SHORT AND SWEAT
A spirited Brooklyn trio shirks escapism — and effects pedals — for raw, unabridged realities.
SAMUEL HYLAND
Jack Nolan doesn’t bed-rot often, but when he does, there comes a point where he desperately needs to step outside and move his legs. The plausible solution: take a stroll to the corner store. The problem with said solution: the corner store is a single crosswalk away from his apartment. At about 5:30 PM one June Wednesday, he was sporting a New York Giants T-shirt and a disheveled mat of hair, skulking up and down his street like a weary vagabond. It was his first time being outdoors for the day, and he’d been taking a lap around his building, which sits on one edge of a long, dreary Ridgewood block—the sort with weeds that sprout through sidewalk cracks, and Spanglish-speckled phone-calls that echo from distant doorways. Nolan is a raffish 28-year-old with the air of an undergraduate slacker; he speaks in punchy, matter-of-fact sentences, only occasionally lightening up when he finds something funny. He moved into his current nest, an old-looking five-story with ominous light fixtures, this past October, after a “nincompoop” landlord mistakenly flooded his old one then raised rent to cover the damages. (If Brooklyn property owner Angel Wong is reading this, Nolan extends his greetings: “Fuck you.”) When his lap around the block ended, he crossed that fabled three-step crosswalk and ducked into the deli, eyes fixed on a cooler all the way at the back. He slid open the door and stuffed 7 beers into a duffel bag, a hefty haul he dumped onto the cashier’s desk with a bag of sour-cream Ruffles.
“It’s about exploring everything—even the worst parts—and being able to laugh about it.”
Inside Nolan’s cluttered apartment unit, a longsuffering floor-fan blew around the mingled, lukewarm scents of sweat and weed smoke. Sprawled across the living space, like fruit from a cornucopia, was debris that bridged the gap between C-tier rock-star and C-earning college student: various sports balls; several uncased guitars; a large, eclectic bookshelf (Girl in a Band, The Dilemmas of Lenin, Short Stories in German); a drum machine; a number of faded punk posters. These days, Nolan moonlights as the spirited frontman of Prophet Thaddeus, a three-piece Brooklyn band that specializes in the dubby, jarring, and off-kilter. But music is pay-to-play, and he’s been paying for almost as long as he’s been playing. It’s why today’s bed-rot was so unusual: his sprawling creative habit is financed by on-call odd jobs, most of which are extremely physical, and nearly all of which churn for grueling, day-consuming shifts. “Two days ago, I did the House of the Dragon season two premiere,” he reported from a couch, munching on the Ruffles while a T-Rex guitar solo blared from his portable disc player. “It was 4 PM to like, 2 or 3 AM. And it was just taking down this giant event that happens over the course of two or three hours. You have to change the whole arrangement. They put a whole fuckin’ theater up and you have to move like 200 chairs… tear up a bunch of carpet… all this work and hustling around for the enjoyment of a couple hundred important people.”
“He’s like, You should take it more seriously. You get to make songs, and you’ve got all these opinions, so why don’t you just say one of those opinions in the songs? Use your voice, or whatever.”
All factors considered, the beneficiary-count of his labor might go beyond a few hundred—and beyond those odd-job confines, too. Last summer, Prophet Thaddeus surprise-released Extended PLAY 1, a brief-albeit-batshit-crazy EP that sent shockwaves through New York’s independent underground. Nolan is no stranger to intrigued audiences—he’s also the longtime guitarist of Standing on the Corner, Brooklyn’s mythic community-oriented art ensemble—but this particular band, and this particular project, didn’t so much catch ears as grip them, twist them tight, bludgeon them with trippy truths, then let go just as quickly. “Jewel Theef,” the first track, told a difficult-to-trace tale of desperation and imperialism; Hi, behold me, Nolan rasped in its opening seconds, and the way it zigzagged, spasmed, and sputtered, you didn’t really have a choice. It’s increasingly difficult to stuff a world into a CD, let alone one that’s only 13 minutes long. And yet—seemingly out of nowhere—here was this shadowy band-of-misfits, their sole footprint a universe of thievery, deceit, phlegm, dance-punk, losers, winners, and cartoonishly grave travesties. “There’s a lot of humor in Jack’s songwriting,” Caleb Giles, Nolan’s frequent collaborator and former Standing on the Corner bandmate, said in a Zoom call this past March. “He just wants to have fun. He’ll play his guitar with a beer bottle sometimes, or with a screwdriver, or a paintbrush. He challenges me to embrace the absurdity of life, and of music. It’s about exploring everything—even the worst parts—and being able to laugh about it.”
