Welcome back to Milwaukee Metal Monthly, the column where I attempt to make my own Headbangers Ball—ya know, if it focused on bands from a single city and it was in written form. This month, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. If there’s a theme to be found this time, it’s extremity and boundary-pushing. Interestingly, everyone I interviewed for this installment requested to be referred to mononymously, and I’ve honored that.
How I arrived on the subject of our first interview is: In early December 2025 I was browsing around the “new arrivals” of Milwaukee metal releases on Bandcamp—which has become more or less a weekly thing for me—and stumbled across an album called 13 Hood Classics by an artist named pickletastemusic. Before hearing a note of music, my attention was already grabbed by the album cover (a person lying in blood on the floor), the absurdist song titles (“Pretty Lady With A Phallus,” “Rollin’ In My 5.0”), and the ironically detached liner notes (“After eight months of jacking off and two months of locking in, I’ve finally recorded my second album.”) When I gave it a listen, I discovered a fascinating collection of late-’90s rap metal, death metal, hip-hop, and whatever you’d call the 37-second “What Did They Do To My Baby?,” which features a vocal interpolation of 311’s “Amber.”
Amused and baffled in roughly equal measure, I turned my attention to the upper right corner of the record’s Bandcamp page where I saw that the label it was on, Smooth Man Records, was based in Wisconsin. Below that was a description: “MKE alt label that specializes in metal, hardcore, and punk.” (+1 for the Oxford comma.) And below that: “Contact us to get signed, we’ll take almost anyone.” I went to the label’s releases page and clicked around it a bit. After maybe five minutes, I decided that I needed to know more, to understand this. Call it curiosity, call it compulsion, call it what you will.
Naturally, I asked for an interview. I contacted SMR via Bandcamp, and an email exchange began shortly later. Given that my only communication with the label prior to the interview was an email back-n-forth, I didn’t know quite what to expect upon meeting up at the Lakefront Colectivo.
So I’m sitting there waiting with a highly caffeinated cold brew when a woman comes up to me and asks if I’m Steve and if I’m here to interview someone named Julian. I reply that I’m here to talk to the owner of Smooth Man Records, so probably. Imagine my surprise, then, when Julian turned out to be 14 (and—plot twist!—is behind pickletastemusic), and that the woman turned out to be his mother. His emails lacked the fashion-statement vernacular and staccato syntax you’d expect of a zoomer, so that was, let’s say, eye-opening.
And it’s the same thing in-person, too. Julian doesn’t speak like teenagers today. In fact, he sounded closer to me when I was his age a quarter-century ago. And he’s got the old-soul taste in music to match. Returning to 311, Julian says that they’re “sorta the favorite band of people who have helped me with the label” and that they “have a lotta inside jokes” about the funk-metal band. Similarly, when I ask Julian about the Eminem-meets-Anthony-Jeselnik rage-bait humor of SMR’s releases, it turns out that it tracks back to Steve Albini.
“I was really into Big Black, and those lyrics of Big Black and other bands like that, they sorta shaped my humor,” he says. He pauses for a moment, then adds a clarification about a 2024 SMR release, Merry XXXMAS And Happy Hanacaust, by a goregrind band called Necrotic Anus: “I told the guy [behind the project] I’m never gonna release his music again because I don’t want those song names on my label.” He chuckles nervously, then concludes, “I’m surprised I didn’t take it down yet.”
Smooth Man Records was launched about a year and a half ago out of convenience, basically. “I wanted something to put out my music on that didn’t say ‘self-release,’” Julian says. As for the name—well, it doesn’t really have any meaning and is really just a name for its own sake. “I kinda came up with the name on the spot. I ran it by some friends, and they thought it was kinda funny, so I settled on it.”
Fittingly, the label’s impetus has the same “why not” feel. “I started [the label] not really expecting it to get very big. And I thought for the longest time I was gonna be the only artist on the label ’cause I didn’t get attention until probably this [past] summer. And then my best friend started making music on the label, too. That’s when other people started joining the label for the first time. And that’s when I realized that this wasn’t just gonna be a little thing.”
Interestingly, Julian’s motivation—the guiding principle, I s’pose—for running the label is a bit anachronistic in 2026. “The reason why I sorta do it is because I like printing and making CDs,” he explains. “And a lotta people who joined the label, they joined for the eventual goal of getting their CDs made. But I guess the reason why Smooth Man Records is a thing is to get physical releases out for artists.” (Note: If you’re interested in joining the label, or have any questions about it, contact him on Instagram.)
It’s probably fair, then, to say that Smooth Man Records is currently a pet project of sorts. “The people who are gonna be reading this interview should know that the label is not, like, super-serious as of right now, as you can tell,” Julian says with a smirk. That said, he does want it to become more than that. “I wanna have a dedicated place wherever I’m living when I’m older that I’ll still be able to operate the label. I wanna keep it going when I’m older for my own music and for the other bands on it.”
