Tayler Lee and Ty Varesi on the frustration, instinct, and community behind their In The Red Records debut

Transmission 364: Interview with Genre Is Death

Genre Is Death is a New York-based noise duo formed by Tayler Lee (bass, vocals) and Ty Varesi (guitar, vocals), both originally from Georgia. The two met as teenagers at a skate park, and after years of playing in informal setups around their home state, relocated to New York City in August 2023. The move preceded the band’s formation: it was the friction of the city, combined with a sustained frustration with the conventions of contemporary rock, that pushed them toward the sound they were looking for.

Title: Attractive People
Artist: Genre Is Death
Release Date: 2026-05-01
Genres: Experimental Music, No Wave, Noise Rock, Post-punk
Label: In The Red Records
Description: Genre Is Death talk Attractive People, Martin Bisi, New York noise, and writing songs in five minutes on In The Red Records.

Their debut album Attractive People, recorded by Martin Bisi and released on In The Red Records, draws on the New York noise lineage without treating it as a template; the distortion is heavy, the riffs dissonant, the vocals reverberant, and the songs, most of them written within minutes, carry the logic of instinct over craft. Since arriving in the city, the duo has performed alongside Bush Tetras, Cherubs, and Jon Spencer, toured with Gogol Bordello (read our interview with Gogol Bordello), and played the New Colossus Festival. Their entry into the New York underground came through a chance encounter with Live Skull, which led to a sustained connection with The Art Gray Noizz Quintet, Lydia Lunch, and the broader community around Bisi’s BC Studio.

Featured image: Genre is Death © Gerson Vargas

How did you meet and how did you decide to start a band together?

Tayler Lee: We met in Georgia. We met at a skate park in Georgia when we were teenagers. Ty grew up playing music and I didn’t really grow up playing music, at least not in bands. I played piano, but in a more vigorous, boring way. After I met Ty, when we were teenagers, a couple years later, Ty asked me to pick up the bass and play with some of his friends. I did, and I started learning the bass guitar.

The reason we started Genre Is Death specifically was because during that time period, which was about four years of me playing with his friends, we realized we were really bored by a lot of things in the music world. There was a lot of boredom. There were a lot of bands that sounded the same. We were really bored and actually were pretty angry about how bored we were. That’s kind of how it led to Genre Is Death.

What made you leave for New York?

Ty Varesi: The same reason, mainly just being bored. We grew up there our whole lives and we felt like New York wasn’t necessarily the only option we were thinking of. We were kind of just wanting to go anywhere. But New York was the first place we thought of because, I mean, it’s New York. We wanted to just try to uproot and go anywhere. So we ended up selling everything we had and renting a car for a day and then luckily found a spot. Now we’re here. To come here and experience something new, nothing more than that.

Where does the name of the band come from?

Tayler: We wanted a band name that felt timeless. We wanted a band name that people were drawn by upon reading it immediately. On top of that, I also ran a T-shirt business where I would have to make funny sayings for T-shirts.

Ty: Just crude sayings, anything that would catch the eye.

Tayler: Right. When I was making shirts, I thought of making a statement about music and how you didn’t have to fit in a box to make music. I think I said something like genre equals death or something like that.

Ty: Yeah, something along those lines.

Tayler: Then we were spitballing a way to make it sound better, and then “Genre Is Death” came out. We were like, no, no, no, we have to use that for our band name.

How does your mutual regard for each other function when you hit a creative disagreement?

Tayler: We don’t really disagree about anything, I will say. We’re just able to speak to each other really honestly. If I don’t like something he does, there’s not really a conversation, it’s more just like, I don’t like that.