Nolan has long taken an interest in the absurdity of the world, and somewhere beneath his zany art, there’s an urgent desire to interrogate it further. The grandson of working-class Irish immigrants, he grew up skeptical of bigwig bosses and capitalist conveyor belts; come college, he obsessed over lofty questions, the kinds with answers that demand critical reassessments of America-as-protagonist. “Growing up, I thought Iraq and Afghanistan were the same place—I was like, are they… connected?” he said, giving one example. “When I found out they weren’t bordering each other, I was like what the fuck? What does any of this mean? Those wars, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, were definitive of our childhoods. And this question of what they were even about was crazy. It always haunted me.” He shares an inquisitive politics with Gio Escobar, the Standing on the Corner co-founder he talks to about these things “all the time.” But where the SOTC art ensemble has long worn heavy-handed rhetoric on its sleeves—literally, vinyl sleeves—Nolan comes off more like someone stewing over difficult truths, less eager to shout his questions than let them marinate. Upon entering his apartment and scanning the bookshelf, he mentioned, with some prodding, that the most recent book he’d bought was The People’s Republic of Walmart, a 2019 text that links American corporations to socialist futures. “Sometimes I just wanna read theory to feel smart,” he said, a bit disingenuously, when I asked why that book in particular. “Do you feel smart?” I followed up. “Not really,” he answered.
“It is not that we have a singular agent that connects the struggle for all oppressed peoples against tyranny (or a new history putting them together), but rather a perhaps banal and widespread link between the people doing the tyranny.”
But he sure does sound smart. Part of what makes Extended PLAY 1 so off-putting, yet so alluring, is its knack for nestling sparks of virtuosity—and sometimes, scathing social commentary—in bizarre, unassuming packages. In a live recording of “The Use of Things” recently uploaded to the band’s YouTube channel, a hooded Nolan is bouncing around with a sizable semi-hollow guitar, blazing through complex jazz chords while rambling weird non-sequiturs. (“I’m Patti Smith,” he declares at one point, “… I do art.”) His vocal performance, which sits somewhere between cartoon villain and mob henchman, is more phonetic than linguistic, although in the rare moments where words win out over gibberish, reckonings with injustice peek through the cracks. Take “Jewel Theef,” the aforementioned opening track: while its far-out feel is largely owed to yelped nothings (“ACK!”; “lowlowlowlowlowlowlow!”; “Nononononlolololo!”), there’s also a looming sense of cynicism, something of a scoff at the funny fucked-up-ness of life. “How’s the weed?” he asks early on, like an out-of-breath comedian:
At the Halloween in Fallujah
They loot some Nubians then they take those rubies
These ain’t no jewel thief
No, they just collecting fees
It’s just the IMF, baby
PAY ME! PAY ME!
Nolan does vocals for Prophet Thaddeus out of utility: no one else volunteered, which meant that unless he claimed the mic, they’d be Temu Hella. While his inclinations mostly lie with motifs and melodies, it’s been something of a challenge for him to platform these razor-edged ideas—questions and critiques alike—in intentional, clear-eyed ways. Most times, he records original vocal takes in gibberish form, squealing alienish noises then assigning them English words post-hoc. The push to make those words meaningful is partly owed to his father. “I’ve always felt kind of meh about lyrics—I guess I view it more as an instrument. Like, what the fuck is he saying right now?” he said, gesturing towards the CD player, which was now blaring Minor Threat’s Complete Discography. “Some of my favorite songs, I have no idea what they’re saying. But also, my dad’s given me some shit about it. He’s like, You should take it more seriously. You get to make songs, and you’ve got all these opinions, so why don’t you just say one of those opinions in the songs? Use your voice, or whatever.”
