The Bad Penny (beta)

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Last night, The Bad Penny had the distinct pleasure of catching up with one-half of Atlanta’s blackened post-death metal band Malevich: drummer/vocalist Sasha Schilbrack-Cole and guitarist Josh McIntyre. We talked a bit about Under a Gilded Sun, their new album, which hit the streets and the Interwebs late last month. But the bulk of our conversation revolved around how Authoritarian America is impacting musicians, as we had planned for the interview to be part of The Bad Penny‘s ongoing series On Tyranny.

Little did we know that we’d be speaking to two individuals whose intellectual capacity is as profound as their crushingly righteous music. Enjoy perhaps the best installment yet in The Bad Penny‘s On Tyranny series by watching the entire video above or on YouTube, or reading an abridged version of the conversation after the jump.

OK, so hey, guys, we’re here for another installment of the On Tyranny series that is being conducted and carried out by The Bad Penny, which is me, Kurt Orzeck, a rock journalist. We have with us today a very special group to talk about the topics of tyranny and fascism and authoritarianism, Malevich. These guys are thoroughly, thoroughly exciting … I always feel awkward describing a band in front of them.

Schilbrack-Cole: I love hearing how different people describe us. It’s fun. It’s like we have kind of a running genre joke that we just like we’ve strung more and more genres onto it. So it’s always fun for us to hear other people describe it.

McIntyre: I think you were about to say, “I’m going to let you define your band.” But we don’t like doing it. 

I see. You don’t want to box yourself in, you want other people to do it for you, so you can criticize them for boxing you in.

McIntyre: Yeah, exactly.

I’d maybe classify you as a sort of post-blackened power-screamo glam-rock disco funk band. All right, can you guys introduce yourselves?

Schilbrack-Cole: My name is Sasha Schilbrack-Cole. I play drums and sing in Malevich, and I do most of our visual art.

Which is beautiful, by the way.

Schilbrack-Cole: Thank you.

McIntyre: I play guitar and also write most of the lyrics, which Sasha edits because he writes most of the vocal parts.

Malevich was formed about nine years ago, is that right?

Schilbrack-Cole: Yeah, that’s crazy. Almost a decade.

Before we start on the topic [of tyranny], are you surprised by how popular some of the strains of your sound have become over the years? 

McIntyre: The whole blackened hardcore/screamo thing … it’s still a niche, but it was less common when we first started.

Schilbrack-Cole: We were kind of going in that direction. We’ve purposely kind of pulled back from it, which I think is why the new album sounds different from the previous stuff. … We have a lot of friends that play that stuff, but we want to stick out. So it’s a pretty conscious decision to have a different sound this time around.

McIntyre: Also, we get bored. We want to explore different things, different possibilities. We just write music that we appreciate.

Your new album is called Under a Gilded Sun and just came out about a month ago. I’ve had a good chance to listen to it and am hooked. Might be some top ten potential there. But really, it’s a pleasure to speak with you. And thank you for making the time.

Schilbrack-Cole: Absolutely. 

I want to start by asking … you have changed your sound quite a bit. Do you feel like you’ve changed your message at the same time, or no?

Schilbrack-Cole: Not really.

McIntyre: The core aspects of it were there, but the main difference, I would say, is that the very first stuff we did in 2016, Only the Flies, we had a different vocalist [Joseph Turner], who only did vocals.

Schilbrack-Cole: I wrote half of the lyrics on “Only the Flies.” So some of that was based on his personal life.

I’ve taken more of an editing role as I go to write vocals. Our politics are in a similar place and our intention with how we want to approach writing lyrics is coming from a similar place. But we all have very different voices.

And like the ways in which we express things has had kind of a different layer to it, depending on who is taking that role, and then filtered through someone else editing it. There’s always been kind of a collaborative approach to lyric writing with one person being like the main person who pushes like the bulk of a single song.

