A Yamaha P45 digital piano, a Boss HM-2, a Digitech Death Metal pedal, and drums. That’s the whole band. Painist is a one-person project built on a premise most people in extreme music would dismiss on sight: crust punk and post-black metal with no guitars, no bass, and no real reason it should hold together. The debut EP “Too Many Clunkers,” out now, is four tracks of distorted piano hammered under d-beat tempos โ and it sounds less like a gimmick than you’d expect.
The person behind it came up through hardcore, crust, and metal bands as a guitarist and vocalist. Years of that, and nothing clicking the way it should. “I wasn’t hitting the level of originality or visibility I was looking for,” they explain. “Then, almost by accident, I had an epiphany: why not bridge two of my passions that aren’t supposed to coexist?” The piano was actually their first instrument. The distortion came later, once they started running it through the HM-2 and the Digitech Death Metal โ a pedal they admit is controversial but defend if you EQ it right.
There was also a practical angle. “Trying to coordinate a band’s rehearsal schedule is harder than the last level of Tetris.”
The EP leans into neocrust as its backbone, but moves through doom, stenchcore, and post-black metal across its short runtime. Tracks like “Crustaccato” and “Body Sonata” wear their intentions in their titles โ classical naming conventions dragged through mud and feedback. “Mental Health รtude” and “The Implicit Coda” do the same. The whole thing runs just under ten minutes.
Before any of this took shape, there were months spent with Swans, Daughters, and live footage of Einstรผrzende Neubauten. “Exploring the noise genre was something pending for me,” Painist says, “and it definitely helped blur the limits of what I thought was possible.” That influence sits underneath the record โ not as direct sonic reference, but as permission to treat instruments as something other than what they were built for.
The artwork plays off the same idea. The outline of piano keys is split into quadrants, each one showing a different image of failure โ social, human, systemic. It connects to the title: a “clunker” is both a wrong note hit during a performance and a broader kind of collapse. That double meaning runs through the whole project.
Painist is careful not to set it as provocation. “I have respect for the piano and for crust/post-black metal. I just wanted to show that there’s still room for creativity in rock. Too many bands are doing the exact same thing.” They’d actually stopped playing music entirely for a stretch, waiting until there was something worth contributing. “I had stopped playing until I felt I could contribute something new to the extreme scene, which sadly seems to be losing the war against trap and reggaeton globally.”
Geography plays into it too. Time spent in the Berlin and London underground scenes – places where odd ideas tend to get a longer leash โ sits in contrast to the Argentine scene back home, described as far more rigid. “If you do hardcore, you do hardcore. If you do metal, you do metal. There’s little room for the strange.” Had the project started with live shows rather than a recording, the reaction might have been different. “If bands like Swans or Daughters started here, they’d be playing for five people or watching the crowd walk out.”
Next steps are already forming. A full-length is on the table, and there’s talk of folding in post-punk and noise rock elements alongside the crust foundation. The piano, it turns out, doesn’t just substitute for the guitar โ it opens different doors. Whether those doors lead somewhere lasting is still an open question, but “Too Many Clunkers” at least proves the instrument can take the punishment.
Stream “Too Many Clunkers” on Bandcamp.