It’s a prescient sentiment, but one he wouldn’t have much more time to mull over tonight. There were other, more pressing, things to vocalize support for. Things like the New York Yankees, whose game against the Minnesota Twins commenced just as his roommates began to trickle in from their respective jobs. Nolan’s New York is a storied one, spiritually embodied by its sports franchises: his favorite mass-market teams (the Yankees, the Brooklyn Nets, and the New York Giants) each share a city-wide liminality, stuck somewhere between olden glories and present-day pitfalls. Prophet Thaddeus isn’t named for the Biblical character, but the latter-day Brooklyn Nets role player Thaddeus Young, whose tenure threaded together two of the NBA’s most notorious failed super-rosters. The Giants haven’t hoisted a Lombardi trophy in over a decade, and the Yankees, the MLB’s most decorated organization, are currently clawing out of their longest-ever title drought. This evening, though, things seemed to be looking up. By the third inning, the men in pinstripes had thoroughly demoralized their offenders, sending the Bronx baseball cathedral into a frenzy, and Nolan’s apartment into a spirited, although slightly more muted, variant. “Hopes are high,” he said, following a stadium-rocking RBI single by Anthony Rizzo. “Hopes are high.”
Beneath all this, as with many facets of sports-as-business, is a long-churning tale of justice and injustice. The Bombers invoke a litany of bygone-era New York villains, Giulianis and Trumps and Steinbrenners who dogmatized their dollars and bullied their ways to permanence. (The Yankees’ payroll is consistently among the league’s highest; this year, its services are going towards a lineup peppered with Cy Young winners and former MVPs.) Nolan finds the social implications of sports interesting: it’s funny, for instance, that if the Diamondbacks didn’t win the World Series in 2001, Rudy Giuliani could well have been the 44th President of the United States. Sure, these rabbit-holes seem futile, especially if you aren’t subscribed to Secret Base. But it’s an absurd world, and it calls for absurd questions. It’s about exploring everything, after all—even the worst parts—and being able to laugh about it. The absurdity is a lot easier to deal with when you do.
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“I wanna just hang out once a week and work on songs.”
The official Prophet Thaddeus website is designed to resemble shitty old-school infomercials, the kinds with fast-talking voices, pop-up prices, and promises of Or your money back, guaranteed! Where the typical ticker tape might list boring disclaimers, theirs excerpts an essay written by Nolan last year. “It is not that we have a singular agent that connects the struggle for all oppressed peoples against tyranny (or a new history putting them together), but rather a perhaps banal and widespread link between the people doing the tyranny,” it reads, in all caps. “A common enemy, a defined pattern or parallel affixing conflict to conflict, coimhlint to صراع. From desert to rainy bogland, history is written by the winner… until now.” (Nolan declined to share the full essay.) The webpage was put together by Mikey Saunders, a freelance software engineer who’s done sites for the likes of Crumb, 10k, and AINT WET. “It has a very in-your-face, not apologizing for anything energy,” he said in an April phone call. The band, too. “Jack plays guitar for Standing on the Corner, and I kind of knew him as that,” he continued, pivoting to Prophet Thaddeus’s all-out sensibility. “But he was like Oh, I have this other band I’m working on. I saw them live, and I didn’t really know what to expect. But I was just blown away. It was the kind of show where you don’t feel like anyone’s looking at you. No one’s trying to be cool here.”
“Like, if someone were to say Hey, here’s a bunch of money to make more records—which we’re already doing—that would be cool.”
The weekend after I first met Nolan, Prophet Thaddeus were slated to play a rickety Lower East Side venue called Heaven Can Wait. There’s a big difference between booking shows as Standing on the Corner, and booking them as an independent three-piece. The SOTC art ensemble amassed a cult following while Nolan was still in college; often, he’d miss weeks’ worth of lectures on tour vans, balancing final assignments with opening for King Krule. The indie circuit is a lot less sexy. “It’s a racket, especially on the lower end of it,” he said. “With Standing on the Corner, you get money, you get a rider, you get free X, you get a green room. But for something like Prophet Thaddeus, you get one free drink, and then they give you whatever bullshit cut of the door price—it’s just a racket. They think they’re doing you a favor by letting you play… like, dude. I just brought 20 friends to come spend money at your bar.” It isn’t hard to deduce that the music makes it worth it. Nolan co-founded Prophet Thaddeus, years ago, as an avenue to more straightforward fun with less frills. He’s obsessed with the ritual of rehearsing, playing shows, then repeating the process ad nauseam; where SOTC’s iteration of this routine had always been “nebulous,” forging a new band fulfilled a simple wish: “I wanna just hang out once a week and work on songs.”
