Propped up on a hotel bed in Prague, Ethan Billips calls in through WhatsApp to join my interview with Max Deems and Andrew Nogay, his bandmates in Blank Hellscape. The multi-instrumentalist is on a brief four-day break from an international tour with post-rock giants This Will Destroy You. The night before, a curious native asked what brought him to town.
“I’m playing with This Will Destroy You,” Billips said.
The local shrugged and responded, “Never heard of them.”
He mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that he also played with a lesser-known Austin noise act called Blank Hellscape, and the guy lit up.
“It was the first time that’s ever happened. It’s usually the opposite,” Billips says – to a roar of laughter from his two bandmates, who know the feeling all too well.
Despite operating under the radar, Blank Hellscape has been a staple of Austin’s DIY and experimental scenes since 2017. They’ve released one full-length album, three EPs, and a grip of singles, and have played more shows than they can count. But garnering favor from venues and bookers in Austin’s increasingly commercial musical landscape has been difficult – especially for a noise band known for setting fires, breaking bones, and experiencing the occasional onstage electrocution.
“I think people don’t take us seriously because of the genre. I think that’s a specific thing to Austin because we do better in other cities than we do here,” guitarist Deems laments.
“In Austin we play any and every show. We play with indie bands, punk shows, raves, we play whatever … When we play a mixed bill, we’re kind of the weird act, we’re the freak act,” vocalist Nogay says.
“Then when we play noise shows we’re not extreme enough,” Billips adds.
The band might not be basking in commercial glory, but their impact runs deep in the city’s creative veins. They are held in high regard by the people whose opinions matter most to them: other musicians.
“Blank Hellscape is responsible for reviving and igniting Austin underground music during a time where it felt like the city had lost itself in the corporate belly,” Alton Jenkins of Fuck Money raves. “They are important to all of us who want to bring attention to art. To resist comfort and convenience. Resist natural inclinations. Resist passive consumption.”
That resistance and raw expression pulses through their long-awaited sophomore album, Hell 2, out April 25. Blank Hellscape had been working on it since finishing their first self-titled LP in 2019.
“The end of the record is funnily enough like the beginning of the lyrical cycle,” Nogay says. “The first album is about self-hatred, and that kind of progressed into, it’s not yourself you hate, it’s capitalism, it’s everything else, the death of the environment. These things are leading to existential fears within yourself.”
“Blank Hellscape is very much music for the body. They conjure a combination of feedback, screaming, and rhythm that moves a person deep in their viscera. It’s pure serenity. Extremely physical.” – David Rawlinson
Hell 2 thrives in tension. Chaotic, fuzzy noise gives way to irresistible, disco-laced beats that invite you to dance your cares away – until the lyrics stop you in your tracks. The vocals, refreshingly front-and-center in the mix, showcase Nogay’s raw, open-hearted poetry, floating above hypnotic rhythms, capturing the collective dread and fragile hope of the present moment.
“In the political climate right now, it’s hard to ignore. It’s on my mind, it’s on everyone’s mind. All of my emotions are reflected in my lyrics,” Nogay says. “But I’m not a miserable person. I think I’m generally pretty happy. None of us want people to listen to this record and feel bad. That’s not the full extent of being alive.”
The album was carved from over 200 hours of jams recorded across five years. When the three sat down to pore through the GarageBand files – full of impossible-to-replicate pedal chains and hand-crafted tape loops – the overwhelm almost killed the project for good.
“The hard part about it was we decided to be intentional about song length … We could make 17-minute monolithic jams all day long, and it’s good stuff, but we are also really into short songs and songwriting and pop music,” Billips says. “Reduction becomes even more exciting than adding. When you start thinking of it that way, it becomes a more interesting musical problem to solve.”
To keep from spiraling into oblivion, the trio got pragmatic, breaking things down by timecode and organizing each side of the LP like a puzzle. Some riffs and loops have been stitched together into Frankensteinian creations – other ideas are gone forever.
You may be wondering how they will play these songs live. “We have no idea,” Deems admits.
They won’t replicate the songs exactly. “What [we] should do is take the essence of what it is and fit it to the way Andrew chats,” Billips says. “Like in rap music, you can switch out the beat and keep the cadence and the vocals the same.”
Blank Hellscape’s live shows are almost always entirely improvisational, more like controlled chaos than album playback. Deems and Billips lay down an instrumental, and Nogay drops vocals in real time – sometimes new, sometimes reciting the original lyrics. The result: No two shows are ever the same.
“There is music for the mind and music for the body,” says David Rawlinson, guitarist in Gus Baldwin and the Sketch. “Blank Hellscape is very much music for the body. They conjure a combination of feedback, screaming, and rhythm that moves a person deep in their viscera. It’s pure serenity. Extremely physical.”
Even performing on their home turf at Hotel Vegas, where Deems works sound, Blank Hellscape can’t help but raise some hell. Maybe you’re one of the 5 million people who have seen the viral video of Deems dragging a PA blasting their noise onto the Hotel Vegas patio, drowning out the Top 40 dance party and flipping off the crowd on his way back inside.
“It was definitely done in response to like, this is everything wrong with the city,” Deems says. “It got us banned from Vegas for a while, but everyone in that comment section is like ‘Where is this, I want to see this?’ and then my boss is like, ‘I’m very disappointed in you.’”
The band will commit this sonic assault on May 9 when they launch their “Most Dangerous Band in America” tour at Hotel Vegas. Ahead of the gig, also featuring Touch Girl Apple Blossom, Wet Dip, Guiding Light, and Gerard Cosloy, Deems laughs:
“You don’t have to be a degenerate noise person to like our music. I get people telling me all the time, ‘I never in a million years thought I would like this,’ which I take as a compliment.”
Blank Hellscape plays a Hell 2 album release show on May 9 at Hotel Vegas.
This article appears in April 25 • 2025.