New York City trio Kill Alters fuses electro-punk, digital hardcore, and noise rock into a turbulent sound laced with incidental fragments drawn from Bonnie Baxter’s family archives. Their 2022 album Armed to the Teeth L.M.O.M.M. careens without warning among grinding industrial rhythms, weightless drones, and snippets of childhood audio preserved on cassette.
The group assembled in 2013 around Baxter—previously recording as Shadowbox—alongside Nicos Kennedy and Hisham Bharoocha, whose résumé includes Soft Circle plus prior stints in Black Dice and Lightning Bolt. Baxter had unearthed tapes her mother made from the 1970s through the 1990s as a means of managing severe OCD and Tourette’s syndrome, together with early recordings of Baxter herself that she later examined while confronting childhood trauma. Their self-titled debut appeared on Godmode in 2015, folding those unsettling yet occasionally whimsical excerpts into abrasive textures and lo-fi electro-punk constructions. The follow-up, No Self Helps, arrived in 2016; Hausu Mountain reissued that material in 2017, appending the original self-titled set to the CD edition.
Beginning in 2018, Kill Alters issued a series of digital Archives volumes built from concise experimental pieces centered on the same family recordings. Baxter simultaneously launched solo projects leaning further into techno, and she launched the project Prolaps alongside Matt Stephenson of Machine Girl. The band resurfaced with the 2021 single “Eyelid Viewing” before delivering the full-length Armed to the Teeth L.M.O.M.M. the following year.
