Who Will Entertain in America? Pt. 3 - Code Orange

Leaning Into The Blur

No matter how much time passes, my mind defaults to mid March. It's like I’ve missed a save point somewhere along the way so that the terminus of my train of thought opens back up to the last moment before the disc started skipping. Like Neo running fruitlessly through the tunnel only to remain in Limbo, I am stuck at the tipping point between the previous order and future instability. No use despairing. Let’s put those old gamer instincts to work and see if we can find a way out through a different path.

Last time we tried our luck with the NBA Bubble, the makeshift basketball simulacrum built after the NBA season was cancelled on March 12th, 2020. The following day, the first of two Friday the 13th’s in 2020, Code Orange released Underneath, their fourth album and second for Roadrunner Records. 

In a pandemic-less 2020 this record was to be the consecration of Code Orange’s place in heavy music’s big leagues. First, a hometown release show in Pittsburgh, PA, then a tour of the United States, appearances at WWE events all but guaranteed, spots locked in for end of the year lists in print and digital press alike. Instead, facing the sudden shutdown of the live music industry along with much of the rest of public life, Code Orange pivoted and performed that release show to an audience of cameras.

Now, having passed the second Friday the 13th of the year, much of the Code Orange coronation has continued as planned. In June the band performed the title track of Underneath at NXT, and in November the same song would be nominated for a Grammy, the band’s second nomination in as many album cycles. At the time of writing early returns are good for the record’s place on end of the year lists, a predictably negative review in Pitchfork aside. Code Orange emerged from 2020 roughly as victorious as they could have hoped. Not yet the biggest name in either hardcore punk or heavy metal, but the youngest band to feasibly be part of the conversation, the clear holders of the torch for heavy music for the next generation.

Have they conquered the world or have we just entered their world, as Code Orange memorably predicted back in 2013? Did they reach this peak through sheer force of will or inertia?

I don’t ask these questions out of disrespect for the band, Underneath is locked into my own end of the year list, but because their seeming inevitability leaves too much unsaid. What about this band has brought them here, beloved by both a huge audience and a media class typically skeptical of bands that build such a big tent following? Why Code Orange and why now?

Before they were Code Orange they were Code Orange Kids, a scrappy but undeniably talented hardcore band. Since 2011 their lineup has revolved around drummer Jami Morgan, guitarists Reba Meyers and Eric Balderose, and bassist Joe Goldman. The first three all share vocal duties, although early on you’d be forgiven for not noticing. At this point it wasn’t clear whether Code Orange Kids could actually write songs or just sprint through them at top speed. Structure, repetition, and hooks all took a backseat to momentum and raw aggression. This can take you pretty far in hardcore, especially if you tailor your live show towards getting the crowd moving. 

After a few splits and EPs the group released Love is Love // Return to Dust on Deathwish Inc. Recording with Kurt Ballou and getting a Deathwish Inc cosign would be a big deal for any hardcore band, let alone a bunch of gangly teens that were running more on gumption than skill. The record was well enough received, but didn’t separate them from a field of other well received hardcore records. Still, they were a known entity.

Having emerged from Converge’s Finishing School For Malcontent Youths, Code Orange got serious. For their second album I Am King, the band dropped the “Kids” from their name and added a chip to their shoulder. Their songwriting shifted to a slower, groovier, and more menacing style of hardcore. In doing so they turned their previously chaotic approach into a strength. By integrating electronics and Ableton Live they approximated a post-human style that could jump from sound to silence and back instantly. The effect was something close to a 90s beatdown act cut up for the pace of social media.

Around the time of that record (2014-15) I saw Code Orange live at Subterranean in Chicago, as packed as I’d ever seen it. It was the first time I’d noticed hardcore kids wearing KMFDM and Sepultura long-sleeves, part of a growing shift toward the sounds and fashion of the 90s alt metal and industrial. Code Orange tore the place apart.

The next time I saw them they were opening for The Dillinger Escape Plan in Terminal 5, as part of Dillinger’s farewell run. By then Code Orange had signed to Roadrunner Records, released their third album Forever, and had, as Jami Morgan put it while counting off a song, taken their sound “from the basements to the Grammy’s”. Their songs were starting to zoom out, become broader and blunter. The scrawny punks from Pittsburgh hit their first red carpet looking like villains from Batman Beyond.

Why of all the bands that released well received but unremarkable records in 2012 did Code Orange end up here? There are musical explanations, yes, the beats of which are probably familiar to anyone now or formerly concerned with the cost of selling out. There are also factors that could charitably be called world building and cynically dubbed marketing. The two are related.