And Julian’s also hoping to make SMR a bit more Milwaukee-centric, later stating by email, “I plan on getting more local artists and bands though, I’ve been making friends at shows that could be potential artists.”
My other interview this month is with a band called BxBxB, a trio consisting of vocalist and sometimes-drummer Jet; drummer Eric; and Dom, the band’s founder who plays guitar, bass, drums, produces, and does “audio mixer stuff.” (During our 15-minute chat, Dom also emerges pretty much immediately as the band’s spokesperson.) As for what they do, their Bandcamp page offers a description: “We’re an experimental band that likes to test the limits to what is and isn’t metal.”
But despite that clear-seeming statement, categorizing BxBxB presents a challenge, even for its members. “I like to classify us as noise and goregrind kinda stuff, but we’re also metal,” Dom says. “I like to say we’re metal because we have the guitar and the drums and the vocals and the bass, which aligns with rock ’n’ roll, you know. And I like to say ‘noise’ as just noise music but with vocals ’n stuff. So some of the songs have actual structure, and some don’t.”
When I throw out my best attempt at a classification of “industrial noise-grind”—i.e., the band’s sound has elements of industrial music, noise music, and grindcore—Dom responds, “I just like to make stuff that sounds good.” Then Eric adds, “Honestly, just do whatever, and go with it.”
Thankfully, the (short) history of the band isn’t nearly as complicated. “So, originally the band started in October 2024 with me and two other people,” Dom recalls. “But that didn’t really work out ’cause they didn’t really do anything. So I basically kicked ’em out. And then I invited Jet to the band. And I was doing the guitars, and he would do the drums and vocals. And then after a while, I learned how to do all the stuff, so Jet would help ’n stuff. And then I invited Eric to do drums for live stuff, and also to make music.”
From there, they had a rather productive 2025, releasing a demo, a curated compilation of various grind and noise bands, a split with Domestikation, a live album, a single, and a studio album (whose liner notes end with the winking apology, “Sorry for all the noise”). I was curious about that compilation, 18 Various Ways To Get Gored, so I asked about it. “Me and Jet hosted it together, but I planned most of it,” Dom states. “I basically got all those bands together, and I communicated with everyone about it.” Eric then sums up their motivation: “We just decided one day that we wanted to get a big split goin’ on. Grab a buncha bands and put ’em together on an album.”
When I point out that their live album, BxBxB Live At Grandmas July 11th 2025, is the best summation of what the band is and does—their often-perplexing music + winging-it goofiness like, “This song is about our lil’ old friend Quackhead that not too long ago got a girlfriend, so good for him.”—Dom reflects on that. “Yeah, that one was made a really long time ago. I made it with my friend as a joke. We had a mini-concert in my grandma’s garage. We didn’t even rehearse it at all. We kinda just made it.” (If you’re curious, there’s a video of the whole show.)
And that tongue-through-cheek humor is also present in BxBxB’s music in the form of audio clips from TV shows. Across their catalog thus far you’ll find clips of Breaking Bad, South Park, and Ren & Stimpy, and it’s as much rooted in nostalgia as it is a nod to other bands in the scene. “Growing up, I watched all those shows, and I just really like to go back and rewatch them,” Dom explains. “And sometimes I’ll watch them and think, ‘Wow, that’d be so funny to sample in a song.’ And I also kinda got [the idea to sample] from Cerebral Incubation and Putrid Stu, bands like those, that like to sample TV shows.”
BxBxB wanted to make it clear, though, that sampling TV clips isn’t something that will become a permanent fixture. “To be honest, our newest EP that we just made [Noise Of The Slaughtered Faith] doesn’t really have that many samples,” Dom says. “We don’t really plan on having as many samples in the future, but we will have a song here or there with a funny sample ’n stuff.”
Speaking of that just-released EP—whose third song, “Harsh Vomitus Of Noise,” is an excellent elevator pitch for the band—2026 is shaping up to be another productive year. When I ask about future plans, they have goals for this year. “So after [Slaughtered Faith], I plan on making a buncha advertisements for our music and try to get a fanbase,” Dom says. “After that, we plan on trying to do some shows.”
At the end of my interviews, I usually ask the interviewee(s) if there’s anything else they wanna plug or discuss that wasn’t covered. Usually it’s a no, but this time Dom offers a few closing remarks. “I kinda wanna talk about something. I kinda wish there was more noise music in Milwaukee. I wish there was more of a scene for it.” I then say that part of the reason I started this column was to help bands like BxBxB—bands whose music might charitably be called unlistenable by most of the general public—get some exposure. “Yeah, hopefully,” replies Dom, “because we want more people to make this kind of music.”
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