even one as nasty and heavy as his – but it does just hit a little different in the case of BRAT. At first glance you may just see a band that operates in that wonderful sweet spot between death metal, grindcore and powerviolence – as their brand new debut album Social Grace demonstrates so impressively – but look a little closer and you’ll find an outfit that samples the likes of VANESSA CARLTON and CASCADA at shows, with a former pageant competitor for a frontwoman, merch that borrows from Paris Hilton and Mean Girls, and, of course, pink as far as the eye can see. This, for the uninitiated, is bimboviolence.

“Having an aesthetic like that which is so strongly juxtaposed to the sound is just kind of disarming,” smiles Moate. “It lets people know that it’s okay to be a little bit silly. We have fun with what we’re doing and people just have a good time at our shows. We play pop samples and stuff in between songs live, and people will dance to BRITNEY SPEARS and then go straight into moshing when a song starts and that’s what we’re all about so we lean fully into it.”

Make no mistake though, BRAT may look a little different from your average death metal or hardcore band but their music is all business and the fact that Social Grace arrives via the highly respected Prosthetic Records and the four-piece already have tours with the legendary likes of the CRO-MAGS, EYEHATEGOD and RINGWORM under their belt should be more than enough proof that they are by no means a gimmick. Formed by guitarist Moate and vocalist Liz Selfish in the era-that-must-not-be-named, their first EPs Mean Is What We Aim For and Grime Boss emerged in 2021 and 2022 respectively, and while it may seem as though Social Grace has arrived on roughly the timeline one might expect of a band of this age, it’s actually been a while coming for Moate and co.

“We recorded everything in batches of like two or three songs at a time,” elaborates Moate. “Because we were touring a lot, and we all work full-time jobs in addition to touring a few months out of the year.” As logistical as those reasons may be, the process proved beneficial, with the band able to draw on their ever-increasing live experiences to see what hits and what doesn’t and in turn trim all the fat from the finished product one finds in Social Grace.

“I prefer to write short songs,” offers Moate on the album’s urgency. “I like to keep things moving. Since I started writing the music for the band, it’s always been sort of my emphasis on not letting any one part go on too long or letting things get dragged out too much… the last song on the album – the title track – is like three minutes long and I was like ‘this last part goes on for too long, it goes on for like 45 seconds! This is an eternity!’.”

Indeed, though the process of writing Social Grace was far more collaborative than that of the EPs before it – with the band’s line-up now completed by drummer Dustin Eagan and bassist Ian Hennessey – most of the ideas on the record still start with Moate, including even the lyrics which are eventually barked and bellowed by the aforementioned Selfish. Again brevity remains a key feature here, partly to suit Selfish’s style and the tracks’ generally compact runtimes, but also to serve Moate’s own preference for eschewing the blunt and the obvious in favour of the dark and the cryptic.

“I’ve always been really into creative writing,” he explains. “It was my favourite subject all through school and everything, and I’m really into horror literature and dark literature in particular – huge Stephen King fan – and I’m also a fan of lyrics that are more cryptic rather than straightforward. THE MARS VOLTA was one of my favourite bands growing up, and their lyrics are always very vague and cryptic and hard to kind of exactly pick out what they mean, and honestly a lot of times I’m pretty sure in interviews they’ve said ‘yeah these lyrics don’t actually mean anything we just like the way the words sound together’. Sometimes I use that sort of philosophy and sometimes there’s more meaning but either way I prefer to keep it more cryptic, that’s just my preferred style.”

Of course, it’s hard to chat to a band from New Orleans and not bring up their city’s legendary musical heritage, especially in BRAT’s case as the quartet don’t seem to have much to do with the sludge and doom a metalhead might most immediately associate with the scene. Moate describes it as “a small city with a big reputation”, one in which bands of various backgrounds find kinship as much out of necessity as any particular interest in breaking down genre divides.

“There’s not nearly as many bands in New Orleans as there would be in other cities like Houston or Chicago or LA or New York,” he suggests. “There’s not enough bands to fill out a scene for each genre like sometimes you see in much bigger cities where a city can have almost like a separate hardcore scene, a separate death metal scene, whereas in New Orleans it’s all mixed together. You could go to one show and see a black metal band playing with a grind band playing with a hardcore punk band. The whole thing is just kind of all over the place, so it’s really a melting pot of styles just because of how close knit it is.”

“It’s reflected in our sound because that’s the scene we came up in,” he agrees when we suggest as much. “It is interesting sometimes when we play a very pure hardcore show or a very pure grind show; there’s always the people there that have their arms crossed and stuff like that because we’re playing something a little bit different than all the other bands, but there’s always enough people that enjoy it and that’s what matters to us. We always say we’re not a band for purists anyway, so if those people aren’t enjoying us then that’s not too much skin off of our backs.”

Fortunately it would seem the purists of the world are increasingly outnumbered anyway; bands like BRAT are doing great things to make whatever you want to call the scenes they move in more diverse, more inclusive, and ultimately more interesting, and they’re still just getting started really. “Just keep it going as long as we can,” concludes Moate on any hopes he and BRAT might have for the future. “That’s kind of where we started. Whenever you don’t have any super concrete expectations, whenever things go really well it just hits that much harder, because if you’ve got these great expectations and things don’t happen, then you just get disappointed but if you don’t have the expectations to begin with, then everything is a blessing.”

Social Grace is out now via Prosthetic Records.

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