“My dad's was coming home from two tours in Vietnam, and God knows what he was dealing with,” he said. “I have vague memories of him being in the house, and they are not great ones. He was kind of a loose cannon—huge into cocaine and the drinking.” Nicky said that his childhood experiences were par for the course in his neighborhood. “There was a lot of abuse in every house,” he remembered. “There’d be violent arguments with someone’s mom fucking crying through the walls. I had other kids my age, and I’d be like, ‘Come over,’ and we’d sit there and play music and try to ignore what was coming through the walls. It was happening on both sides.”After being the family's sole breadwinner for years, Nicky's father left. “My mom had to start at ground zero, being a 30-year-old woman,” he said. His mother struggled to keep the family in some approximation of stability. “Working two jobs so she wasn’t around very often,” he remembers. “Sheriff sales for the house—she’s crying, we work it out, and a couple weeks later, they’re back again,” he said. Nicky’s father died on November 19, 2015, a year after Nothing’s first album, Guilty of Everything, came out.“There’d be violent arguments with someone’s mom fucking crying through the walls. I had other kids my age, and I’d be like, ‘Come over,’ and we’d sit there and play music and try to ignore what was coming through the walls. It was happening on both sides.” —Nicky Palermo
Some of the band’s sense of isolation is understandable. Except for Kyle, the band is aggressively working class at a time when rock music is largely the purview of those who come from at least a bit of money. It’s extremely difficult to pay rent in a city, pay for equipment, pay for a practice space, and tour on a barista’s salary. I come from a solidly upper middle class background, and financial stress is still a constant. The members of Nothing describe a background of single parents working multiple jobs and fathers who are in prison or otherwise absent, so resentment towards those who wave a DIY flag while failing to disclose how exactly they paid for Temple University is understandable.Nothing’s history as a band is only slightly less turbulent than that of its members. After they put out their first EP, Downward Years To Come, critics celebrated them as tough guys who put out music that we could enjoy without having our lunch money taken at shows. They signed to Relapse in 2013, representing the metal label’s first foray into short-haired Pitchfork bait (unless you count Unsane). The press bit hard, if not in always glowing reviews than at least in the volume of their coverage. Then, in 2015, Nothing was going to put out a record on Geoff Rickly’s Collect Records, before Collect imploded when it came out that Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceutical propheteer, was the money man behind the label. Nothing was one of the first bands to distance themselves from the label, but if there’s bad blood between the group and Rickly, nobody’s saying so."There’s always been the love from the genuinely Philadelphia people. That’s never changed. The people from the neighborhood, the good people. There was a lot of really good people who gave a shit about the band in early days." —Nicky Palermo
Here’s another story. It’s one that Nicky relayed to me about his first few weeks in prison, and maybe it’ll help elucidate the group’s worldview—one that would reek of collegiate posturing coming from lesser Nihilism 101 boy bands, but that, in Nothing’s case, feels grounded in something true.“Camden County was really crazy. I was stuck in there for the first month. I was in a two-person cell with six people. And it was 23 and one—23 hours locked in and one hour out. The guys I was in with all knew each other from Camden, and they had all boofed a ton of heroin and crack. So the first week they were in there, they were just blowing crack and sniffing heroin off the toilet seat. With a minimum of two years ahead for myself, probably leaning towards four with a parole hit I thought I was going to get because it’s a violent crime, I was more or less thinking of the life of hell my next four years were going to be. Just waking up in the middle of the night and seeing these crazed dudes, the only light being from the window from the door, the fluorescent lights outside, and seeing these dudes holding a burning crack rock, fingers burning—where the fuck am I?The first week I was there, I left the cell to try to use the phone, came back, and my sneakers were gone. I looked around the cell for my sneakers and was like, ‘Oh my god, here we go.’ And I look across the tier, and there’s this dude just wearing my shoes, just busting it up, talking to someone. I was like, ‘Motherfuck, man,’ so I went over and was like, ‘Hey I think you have my shoes, man.’ They say, ‘Oh yeah, come into the cell and I’ll give em to you.’ So I already knew what it was: I go in there and— bop bop bop —get my ass beat by a couple of ‘em.That was the thing; you see these movies that are like, ‘Find the biggest guy there and crack em.’ It doesn’t work like that. They’ll just beat your ass every single day, and that’s it. You have to eat a lot of shit. That’s one of the main things—a point of survival there— which taught me a lot about how to live in the streets again. Pride is an evil fucking thing that makes you do terrible things, and as soon as you realize that that’s the case, and [that] you’re meant to be on this planet to just shovel shit down your throat, you’ll find yourself progressing in more positive ways.That’s the thing: Walking into a room and there’s ten toilets. That first time you walk in, and everyone's just sitting there shitting, you’re just like, ‘Oh, I gotta sit and take a shit like everybody else.’ Pride leaves you super fast. I still have that in me. I can shit in front of anyone.”There are ways for a band to tell their own story. If your band drinks to excess, takes drugs like Good & Plentys, bears the brunt of violence both dished out and received, and digs My Bloody Valentine as gospel, you should use it. You should use it the same way other bands use college connections, insurance-covered zen, and having parents who buy them instruments with all the strings intact. And if that story occasionally feels like a burden, like it’s taken on a life of its own and become a train without a driver, well, you can get off any time you like. But then you’d have to live with a whole different caboose of regrets.Nothing’s success is far from a mystery. They are four handsome boys who perform music that makes potential suicides rethink their prospects, and they perform it loud enough to make boys and girls feel that music in their bones. People relate to them while perhaps not knowing exactly what they’re relating to. For Nothing, confusion isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. They’re void fuckers in a time that calls for it—no lyric sheet attached.Zachary Lipez is a writer based in New York City. Follow him on Twitter.“People message us and and say, ‘This music helped me through the craziest things in my life. It’s cool to touch some mass of people when we just started this with. I wouldn’t say that it’s changed my worldview in any way, but if it did, we’d be making different music than we are now, I suppose. So I dunno. I guess we’re doomed.” —Brandon Setta