I didn’t ask why Labels wanted to meet in the food court of Northeast Mall for this interview until after I showed up, but in its aftermath, I thought a lot about the setting’s steady flow of sensory noise. The ambient conversations and foot traffic reverberating off the ceiling; the insistent, enthusiastic glare of the food-court tenants’ backlit signs; the olfactory tangle of a dozen international cuisines — the sum of all that is highly overstimulating, but it’s sort of a time-release sensory overload, the kind you think about later and pick out details piece-by-piece like burrs from a sock. Labels’ blend of hardcore punk and garage-rock psychedelia hits like this — in the moment, its barrage on your brain doesn’t feel overwhelming. It’s only later, when you pick out this guitar lick, or that drum fill, or the repetition of a particular hook that feels genuinely galvanizing, that your brain sits up and says, What the fuck was that?
Labels, formed by identical twin brothers Braden (vocals/guitar) and Taylor Burgan (drums) in 2019 when they were still in high school, recently released their third album. Called White Hot and self-produced like their previous releases (2022’s Brain Fragments and 2024’s Moral Laws), the album is the first to feature a finally solidified lineup, after years of trying to find both a regular bassist and a singer who shared the brothers’ drive to make the band a top priority. Now, with frontman Tyler Waller and bassist/backing vocalist Matt Frandsen on board, Labels are roaring with all engines lit.
Waller, who was once part of a rap group called Mob Mentality, met the Burgan brothers while they all worked together at a huge grocery store chain — he helped the band get their very first show. Frandsen, who plays guitar in Denton-based psych-rock band Divine Calypso, got to know them from playing shows together, and he was stoked to join on bass when that spot opened up. Seeing them off-stage, at a mall, beneath the triangulated smells of Sbarro, K-Dog, and Master Wok, it was obvious to me that the Burgans and Waller and Frandsen have quickly tuned into that musical telepathy common to really great bands. But they talk over the phone a lot, too, and this also feels central to the fire scorching through White Hot’s 10 tracks.
“We talk on the phone all day long,” Braden said. “We have our earbuds in, and we have long hair, so it looks like we’re just walking around work talking to ourselves.”
“People be like, ‘Are they talking to each other?’ ” Taylor added.
“They’re also talking to me, though,” said Waller, who drives a delivery truck for work, and he said the three of them and Frandsen pretty much bounce ideas off one another all day long in between stocking shelves and dropping off packages, working out ideas for song arrangements and brainstorming places to play. That constant communication is key to a shared goal: Making music is what the dudes in Labels want to do.
White Hot came to be after a studio session with engineer Joe Tacke at his Cloudland Recordings on the Near Southside. While in the studio, their former bassist allegedly decided to alter some arrangements on the fly, which, given the finite time their limited budget allowed, was counterproductive to finishing the tracks as the musicians had written and practiced them.
Art by Taylor Commander
While the band liked the experience overall and while one track from the session with Tacke — “Silver Serpent Tongue” — made it onto the final album, they ended up doing everything at home like before.
“The studio is fun,” Waller said, “but you’re just there on the clock.”
“Yeah, and that was also kind of stressful,” Taylor added. “We got to do as much as we can in one day, but it is a good experience on how it works. I want to do it again.”
A DIY approach is kind of Labels’ aesthetic, as much as the sudden time-signature left-turns and the compressed fuzz on the guitar leads. But even if their approach to recording remains the same, their sound has evolved from Moral Laws. Of that album’s lyrics, Braden told me, “We’re nice people. We just want to promote the positive, y’know?” And while they remain nice people, the world has wormed its way into Labels’ lyrics this time around. It’s less vibey, more angsty — Waller’s shouted vocals hit all over the spectrum of rage. Sometimes he sounds at his wit’s end, like a person trying to get answers in a maze of passed-off calls and interminable hold times. Other times, he sounds like a person who’s about to throw a brick — maybe metaphorical, more likely not — at an oppressive entity.
“Punk is my shit,” Waller said. “The last album had lots of punk it in it, but this album kind of goes harder. … When we started writing the lyrics, the songs got a little bit more political than we thought when they started to come together.”
Frandsen, who came aboard after they elected to make the record at home, said he joined “at the perfect time because I’m uber-political, so they kind of started working on this album that [wasn’t specifically a political album] but had a lot of political themes.”
I recalled that he made some pointedly political remarks at a show at the Boiled Owl Tavern the previous Saturday, and we all chatted in a shake-my-damn-head sort of way about what Frandsen described as America’s “descent into fascism” and “just the absolute insanity” of our government.
“And then Trump got elected,” he continued, “and it was like, ‘OK, perfect. Now we really have something to write about.’ ”
“I mean, we have a song called ‘Devastation of Our America,’ ” Braden said, “so [our political beliefs] are just pretty obvious in that.”
At that show at the Owl, the band played White Hot start to finish, and what I noticed is that these new songs, through the virtues of their subject matter and the brain-sizzling power of their riffs, kind of … I dunno … it’s like they’re letting the band go bigger, be louder, play faster. Labels has always put on a good show, but White Hot has dialed their live-band intensity into explosive territory.
They’ve booked their first multi-city Texas tour for August, joining Divine Calypso and Tacke’s band, Mean Motor Scooter, on a run from Fort Worth to Austin and San Antonio. Labels also have created what Braden calls a “DIY record label-type thing called Twin Reverse” that’s mostly a social media channel to promote Labels and other bands they like and share the stage with. No matter where they play (they’re back at the Owl on Sat, May 24), White Hot is sure to leave burn marks everywhere its songs land. Maybe one day those songs will float out of a food court’s PA, but until then, the band wants to reach every pair of ears they can, one blistering performance after another.
Labels
8pm Sat, May 24, w/Moon Owl’s Mages and Sun Valley Scarlet at the Boiled Owl Tavern, 909 W Magnolia Av, Fort Worth. Free. 21+ . 817-920-9616.
Joe Bruno
