The Scene Around Them

The labels, the city and the bands they came up beside.

§ 01Seattle, the Labels, and the Company They Kept

The Blood Brothers formed in Seattle in the late 1990s, which matters more than geography usually does. The Pacific Northwest had already produced noise and grunge in excess, but by the time this band emerged, a younger set of groups was pulling hardcore in stranger directions — jagged, theatrical, less interested in catharsis than in agitation.

Their records came out on Three One G and ArtistDirect before the band moved to V2, a much larger label whose roster leaned towards rock with a sharper commercial instinct. The Blood Brothers were almost certainly the most abrasive thing on that roster — the pairing was odd on paper, but V2 gave them reach they wouldn't have had otherwise.

The company they kept on the circuit mattered as much as the label. They shared stages and sensibilities with bands working the same noisy, angular territory: Refused's structural dismantling of hardcore was an audible precedent, and contemporaries like At the Drive-In had proved that twin-vocal chaos could find a real audience without softening the edges. Fellow travellers on the Kill Rock Stars and Hydra Head axis — Locust, Daughters, Pretty Girls Make Graves — were doing adjacent damage in adjacent rooms. Pretty Girls Make Graves were also out of Seattle, and the overlap in personnel and ambition was close enough to feel like a genuine local current rather than coincidence.

None of this context explains the twin-vocal collision or the specific pitch of the Blood Brothers' noise. But it does explain the room they walked into — and why that room was ready to be frightened.