In addition to the linear, breakdown oriented material, Code Orange started including straight ahead verse-chorus tunes. Not only were these more accessible for all the usual reasons, they also let the band’s multi-singer potential flourish. Now a shouty Morgan song could sit comfortably next to alt rock tracks with Meyers singing lead. Not only did this make their material catchier on the whole, it also injected them with a much needed dose of personality. Matching their audience’s sudden interest in 90s metal fashion, Code Orange’s melodic material gets compared to grunge-ish hard rock, industrial metal and nü-metal, essentially a composite of the most distinctly 90s-early aughts trends in American heavy music. They’re quite good at it, in the opinion of a 30 year old with formative memories set to burnt Korn CDs. 

There’s a fine line where this kind of stuff can get a bit too sweet in the hooks. Done right even the prettiest parts should sound a bit ungainly. Parallel harmonies, lots of chromatic movement, maybe the vocals aren’t exactly nailed to the pitch, that sort of thing. Conversely the uglier chunks should have some musicality to their arrangement, a sense of push and pull, good timing, all in the interest of getting the body moving. Underneath does both.

Code Orange began carrying themselves like they had something to prove, writing songs that lashed out against critics and lesser artists. This tough guy turn was accompanied by a series of mantras or slogans that have stuck to the band’s merchandising ever since, “Thinners of the Herd” being the most prominent. By the next record they were dropping their own name into songs; “Code Orange Forever”

This sort of stuff can really rub people the wrong way in heavy music. It can seem pompous, or self-important, or egotistical. For whatever reason this kind of talk seems to really bother other musicians, who have trained themselves to keep their egotism and shit talk backstage and are suspicious of anyone behaving like a rock star without having earned it first. I’ve heard some unsubstantiated stories from other musicians of the Code Orange folks being dicks at shows and during an off the record conversation the drummer of a highly regarded band from the same generation told me “fuck that band” in a way that suggested dislike for more than just their music.

What musicians tend to overlook is that this kind of chest beating actually goes over really well with audiences when the tunes can back it up. In Code Orange’s case the multi-singer lineup really helps sell it too. It’s one thing to hear a single guy bellow “I Am King,” but when three people trade the line off and bellow it together it can start to sound a lot like “We Are King” and if that’s the case then hell maybe “You Are King” too. Everything about Code Orange’s branding is telling you that it’s their band against the world, but that you can join the club anytime. That is of course if you’re a bad enough dude to handle it. If you feel as much pent up resentment and disgust at the world as Code Orange, then maybe you too can be a Thinner of the Herd. 

It helps that Code Orange are from Pittsburgh, not exactly a small town but certainly far enough afield from the centers of culture to give their outsider status some verisimilitude. It’s the same logic that led to Kiss building their Kiss Army by touring through otherwise ignored stretches of the country. The same impulse that led Insane Clown Posse and Slipknot to refashion their fans as Juggalos and Maggots respectively. There are a great many people in this world who don’t feel like a “them” but haven’t been included into an “us” yet either. No matter how corny or careerist you may find it, a band that can provide someone with an “us” to belong to is headed for good things.

Worth noting that Roadrunner Records have some experience turning this kind of band into a global phenomenon, since they have been the only label to release Slipknot albums. Corey Taylor himself gave a tacit cosign by showing up on a Code Orange EP in 2018.

So come March 2020 (fuck, see we’re at the start of the loop again) here was a hardcore band that had grinded their way to the edge of the mainstream and were following an iron clad blueprint set by a band that has dominated metal media for decades. Suddenly their hellish victory lap vanishes before their eyes. If ever there were a chance for them to back up their claim that “Code Orange is Forever” here it was. 

I am pleased to report that they delivered on the promise.

Code Orange have played three live stream concerts, each with a unique twist. First was “Last Ones Left: In Fear of the End,” which restaged their release show for a digital audience, mixing in their background projections into a fairly standard live performance, albeit one by a band ready to crack skulls across the country. They followed this up with “Under The Skin” (no relation to one of the best movies of the last decade, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the band were into the Mica Levi score) a stripped down acoustic set reminiscent of MTV’s Unplugged concert series, a comparison they made explicit by covering Alice in Chain’s “Down in a Hole.” 

Finally, on Halloween they launched “Back Inside The Glass,” which turned their headlining tour into Generation Z’s “Rock And Roll Circus.” Preceding their performance were sets by the intended openers for their US tour. Machine Girl, a project that deserves its own lengthy celebration at some point, tore through a set in what looked like an abandoned high school, including an appropriately sardonic cover of Faith No More’s “We Care A Lot.” Year of the Knife and Jesus Piece played fairly conventional hardcore sets to an empty room, the quality of which will depend largely on how you feel about those bands (YotK, sure why not? Jesus Piece, hell fucking yeah). 