A few hours before the Heaven Can Wait gig, it was blazing hot in Brooklyn, and somehow even stuffier in the trio’s boxy, mega-cramped rehearsal space. Today’s practice took place in a shoddy, windowless structure in Gowanus—a liminal neighborhood, where the nearest Subway station is a 14 minute walk away, and the path to said station is peppered with a Tesla dealership, a deli that boasts “10% OFF FOR TESLA WORKERS,” and long, sparse blocks that make you yearn for shade. At about 4 PM, Nolan poked his head out of a covert, cobwebby door, drenched in sweat. He was wearing a drapey yellow short-sleeve, a pair of gym shorts, and weathered Adidas sneakers; you might have guessed that he was an amateur boxer. If you looked back at the two doors blockading the way in, you’d find warning signs plastered to their backs: “CLOSE THIS DOOR BEHIND YOU! MAKE SURE IT IS LOCKED!” “PLEASE LOCK THIS DOOR! DO NOT LEAVE IT OPEN!” The actual room sat at the apex of a long, pitch-black staircase. It looked like something out of American Psycho.
“Because then it wouldn’t be fun. You take it as serious as you can, while it’s fun.”
Prophet Thaddeus comprises Nolan, 28, co-founding bassist Théo Guillin, also 28, and drummer Jack McFeely, 30. They’ve known one another for a majority of their lives—they went to the same schools growing up, where they slipped in and out of one-off bands—but their banter is less frenetic than muted, only occasionally giving way to a light chuckle, or an inside joke. They’re far more eager to talk with their instruments. For music that sounds so freakish, so formless, it was disarming to see the group play so tightly: deadlocked into something precise, but leaving just enough room for their signature self-deprecation, this zany squall of cartoonish frenzy. Only now, the slapstick quality seemed less comical than critical. During the first song I saw them practice, which was about brand-new cars, Nolan stamped his feet like an angry child, squealing into the mic while wrangling his guitar like it was a loose animal. Few spare words lingered between the first selection and the final one; tiny as the room was, you could feel the music bouncing off the walls, off your body, as if pounding itself free. Categorically, it was all difficult to place a finger on—some moments felt jazzy, others like raw collegiate punk, others like mutant disco. But it was fast, it was hot, and it packed out a teeny cellar, already far too stuffed for its unlivable size. “Short and sweat!” Nolan mused. It was one of those moments where everyone lightly chuckled.
Prophet Thaddeus are puzzling, in part, because they’re seriously virtuosic, but also not extremely serious. “It’s not, like, a joke,” McFeely said after the rehearsal, trailing off. “But…” “—We’re not trying to win Grammys out here,” Guillin interjected, to approving laughter. McFeely: “I care about everything I play. I play the best that I can. But it’s not, like, super serious or anything.” Guillin: “Because then it wouldn’t be fun. You take it as serious as you can, while it’s fun.” Murmurs of assent; a brief flurry of cut-off sentences; awkward silence. “Yeah,” McFeely said. “I think that’s true.” History would agree. The middle-ground between fun and funding is well-documented terrain for similar acts—close-knit friends who have the sound, have the skill, and have the spirit. Everything, it seems, but the money. “It would be nice to not have to work shitty jobs,” Nolan added, a little sarcastically. “Like, if someone were to say Hey, here’s a bunch of money to make more records—which we’re already doing—that would be cool.” But it’s also a slippery slope. Prophet Thaddeus’s music straddles a loose line between punk and No Wave; interestingly enough, each of those subcultures have grown fey, historically, when they were given sums of cash, and melded into corporate property. As of now, the trio’s hijinks are largely financed by CD sales and day-jobs: McFeely works at a few venues, Guillin at a restaurant, and Nolan on the aforementioned on-call grind. A listen to their stuff feels like a listen into their lives—frenzied and laborious, but rewarding enough for the absurdity not to matter, let alone be a defect. “One thing about Prophet Thaddeus—they’re real rock-stars,” Giles said, over Zoom. “They really are what they say they are. They rock the fuck out. They party, they drink, they wake up at 2 PM, they write masterpiece albums in an hour. That’s what they’re like.”
