No Wave was called “No Wave” because it was philosophically anti-“wave,” united in opposition to press-ready categorizations. Unfortunately, a locus of like-minded musicians does, in fact, constitute a “wave,” which is funny considering No Wave’s legacy. No Wave, circa 2025, is multiple things: genre, sound, aesthetic, buzzword for when a musician lives in New York and makes loud music. Among these musicians is Brutus VIII, an LA-bred button masher who sounds like John Maus got really high and binge-listened to Alan Vega. Brutus is Jackson Katz, an ex-indie rocker (Slow Hollows, Current Joys) who ditched drumsticks for drum machines. Since the early 2010s, when he started his solo project, he’s hawked a hearty imitation of the old New York avant-garde, but an even better mockery of it. He sings in a brooding baritone, presents as ultra-masculine, and performs with an interpretive dancer. This is a caricature, and in many ways, so is the movement he’s engaging with: an anti-scene scene.
That the music doesn’t feel overly parodic, or insincere, is impressive. By tinkering with No Wave, Brutus VIII also tinkers with its masculine mythos—the brawn of early Swans, the suits and ties of Television, the dogmatic rule of Glenn Branca. In his most wrenching songs, like “Anger” and “Burn,” he plays a fractured despot, less inflicting power than reckoning with what he’s done. When I hear those tracks, I picture sweaty men alone in their living rooms, ties undone and shirts rumpled, weeping before their wives get home. It’s uncomfortable, and not because it’s oppressively loud, or dissonant, or arrhythmic—it builds a character, breaks him down, then forces you to watch.
His slight new EP, Do It for the Money, strives for a similar effect. But while it does evoke pain, the pain seldom becomes agony, because the music is too muscular, too well-studied, to make his anguish believable. Katz has perfected No Wave pastiche, which is impressive, but at times somewhat robotic: an echo here, a blown-out synth stab there, a layered scream every now and then. As a result, he winds up with a half-sincere tribute—serenading the very movement he set out to subvert. Take thumping lead single “My Eating Disorder,” an honest attempt to confront dietary issues, like food guilt and body dysmorphia, not often thought to be masculine. Lyrically, it’s packed with gender-deviant dictums, like the rousing “When I grow up I’ll be a skinny girl,” which he screeches in the chorus. At a rhetorical level, it sort of works. But then again, these things are harder to believe when there’s an overblown MIDI and six distortion pedals in your ear telling you to man up.
Early Brutus VIII was devastating because he so deftly scored the loneliness of desperation. When I hear the overdone chaos of Do It for the Money, I miss the resourcefulness of A Hackney Pursuit, a 2018 LP that sounded like a Little Tikes synthesizer possessed by a panic attack. You don’t need a huge rig to make “I Am in Control,” but if you want to remake the title track of this EP, you might want to start saving up. If there is any glimpse of vintage tearjerker Brutus on Do It for the Money, it’s on “Five Goodbyes,” the instrumental closer whose lush textures would be devastating if he were saying something—like the staunch counter-masculinity of “My Eating Disorder” or the jaded cultural critique of “Eichmann on Trial Again.” Disappointing, but fitting for a record that screams so loudly it forgets to speak: In the best possible place for lyrics, there are none.