For their own performance, Code Orange made every use of their new medium to provide something more than just a glorified band practice. They performed on a multilevel stage, where every visible inch had been mapped for projections. The effect was that the band were moving through a version of the same web you were using to watch them, an effect heightened by the footage of fans furiously banging their heads in pre-recorded videos that occasionally passed through the margins of the projections. Supplementing the wide shots were closeups handled by Sunny Singh, cameraman behind the popular live video channel hate5six, as well as “picture-in-picture” frames that disrupted the supposed “reality” of the experience.

This would have been a terrific presentation for any modern rock band, but it couldn’t have made a better fit for Code Orange’s increasing interest in retro-cyber-futurist aesthetics. Let me unpack that a bit. Underneath is an album primarily about the way that modern digital life refracts and warps human interaction. As you’d expect from a band now firmly entrenched in the belly of the music industry, the examples they draw to represent this disconnect come mostly from the mediasphere (the parasocial stalker of “Who I Am”, the pressures of celebrity in “Autumn and Carbine”). 

Code Orange backed up this lyric focus on the digital life with music with renewed emphasis on electronic sounds. Not only did they use Ableton to cut up their music into stuttering glitches, they worked with former Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson drummer Chris Vrenna to incorporate a range of synthesizers and drum machines on Underneath. This mix of electronics both new and old into heavy music puts the album into two spots in time simultaneously. It is a modern record, the product of a young band using all of the available technology to talk about the world they live in. It is also an album that sounds like the best of the turn of the century polished to fit today’s market. Black trench coats, dyed hair, bounce riffs and drum machines, songs from the perspective of stalkers (welcome… to my twisted mind), fonts equal parts The Matrix and Blade Runner, etc. The future Code Orange describe already happened. 

I don’t think it’s unrelated that the further Code Orange push into this aesthetic territory, the more critics praise their work. Enough time has passed that the former nü-metal kids raving under the overpass are now riding Ubers to their office on top of it. They see a band recreating the sounds of their youth building an audience of the current youth and egg them on. That would be the case regardless of the style of music in question. But the specific historical circumstances of this subgenre add another layer of nostalgic glow. Code Orange’s mix of industrial and nü-metal recalls the last moment when heavy metal was viable pop music, and thus when a future for the genre outside of insular subculture was possible. (By God, is that the Pynchonian Subjunctive’s music?? It is! Unbelievable! It’s going for the Garage Rock revival with a steel chair!!). Nü-metal singers shared the stage with pop singers, and blockbuster action films like Underworld and XXX stocked their soundtracks to the brim with dreadlocked lords of drop B. Code Orange reviving the look, sound, and extra-sensory vibe of this point in time and making legit great work out of it feels like the re-opening of a sealed off horizon.

Back in 2016 I interviewed Jacob Bannon of Converge and Deathwish Inc. about a pair of special sets the band had planned for Roadburn Festival in Tilburg. After the bulk of the interview was finished I slipped in a few questions that had been nagging me as a Converge fan. The last few times I had seen them Bannon had repeated an idea between songs about the band’s purpose. Essentially, he saw it as Converge’s job at this point in their career to inspire the next Converge. I wanted to know which younger bands in Bannon’s estimation best fit that description. “Code Orange and Full of Hell,” he told me. At the time I found the answer a bit disappointing, so I moved on to even nerdier questions about why No Heroes wasn’t more popular.

I don’t know if he could have given me a satisfying answer at the time. There was something coursing underneath that bit of stage banter that I found upsetting. Is that all there is to being a band? You inspire another iteration of yourself, who inspires another iteration, on and on throughout time. To use Code Orange’s language “imitation of imitation” or to use Nine Inch Nails’ “a copy of a copy.” Just an endless cycle that tumbles forward but always ends in the same place.

I don’t feel that way anymore.

Yes, Code Orange owe a debt to the music of the 90s and early 00s, which in turn could not exist without the cyberpunk aesthetics of the 80s, and so on and so on further back in time. You cannot escape the footprint of influence, but you can take the next step forward. Since Code Orange’s three live streams two clear forebears in Slipknot and Greg Puciato (formerly of The Dillinger Escape Plan) have announced their own live stream productions. Code Orange are now a step ahead of artists whose wake they once drifted in. If they are an iteration, then they are the iteration we have now. The cycle is in good hands. Run on, Neo, run on.