Ty: I receive it well because we’ve known each other for so long and we just know how each other work, so there are no real arguments. We just kind of…

Tayler: We don’t really fight. We do disagree, it’s more that we’re able to easily come to a consensus because we’ve known each other for so, so long. The band is equal parts to each other, so it’s like we’re not trying to out-macho the other one or be better than the other one. It’s more like, this is the perspective I have. Usually it’s me that’s drawing lines, but Ty does too. I don’t like when certain things are done on stages, because it goes against why I started the band. A lot of bands do stupid things on stages. A lot of bands annoy me. A lot of bands suck. The reason why we made this band was to not do the things that would piss me off that I saw in other bands. So whenever I feel like me and Ty do some of those things, because they’re easy things to fall into, they’re things you can hide behind on a stage,

Ty: The crutches.

Tayler: Then I will say: if we ever do that again, we might as well kill ourselves.

How did you select and involve the several collaborators and contributors to the album, like Martin Bisi or Bob Bert?

Tayler: How did we choose to work with these people? When we moved here, it took a while, about a year. We ended up falling into a group of people, the best group of people we could ever run into. Do you know the band Live Skull? They’re an 80s New York noise band that played with Sonic Youth, heavily involved with 80s New York noise. We ran into them and ended up playing a show with that band. Through them, we met just the best group of people ever. We met The Art Gray Noizz Quintet, which is a band fronted by Stu Spasm, who was the frontman of Lubricated Goat, a really awesome Australian noise band that relocated to New York City in the 90s. We also met Lydia Lunch through this crowd of people and became good friends with her. Through these people, Skeleton Boy in particular from The Art Gray Noizz Quintet recommended us to work with Martin Bisi and gave us his email address. We didn’t know who Martin was. We looked him up and obviously were like, he’s the perfect choice, he’s done so many of our favorite records. But honestly, we didn’t really know he was the perfect choice until we met him. Once you meet Martin, you just know there is no other person in the world like Martin. He is such a humble genius. The way he acts, you’re almost wondering, do you know how good you are at what you do, or are you unaware of it? I feel like he knows, but the way he acts, you wouldn’t know it because he’s so down to earth. It was obvious once we met him that we had to work with him, just beyond his history. If the energy wasn’t right, we still wouldn’t have worked with him, even though he has an amazing history. But his energy, his presence, he is the perfect guy to work with.

What does the community around you help you to do or support you to make your music?

Ty: Well, we started off kind of lost when we came to New York. We knew nobody. We came here with minimal instruments, a guitar, a bass. We didn’t have a drummer. We had nothing. So already we were off to a rocky start community-wise. We were kind of just thrown into it. Then, like we said earlier, we ran into certain people that were drawn to this type of music we were wanting to create anyway. It’s already a niche thing, as we all know. Finding just one person is already a good start, you’re already building a community. Well, we have that one person, now they tell their friend, maybe their friend has an act for that type of music. Now you have three, now you have ten, fifteen. It started to naturally build in a way that me and Tayler really appreciated, because these people genuinely liked what we were doing. Me and Tayler take a lot of pride in really trying to do something different when we write music, even in the way we write it, we try to do it differently. Having people who see that and appreciate that is…

Tayler: They really try to elevate us. Everyone around us will be trying to send our record to people they feel like need to hear it, using their connections to try to help us grow. When we go on tour, they’ll send their friends from different cities. They’re like, I’m this guy’s friend. We’re like, this is so cool, all their friends are showing up in North Carolina or wherever. They really seem to care. We really, really care about them too. It’s very mutual. It’s really cool to see how much they’ll do for us, beyond just telling us like, you guys fucking destroy, which is also amazing, because we need to hear that sometimes. It helps us get angrier and better.

Ty: Yeah, it definitely does. I’d say we have a nice little community here.

Is there a shared theme running through the tracks of the album?

Tayler: There are a couple of threads. There’s the topic of being seen by a crowd, voyeurism maybe, voyeurism through the audience. There’s also disgust, perception, identity. I think those are the themes of the record.

What were you reading, watching or thinking about outside music when you wrote the album? Are there non-musical influences?

Ty: Let me think.

Tayler: As far as movies go, we’re really into horror films. The past year and a half, definitely watching a lot of gore.

Ty: A lot of grotesque things.