“[There’s] a way people talk when they’re angry, or when they’re drunk, or when they’re passionate, or something. There’s no other way to sing, to me.”
Three hours after rehearsal, Nolan was skulking across Avenue A with a guitar case strapped to his back, and he seemed mellow—far calmer, and less disheveled, than the hoarse henchman who commanded the practice room. He could have just stumbled out of a portal. The bouncer, a bespectacled late-20s-looking man, was annoyed to learn that he hadn’t sent any names for the guest-list, even though he obviously had guests. (Two of them, myself and a friend, had spent the past few minutes fumbling for proof.) “Oh, shit,” he said, racking his brain for potential candidates. He started listing acquaintances, eyes up as if searching for them, and the doorman stood there, scribbling. It was strange to imagine someone so dead-focused on music that crafting a guest-list—the knee-jerk first step, for many—was an afterthought.
Inside, Nolan strutted over to a desk close to the bar, working out preferences with a friendly man in business-casual. He was the first of the trio to arrive; McFeely and Guillin would make their entrances within the hour, sans a sound-check. It wasn’t like they’d be needing one, anyway: “It’s not fun if you’re not raw-dogging it,” Nolan mused into my tape recorder, barely audible above the blaring PA system. By then, foot traffic had been billowing, but not by much—everyone seemed to know one another, and if you closed your eyes, the chirpy murmur of shout-speak might have sounded like a fledgling dorm-room party. Venue considered, it could have looked like one, too. Should you be in a walking mood, Heaven Can Wait bookends a 20-minute pilgrimage from the 8th Avenue L Train Station, where shit-stained sidewalks host snazzy skater types, and everyone above the age of 30 seems to be tucked away in a restaurant. Walk through its well-hidden front door, and the ragtag let’s-have-fun energy congeals: disco balls, deep-blue LEDs, cramped hallway, crowded bar, multiple fire hazards. That night, there were two candle-lit booths bordering the backstage section, this strange backrooms-y space comprising a sparse lobby and three unsuspecting doorways. While various members of various bands trickled in and out, Nolan was holding court somewhere in the middle, orbiting the stage as if orbiting an altar.
By showtime, things moved fairly quickly. This wasn’t Brooklyn Steel, nor were there any tour buses parked outside—more often than not, it felt like something of an open-mic event, splotchy-sounding songs punctuated by the hollers of friends and invitees. The two acts that preceded Prophet Thaddeus—Slowtoe and Rat Palace, both upstart indie bands—offered passionate samplers of young discographies: spaced-out ballads that comprised sprawling pedalboards, lighting hijinks, laborious setups, and just-as-laborious breakdowns. Which made it all the more strange to see Nolan and co., billed second-to-last, stagger on-stage at about 9, toting nothing but their instruments and a single BOSS TU-3 (Chromatic Tuner). When the PA music cut out, all festive energy gave way to heavy awkwardness, as if the low-stakes hallway gig had suddenly morphed into an amateur comedy show. “Hello, hello, thank you. Thank you all. Uh, we are Prophet Thaddeus,” Nolan said into the microphone, battling chatter like a substitute teacher. “We have a bag here. It’s got CDs in it. So I’ll just be walking around with this paper bag. It’s fifteen bucks, exact cash, or you can Venmo. If you like it, you can buy it, and just support the… support us. Thank you.”
“People thought I was a pothead. I was just very exhausted. One time, one of my high school teachers called home, like I hate your son, he’s doing drugs. Not true… Your class is boring, it’s too early, and I’m tired.”
