We were so moved by people in blacks prefomance that we decided to do an interview last minute. (we were at a show to cover Subpar Snatch.) We apologize for the shotty camera work, audio quality and the fact that oskar and i were hammered
By the summer of 1989, the Satanic Panic had mutated into a full-blown psychotic epidemic, turning the suburban backwaters and dusty flatlands of Central Texas into a raging cauldron of moral hysteria. The air was thick with the foul stench of collective hallucination, fueled by sensationalist television preachers and small-town cops hunting for invisible demons. Down on the ground, the abstract fear of occult ritual abuse solidified into a concrete, terrifying bogeyman: the “People in Black.” Overnight, anyone draped in a dark trench coat, a faded black leather jacket, or the hooded vestments of alternative youth subculture became public enemy number one—a dark army of presumed satanists, cat-killers, and child-abductors lurking in the neon shadows of every drive-thru and Texaco station.
It was absolute madness, a classic American dragnet driven by high-octane fear and cheap gossip. Local law enforcement, hopelessly out of their depth and under heavy fire from twitchy neighborhood watch committees, launched full-throttle sweeps across the highways, rounding up every long-haired kid, goth, and midnight wanderer who dared to dress in dark colors. The squad cars swarmed like angry hornets, slamming kids against the hood under the blinding glare of police spotlights, demanding confessions of ritual crimes that existed entirely within the fevered imaginations of the local populace. When the smoke finally cleared in the interrogation rooms, the grand conspiratorial nightmare evaporated into thin air—yielding no blood cults, no sinister syndicates, only a stack of confiscated denim, confused teenagers, and the lingering, hangover-like realization that the whole violent spectacle was nothing more than a mass hallucination cooked up by a terrified public.
People In Black the band explains that their band name and visual aesthetic are directly inspired by a 1990s documentary about the Central Texas panic where law enforcement and moral crusaders rounded up alternative kids, goths, and metalheads—the “people in black”—as scapegoats during the Satanic Panic.
We were standing out in the south Austin night under the sprawling courtyard of The Far Out Lounge, operating purely on bad instinct, cheap vodka, and a desperate mandate to capture video of Subpar Snatch. My intern, booze-soaked and clutching a trembling rig like a lifeline, was scanning the perimeter when the sonic equivalent of a runaway freight train smashed straight through the outdoor speakers. Out of nowhere came this monstrous, unholy collision of genre-mutilation—a sound best described as hardcore violence crashing headfirst into smoky, beat-driven trip-hop and jagged post-punk—tearing through a profoundly moving, completely twisted Daniel Johnston cover tribute. The sheer emotional gravity of the set hit like a sledgehammer to the skull; I abandoned our original mission on the spot, hauled the gear over to the stage, and began frantically burning film on these bastards before sitting down with them for a raw video interview.
Forgive us right now for the wretched state of the footage—the camera work is erratic, the audio bleeds like an open wound, and the whole production has the frantic, shoddy polish of a late-night police raid because we hadn’t intended to cover them at all, and for that technical butcher job, we owe a sincere apology. But as the tape rolled, they tore through blistering, transcendent tributes to both Fugazi and Massive Attack, proving themselves to be an absolute force of nature. Despite the dark, heavy thunder they unleash on stage, the dudes in People In Black turned out to be fantastically chill, ridiculously sharp, and armed with the kind of warped, razor-thin humor.
We were knee-deep in the swill at the Far Out Lounge, producing the kind of high-octane verbal diarrhea that only surfaces when seasoned survivors of the audio underground start trading war stories. The members of People in Black—honed on the bleeding edge of Austin’s darkwave syndicate. Coming up through the asphalt burn of New Orleans and Philadelphia, these boys were no strangers to getting shoved against a squad car hood for the high crime of looking dangerous, making their baptism into the black-shirt tradition as inevitable as death and taxes.
When the conversation dug deeper into the sonic machinery, the philosophy got wonderfully feral: they weren’t building a retro novelty act; they were engineering a monstrous, high-voltage collision between raw New York hardcore aggression, pulsing synthesizer dread, and the smoky, subterranean bounce of 90s trip-hop. They traded ecstatic gunfire over hip-hop history—saluting the holy grail crossover of Public Enemy and Anthrax, dissecting lost lore about Zack de la Rocha shacking up with El-P in New York after Rage Against the Machine imploded, and swapping sweat-soaked tales of trimming weed on outlaw mountains in Northern California. They even teased a forthcoming full-length record titled Cheap Dopamine dropping in early spring, complete with a twisted, beat-fucked Sarah Vaughan jazz inversion. Looking out across a modern crowd where 17-year-old punks and 57-year-old lifers slam shoulder-to-shoulder in the dark, these road-weary veterans proved they aren’t looking backward—they’re strapping explosives to the new wave and driving the getaway car straight into the red-eye of the dawn.
We didn’t stop there, because once the tape rolled past the surface-level wreckage, the conversation unspooled into a gloriously unhinged cross-country seminar on geography, subculture, and dive-bar anthropology. They started jawing about the legendary Castle in Ybor City—that sprawling, two-story Tampa gothic landmark where live chickens roam the perimeter like feathered narcotics agents, serving as the ultimate urban litmus test where you know you’re knee-deep in the danger zone only when poultry starts crossing your path. From there, they bounced sideways into the weird economics of modern touring, name-dropping heavy industrial-goth standard-bearers like Contravoid, N8NOFACE and Buzzkarc who had just welcomed them with open arms on recent runs through New Orleans and Atlanta, proving that the modern darkwave underground is less of a cold corporate market and more of a fiercely loyal, blood-bound fraternity of weirdos.
And then, just when the tape was begging for mercy, they veered straight into the surreal wasteland of modern pop-rap anomalies, riffing on Diplo and Riff Raff’s bizarre, Eastern-Bloc-tinted neon experiment as proof that the musical landscape has become a totally lawless free-for-all where anything goes. The whole scene wrapped up with the kind of cynical, battle-scarred wisdom only forty-year-old veterans of the indie-rock meat grinder could deliver: laughing off the endless digital crate-digging of the internet age while gearing up to drop Cheap Dopamine and drag their synthesized hardcore brutality back out onto the desolate, neon-lit highways of America.