Every core thing is still there. Like, we’ve always wanted to be a politically aware band. I think that, as Josh has taken on more lyrics, he knows the most political theory and is the most well-read of all of us.

By the by, I should mention that the goal of this On Tyranny series is to spotlight how musicians are being affected by the authoritarian takeover of the United States and how it’s affecting their lives. This past week, a punk band that I invited to participate said, “Musicians don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk about politics.” And I couldn’t disagree more. We’re far past the point where this is even a political conversation. We’re in an existential crisis in this country. Human rights and free speech are at risk, for chrissakes. I want to discuss how your band is so cerebral and that you started tackling the concept of fascism pretty early on in your music. What provoked that?

McIntyre: The obvious answer is that we started in 2016, and that election is what started this new era of American politics. But even before then, we’ve been leftists that wanted to have some kind of way to express that. Everything that started happening in 2016 and the country/world that we live in now.

Schilbrack-Cole: For us and our perspective on the place that we’ve reached as a country, this has been a slow swell of far-right movements and a lack of empathy that Americans have towards the rest of the world and a very, you know, exploitative, unfair relationship that we have with so much of the world and that that’s kind of been the backbone for the rise of contemporary politics and contemporary capitalism. And so it’s not so much that this is a new thing, you know, it’s just gotten to the point that the world that we live in is built on inequality, and it’s coming to its zenith.

And then in conjunction with that, there’s climate change and there’s all of these other exacerbating factors that are forcing people to migrate more and pushing more intense development of xenophobia. Yeah, xenophobia, but also just like heavy pushes towards more extractive ways of living to keep afloat that, you know, American lifestyle. So I think that we are living through something that’s unprecedented.

On the one hand, it does seem like everything’s moving so fast, which it is objectively, I suppose. But if you’ve been paying attention to the news since 2016, you can see that this has been incremental. It kind of speaks to who you are as a news consumer or just somebody who pays attention to what’s going on. I’m sure you’ve had people in your life tell you, when you get really frustrated about things, “Don’t watch so much news,” or “Put your blinders on.” Well, those are the people who are really shocked right now.

McIntyre: This did not come out of nowhere. I mean, we grew up with Bush and the Iraq war and then Obama’s election when we were in high school. That really started the Tea Party movement. And it has grown into what we’re dealing with now. One thing I come back to a lot in thinking about the contemporary American political space is that I felt like a lot of the liberal, middle-of-the-road people who I agree with on a lot of things in terms of like their emotional relationship to what they want out of a better world haven’t been willing to ask enough of the politicians on their side of the aisle. 

There’s this kind of acceptance of like, “Well, if my guy does it, then it’s not as bad.” Coming out of the Bush era, I think Obama was … I mean, I was a teenager at that time. I was just starting to vote. And I was very excited by the opportunity that Obama presented. But more and more, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve felt like the Democrats have been building the guns to pass them off to the Republicans when they take power and further tighten up the belt on our civil liberties. And as people point out, Obama deported more people than Trump has so far. But people like to ignore that. 

Schilbrack-Cole: And, you know, Obama was the first president to drone-strike an American citizen. But setting up the precedent for a lot of what we’re seeing now, with the rolling out of real Gestapo-type tactics … 

Has Authoritarian America shifted your focus on your music or had any sort of impact upon the subject matter you want to deal with? 

Schilbrack-Cole: I think that probably the biggest single thing, if you can call it a single thing, has been the genocide in Palestine. There’s an ongoing genocide done with our dollars and opening up your phone every day and just seeing more and more mutilated children. Reckoning with that as an American is probably the single thing that’s colored this album more than anything else — the sense of rage and powerlessness and guilt. 

But also, the amazing way in which Palestinians are still able to go on and go on living and keep fighting for their homeland … a few months ago, I saw a video of — I think it was during the first ceasefire — a big ceremonial dinner that was being had. They had set up all these tables [with] rubble on every side. People were coming out to have dinner, and just that sense of still being able to find a community despite that total destruction and fear and hopelessness … I think that, if anything, has been the biggest impact on the lyrics and the impact on us thinking about relating to this record, and what we wanted to say with this record. 