I’m not sure if they do this anymore, but when I was in summer camp, there came a day when I was ushered into a pitch-black room upstairs, and a UPS-sponsored video spewed graphic (but educational!) footage of car crashes. In this video, which I think was a state-wide attempt at preemptive Driver’s Ed, there was a lengthy section dedicated to the importance of seatbelt-wearing: You are the bullet, a stern voice would say, and a test dummy would go flying through a vehicle, altering every chair, cushion, and body in its path of destruction. For 35 minutes, Nolan was the bullet. He’d pinball from spot to spot as if possessed, strangle his guitar, accidentally kick his cable out of his pedal, jam it back into place, leap at Guillin, leap at McFeely, do a weird jig, leap some more, lunge towards the microphone, rasp at it, finally stop for long enough to not be a blur, then mutter “Thank you.” Part of me wondered how, if at all, this could possibly be accurately recorded on tape and sold as a packaged good. No effects also meant no escape: from harsh pluckings, from harsh clankings, from harsh realities. Every sound was a blunt object; every syllable was coming to get you. Back at his apartment weeks prior, Nolan had mentioned “a way people talk when they’re angry, or when they’re drunk, or when they’re passionate, or something. There’s no other way to sing, to me.” Jutting from the band’s freakish comedy were his urgent, vein-popping commands—little fragments of phrases, like “It’s too late,” or “Do or die,” or “Nothing is left,” staring out from heaps of scuzz, daring you to make eye contact. It was hard not to feel either energized or slightly scared.
By the time they walked off, and the headliners stumbled through their first selections—complete with trippy lighting hijinks, intricate effects gauntlets, and a provocateur enlisted to stir the crowd—I was still scrambling to make sense of what had just happened, let alone what any of it meant. Post-show, I couldn’t figure out a way to ask anything deep—Jack, sir, what exactly did you mean by the exaggerated jig you did during that one “birthday” song at approximately 9:53 PM?—so I muttered an awkward question about what Nolan’s plans were. He said the band was likely headed to a bar in Ridgewood for celebratory drinks. Late-night LIRR schedules meant I wouldn’t be joining them, but for some of the ride home, I wondered what time they’d be going to sleep—if at all—and what times their respective jobs started.
🌎🌎🌎
“I really liked it, but I couldn’t really understand what you were saying! I love that one. Like, what are you gonna do, sign me up for elocution classes?”
When Nolan was in middle school, he spent two seasons batting ninth on the Brooklyn Bulldogs, a long-lived travel baseball organization catering to local athletes aged 8 to 14. He earned a “gold glove” award for his efforts in center field, though he sometimes wonders whether it was a pity trophy—the store-bought peace offering youth coaches fling at their worst players’ feet, with fake smiles and “here, damn” handshakes. He was 12 when he stopped playing, which is great in retrospect, given that major-league aspirations are for maniacs who love waking up at 5 AM to do military squats. Nolan didn’t enjoy doing military squats, and he enjoyed waking up early much less. To this day, he’s devout in his belief that no groggy child should be silencing an alarm clock at 7 AM. “It’s an institutional problem,” he said, matter-of-factly, one Tuesday evening in July. It was getting dark in Park Slope, and he was tucked away in the rearmost booth of a dreary bar, caked in drywall residue. Behind him was his guitar case; before him were two beer bottles, one empty and the other halfway there. “People thought I was a pothead. I was just very exhausted. One time, one of my high school teachers called home, like I hate your son, he’s doing drugs. Not true… Your class is boring, it’s too early, and I’m tired.”
Originally, our plan had been to catch up over a movie at the Delancey Street Regal Theater. Before we could, Nolan was penciled in for a long-term demolition job—lots of breaking shit, not much thinking. A real-life rage room you get paid for: Sounds like a fucking blast! Not exactly. Unlike a rage room, a demolition job means waking up, taking the subway, doing eight or so hours of intense physical labor, crashing at your parents’ house because the job site is too far from your apartment, maybe going to a bar, using your remaining energy to plop into bed, then doing it over and over for about a month. If you watch the sci-fi series Severance, like Nolan tells me he does, you might recognize life as a dogfight between rest and labor, bed and workplace. There’s a perpetual running-away inherent to both states; the more you ping-pong between them, the more you yearn for a middle, otherwise known as a hobby. The first time Nolan dabbled in his longtime middle-of-choice, he was 10 years old, and his aunt had re-gifted him a shitty acoustic guitar ignored by uninterested cousins. Come middle school, he attended M.S. 51 William Alexander, a few blocks down from the demolition site in Park Slope. As his short-lived athletic career waned, a fledgling musical one reared its head; more and more often, he flocked to local concerts with friends, bookending dreadful school days with long, loud nights.
“To document it is to kill it. But someone’s gotta document it.”