Tayler: When I’m reading, I really love existentialism and absurdism, and I like anything to do with the body and how the body relates to being a person, how we look contributes to our personalities. I think a daily thing that I reflect on is the book Nausea by Sartre, it’s like my favorite book. I refer to it all the time and I think that’s a basis for a lot of my creative work. The feeling of people almost understanding each other, but slightly missing, it’s really painful to me, just the subtleties of that. That’s nausea to me.

Ty: Mine might not be as maybe… In my free time, I sculpt. I sculpt these really horrific things that me and Tayler have to look at pretty much all day. I’m sure that has bled into our creative world. They’re super nasty. Some people are like, why do you make those? What is wrong with you? So that may also just be feeding in.

Where did the album name come from and who are the attractive people?

Tayler: I was reading something by Joan Didion, I don’t remember which book. There was a kind of random sentence that had the phrase “attractive people” in it. It wasn’t a sentence that was necessarily even important or a standout piece of the book. I just liked the two words together. We were already writing the song that we didn’t have words for. So I brought those words into that and we created that song. Who are the attractive people? The song is just a mockery of people who are more concerned about how they’re perceived than who they actually are.

Ty: Definitely.

Tayler: So if you’re an attractive person, at least if we’re calling you that in the song, you’re probably someone who focuses more on your looks, your social media perception, than on actually building character. You’re what we don’t want to be.

How has the physical reality of New York entered your music?

Ty: It’s definitely worn us down. It’s just made us even more disgusted and angered. To be more clear, I love New York. But it is very difficult to live here. It’s just the truth. I come from Georgia, so it’s a complete opposite. A city as large and as intense as this can definitely weigh you down mentally, physically, whatever. It has definitely made me angrier, made me more resentful towards life. But I still love it.

Tayler: The good parts of New York are amazing. We wouldn’t have been able to write anything if we were still in Georgia because we were so uninspired. Moving here and seeing the creative world of New York gave us everything we needed to start creating. On the other hand, we live in Queens, and it’s hard to get anywhere from where we live. To get to Brooklyn, to get to Manhattan, it takes like an hour or more. We are in New York, but it’s also like we might as well be in Connecticut because it takes us just as long to get anywhere.

Ty: In turn, we live in a box.

Tayler: We live in a really small space. We’re always tripping over cables. We also practice in our apartment, so we’re always tripping over things, banging our leg on a cabinet.

Ty: Accidentally breaking something. It’s not a way anyone should really live.

Tayler: It’s really expensive. It’s just kind of like this thing where it’s like, I wish we could figure out a way to at least make enough money just to pay the rent every month so that we could focus on the things we actually care about.

Ty: That’s always the problem. It’s tough.

Considering it’s a difficult and expensive city to live in, does that force you to think about how the audience will perceive your music?

Tayler: We make it a goal to not think about what people will think about our music when we’re making it. I don’t think about other people when we’re making our music. The way that we write is very spontaneous. Most of our songs were written within five minutes.

Ty: We usually have a cap. If we think too hard about it or drag too long on one song, we come back to it or we scrap it. We’re like, nah, let’s move on.

Tayler: We don’t like to take too long. We definitely don’t want to think about anybody. The whole basis of the band is, actually, fuck most people. Fuck most bands. Fuck most people that go on stage and are like, hey, what’s going on, making jokes, not taking yourself seriously.

Ty: Not taking the crowd seriously. It’s like, have some respect for your audience who maybe just paid even fucking ten dollars to come see you, at least give them something fucking good.

Tayler: All we want to do is believe in ourselves. So if we’re writing, we want to just think about ourselves at that moment. The audience appreciates that and they can feel it. The audience can also feel when you’re writing for them, and the audience doesn’t like that.

Are you working on new material or organizing a tour now?

Tayler: We’re working on organizing a tour. Actually, after this interview, we’re going to talk about what that looks like. We’re getting on another call and we’re going to talk about our next tour. We are writing a lot of new songs right now.

Ty: Trying to work on a second record right now.

Photos courtesy of © Genre is Death

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others