Does that mean that you feel like there’s a degree of hope in the record?

McIntyre: If there’s a theme of the record, for me personally, it’s the constant oscillation between seeing this devastation but also holding on to the possibility of us basically rebuilding society into something that’s a little bit more humane. I mean, I understand a lot like anthropologists — David Graeber is a favorite of mine — and people that study different societies have shown objectively that different types of societies are possible.

States are not human nature. They’re all human inventions. And it’s the oscillation between what you can do as an individual — because we are, for the most part, still products of our social environments, with our ideology, religion, et cetera — but collectively, all kinds of different things are possible. The issue is, how do you get people to collectively move toward a certain direction? And I think that’s the biggest issue not just right now but in all human history.

It sort of speaks to a lack of imagination in our culture now, right?

McIntyre: Right. Capitalist realism is a real thing where people cannot imagine anything beyond capitalism. Again, they’re taught that this is human nature. People need to be controlled and they don’t realize, especially Americans, that those are very, very authoritarian trains of thought.

Schilbrack-Cole: Who was the guy that wrote that we’re at the end of history?

McIntyre: Francis Fukuyama. It’s the concept that we have reached this point where society has been figured out and there’s no new things to do, there’s no new ways to be, and that liberal capitalist hegemonic idea that there’s no other option became the dominant narrative of the ruling class. And most of us were convinced of it, you know, and fully bought into that idea that we shouldn’t have an imagination for a different future.

We shouldn’t think that just because we don’t have an answer for what it is right now to solve this problem, that there is not an answer that we can find or a way to build a society that’s better. And that was really successful, I think, in creating a generation of a lot of nihilism — which ironically, even the author of that has said, “Oh, I was wrong.” Well, there you go.

During the Clinton/Bush/Obama era, you didn’t feel capitalism as “dominance” but rather as the best mode of economy, politics, etc. Everyone is the most free that could possibly be. And then the last like 10 years plus, people are really … the cost of housing and food, et cetera, increasing faster than wages. But people can’t agree on why it’s not working out. Corporatism is our government. Corporatism is the larger scale of everything from center-liberal to far-right extremists. That is all a corporate ideology.  The larger narrative is a fight against corporatism.

What are your biggest fears about how authoritarianism is going to damage you as artists?

Schilbrack-Cole: My main fear is — and this may or may not happen — but if we tour internationally, and if these guys at border patrol start bringing up people’s social media or whatever … at that point you have fewer rights. Say there was a military deployment to Atlanta, and we have to go out and hit the streets, and we get arrested and then we’re branded as Antifa terrorists, and we can’t get into Canada or go to Europe or anything. But at the same time, that is incredibly selfish of us [to think that way,] because, again, Palestinians are being shot at every single day. 

At the same time, though — at least domestically; it’s different when you’re traveling internationally — but the DIY punk movement is very leftist and very supportive of these kinds of things. So there is the backbone of that culture there. And yet some effect on our ability to travel internationally has already happened from being outspoken.

We’ve been a part of a few different compilations raising money for Palestine, and that made some people uncomfortable in Germany when we were trying to tour Europe. So we had a string of shows canceled for some of our activism. [It’s] not that big of a deal, and it kind of rolled off our backs. We would do it again, take any chance we can to raise money for a good cause or speak up for a good cause.

Check out Malevich’s Bandcamp page for more info about the band, and to buy their music and merch.

Go here for The Bad Penny‘s On Tyranny hub.

This entry was posted on 09/29/2025 at 5:56 am and is filed under Features, Interviews, On Tyranny, On Tyranny, Videos with tags authoritarianism, Donald Trump, fascism, MAGA, Malevich, On Tyranny, Palestine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.