The first few times he started playing shows, they were fairly easy to snag—a godsend, given that his earliest bands “fucking sucked ass.” Life doesn’t abide by Lemonade Mouth’s rules, which means that a group of upstart 13 year-olds is less likely to sell out stadiums than DM shitty venues, mess up chords, buy new pedals, stay out late, then break up. “It’s so much more fun to start a band than to have a band,” he mused, echoing a point he’d made at his apartment weeks prior. “We sucked. Your friends are always gonna be nice to you, give you a critique in a compliment. I really liked it, but I couldn’t really understand what you were saying! I love that one. Like, what are you gonna do, sign me up for elocution classes?” Chances are, he wouldn’t have gone, anyway. Classes at-large appealed less to him by high school, while musically, elocution wasn’t such a big priority, either. Of all the gigs he attended, his favorites were the ones that made more shockwaves than sense: gibberish by linguistic standards, gospel by spiritual ones. You don’t have to understand good frequencies to feel them.
Luckily for Nolan, he wasn’t the only young Brooklynite who recognized this. He met McFeely in middle school and Guillin in high school; long before they’d experiment with songs of their own, they shared a proclivity for frenzied acts like Fiasco, the fabled New York trio that blurred hardcore punk with high-energy math rock. Prophet Thaddeus’s present lineup goes as far back as 2016, when original drummer Dexter Cohen moved to California—quite the distance from May 16, 2023, their debut EP’s long-awaited release date. “It almost feels bad to say we’re not a new band, since people are so obsessed with ‘new’ and ‘recent,’” Nolan said, between sips of a Miller High Life. “We’ve been a band for a while.” Rock doesn’t require résumés, though if you were to ask Nolan and co. about the gap in theirs, two general answers might suffice. Transitioning between Cohen and McFeely meant figuring out a new sound—a long-term trial-and-error project, with prerequisites in patience, persistence and practice. (Simple enough, until you factor in college.) Then again, it wasn’t like documentation was ever much of a priority in the first place. Capturing an organic musical movement on tape is like catching lightning in a bottle—preservationist, but at the cost of whatever made it electric in the first place. “To document it is to kill it,” Nolan said, picking his words carefully. “But someone’s gotta document it.”
“You’re the biggest band in the world, and you fucking suck. Talk about effects pedals. It’s just vibes. Sure, they were playing in giant stadiums, and that’s how they filled out those stadiums: big, ambient sound. I guess that’s almost rock n’ roll. But that’s not fucking rock n’ roll.”
Among those entrusted to document Extended PLAY 1 was Gio Escobar, Nolan’s Standing on the Corner bandmate and friend since middle school. Escobar, who’s credited on the project as Shamel Cee My$tery, witnessed much of Prophet Thaddeus’s germination firsthand—enough of it, at least, to recognize a necessary balance between logging their lightning and sustaining its strike. “As a producer, I was allowed a lot of freedom to theorize upon the music, to suggest that perhaps a song would convey a particular thing we sought to achieve if the guitar was altered to a different tuning, or if each member of the trio began a beat later than intended, or if a guitar was played with a screwdriver,” he told Sammy’s World over email. “This resulted in many different takes from which we chose. What I like about Prophet Thaddeus’ methodology to “music” is that the recorded material is conceptually deemphasized. What matters is the act of performance making these compositions not only ever-changing, but also unconcerned with their finished form and hence their commodification.”
At the bar, Nolan was critical of performers who shirk raw-energy truths for cut-and-dried re-hashings. “There are certain bands I’ve seen play live that consider themselves rock, or post-punk, and you can tell [the music] is made in a bedroom with programmed drums,” he said. “You’ll see them play with a backing track, and maybe they’ll have a guitarist. But then they’ll just rely heavily on the track. So they sound just like the fucking tape. I’m sorry… if I wanted to listen to your Spotify, I would just do that. I paid 15 dollars and came all the way to this venue—you can’t come up with something unique and original that’s never happened before?” He was particularly disapproving of U2, the Irish arena-rock band that rode delay and reverb into global megastardom: “You’re the biggest band in the world, and you fucking suck. Talk about effects pedals. It’s just vibes. Sure, they were playing in giant stadiums, and that’s how they filled out those stadiums: big, ambient sound. I guess that’s almost rock n’ roll. But that’s not fucking rock n’ roll.”
