No Age

Los Angeles duo No Age infuse the ethos of early independent punk and hardcore with layers of textural ambient noise across their brisk, jagged compositions. From the outset, Dean Spunt and Randy Randall evoked the sonic collision of My Bloody Valentine reworking Hüsker Dü’s early SST recordings, drawing equally from the optimistic D.I.Y. all-ages community they actively shaped in Los Angeles and from deliberate art-world flourishes. Throughout their trajectory the pair has balanced these impulses, evident in the melodic leanings of their 2008 Sub Pop debut Nouns and in the hazy art-rock and psychedelically tinted punk that later characterized their Drag City releases, including the 2022 album People Helping People.

After their prior band Wives disbanded mid-tour, the longtime friends formed No Age in December 2005. Already embedded in the D.I.Y. milieu orbiting the all-ages venue The Smell, Spunt and Randall assembled a repertoire of rapid punk songs built from drums, guitar, and vocals that were simultaneously anchored and submerged by self-generated noisy samples. Within weeks they played their inaugural show and thereafter treated frequent live appearances as a core element of their practice. Their earliest recordings appeared as five separate EPs issued simultaneously on distinct independent labels on March 26, 2007. Material from those EPs was later compiled on the 2007 FatCat album Weirdo Rippers. Favorable notices, mounting underground attention, and a detailed New Yorker profile further elevated their profile, complemented by relentless touring that prioritized all-ages and nontraditional spaces. They joined Sub Pop for the 2008 release of Nouns, an album whose clearer production and pop inflections contrasted with prior work while retaining raw songwriting and the atmospheric samples that bound their minimal instrumentation. Consistent with the band’s established high-art sensibility—manifest in videos, artwork, and collaborations with visual and performance artists—the packaging of Nouns was elaborate and earned a Grammy nomination for best design. In October 2009 they issued the four-song EP Losing Feeling, followed in 2010 by the full-length Everything in Between. During this period the duo pursued numerous art projects alongside touring and recording, including live film scores, soundtrack contributions, limited-edition publications, and a June 2011 multimedia installation Black Mirror on the Greek island of Hydra with video artist Doug Aitken and actress Chloë Sevigny.

In 2013 No Age recorded their third album, An Object, a conceptual statement equally concerned with the mechanics and textures of music-making as with the songs themselves; every facet of production and design was executed by the band. They toured behind the release, issuing the four-song cassette An Object Tour Cassette, then contributed covers of the Gun Club’s “Sex Beat” and Black Flag’s “Six Pack” to the limited box set Thirty Three and a Third and a Third - 333: The Half Mark of the Beast in 2014. That same year two songs appeared with issue 24 of the intricately packaged periodical The Thing Quarterly. Although live performances continued, no further music surfaced until the self-released 2016 7-inch “Separation”/“Serf to Serf.” A full slate of shows followed in 2017 along with additional recording. Supported by new label Drag City, the band released its fourth album, Snares Like a Haircut, in early 2018. Fifth album Goons Be Gone arrived on Drag City in June 2020. Both Drag City efforts reaffirmed the group’s longstanding equilibrium between taut, moody punk songs and dense atmospheric layering. Their sixth studio album, People Helping People, appeared in September 2022, again on Drag City. The songs were composed before the COVID-19 pandemic and recorded after the loss of the band’s longtime practice space; regrouping in a home studio inside Randall’s garage, the album became the first No Age release produced entirely in-house.