by Dan Goldin (@post_trash_)
There’s an immediacy to Fuck Money that few can match, a sense of abrasion that’s felt even prior to hitting play on their music. You get a sense for the band’s politics from their anti-capitalist moniker, but little can prepare you for the brute force and blunt encapsulation of their music. The Austin based band, which features former members of Future Death and BLXPLTN, embrace noise in all its shapes and forms, weaving together punk, industrial, no wave, and elements of hardcore. Having just wrapped up a string of dates with Deaf Club, the band are sharing their latest single, “Heart Throb,” a song that obliterates your senses with a wall of manipulated sound, clamoring drums, and a guest appearance from Texas noise mainstay B L A C K I E on saxophone. Fuck Money hardly need any help at creating a whirlwind of squalor, but sometimes it’s fun to see just how far you can push the envelope.
“Heart Throb” opens with a crushing riff and a dense pulse of a drumbeat, ripping forward with an inescapable thud. TaSzlin Muerte, the band’s vocalist, comes in howling two syllables at a time, reckoning with the feeling of being left behind for sticking to strong ideals (and not being a douchebag). The onslaught of the vocals is both rhythmic and melodic, and surprisingly accessible despite the layers of noise, feedback, and distorted sax squealing into oblivion just beneath. Drummer Alton Jenkins moves from icy pulse to all out annihilation of the kit, keeping time as everything begins to melt. When the brief but effective hook - “can’t get it out of my mind” - comes warping its way forward like a transmission from some sordid ether, it’s undeniably catchy, a feet in its own right. The video, directed by the band’s own Bill Kenny (guitar) and Jenkins, is a wonderfully strange and disorienting accompaniment, shot with a filter resembling heat signatures reminiscent of Predator. The alien design and intensity of movement draw upon the song’s sonic disarray, where aggression breathes in technicolor.