Much of Nolan’s adult life is dedicated to rock n’ roll, and in some sense, the parts that aren’t both complicate and inform the parts that are. Though his father and grandfather are both long-tenured union members, he only grew heavily cognizant of labor issues in high school, “when you start getting politicized.” For private-sector industries like construction, freedom from government regulation often amounts to conditional disparities, wage gaps, and a glaring need for organization—or, at the very least, solidarity—among the exploited. Except, ninety-nine percent of the time, on-site projects are rigidly split between union labor and non-union labor: great news for cash-hungry companies, but not-so-great news for the contractors they largely pit against one another. “My dad raised me to be like, Alright, if there’s a strike, you support the striking workers,” he said. “That was just planted in my brain. We’re the least union-friendly country in the global north. We’ve been on that foot since Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. We should support unions. That’s basic. It’s not revolutionary to be pro-union. It’s common sense.”
As of now, Nolan is an independent contractor—more opportunities to fund musical aspirations, though at the cost of being a scab. Some time ago, he took a test to gain membership in the BAC Local 7, which would have officially etched his place in a lineage of unionized Nolan-family men. Exam aside, if there existed any barrier for entry, it was fairly low. He wasn’t gung-ho about the work, but he had a familiar surname and a hole in his pocket: shoo-in prerequisites for good-natured nepotist string-pulling. In the weeks before he took the test, freelance work had drastically dried out. “I was so broke—I was like, Dad… I think I might join the union,” he recalled. “My grandpa hated the idea that I would sacrifice…” He cut himself off mid-sentence, then zoomed out to paint a broader picture. “I’m the only musician in my family, so it was like, Do what you want. We came to America so you could fucking go to school… pursue interests… not just be a fucking construction worker like me. That was a strong current in my family. And I agree. I don’t want to be a construction worker.”
“Organize or organ done” (Done, with a long “O,” as in “donate.”)
Union membership means more stable money. It also means more commitment: going to school, doing an apprenticeship, dedicating yourself to things other than hobbies—like music—for longer. It was his if he wanted it. “The guy I was taking the test with, his last name was Nolan,” he said, of exam day. “And I said, My father and my grandfather both worked marble in this union. I’m telling him this after I handed him my awful, failed test. And mind you, every other person there is a person of color. There was one woman there who I knew was taking it for the second time.
“That gives me the fucking ick,” he continued. “Because I know that just by virtue of me being a legacy Irish-American, they’re gonna put me in, even if I’m stupid, and I suck, and I’m lazy. So part of me is like: leave it for the people who are fighting for it, and want to be in that fucking union, and are trying to build themselves that security. It is a privilege to be in a union. They deserve it.”
Non-unionized freelancing is a mixed bag—one day, you’ll feel your first ray of Ridgewood sunlight at 5:30 PM, and the next day, you might find yourself in Park Slope, busting through drywall until dusk. Don’t like those options? Fret not, because there are other days, too: days where you get to make frenetic songs, rehearse them, play them over and over again, then perhaps, just perhaps, put them on tape. (“Creative Mysteries Arts will be releasing Prophet Thaddeus’ upcoming full length debut,” Escobar confirmed over email. “Another noteworthy item, “ThadLIBS”, PT’s first book publication—a MADLib style phrasal template word game featuring Prophet Thaddeus’ lyrics—will be available to the market later this year as well.”) Nolan prefers the latter category of days. And maybe, by some metric, what makes his output potent is that he’s often using one type of day to reckon with the other. Midway through their set at Heaven Can Wait, Prophet Thaddeus roared through a percussive stomper about greedy bosses and the need to join forces against their tyranny. Sometimes, it was hard to hear what Nolan was saying over McFeely’s drums—what are you gonna do, sign him up for elocution classes?—but every now and then, the band would sputter into a breakdown, and he’d sermonize through the seconds-long silences bookending his plucks. “Do or die,” he deadpanned at one point, somewhere between cartoonish arch-nemesis and frenzied prophet. “Organize or organ done.” (Done, with a long “O,” as in “donate.”) It was funny, in the slapstick way a lot of Prophet Thaddeus’s music is. And when the laughter faded, all that lingered was the cold, hard truth.
