When a Truck Hits a Singing Cat

There’s a moment in most Sleigh Bells songs where the noise crosses a threshold and stops feeling like music—starts feeling like a structural problem, like something in the room is about to give. The guitars are processed into weapons. The beats stack on each other with no consideration for your ears’ wellbeing. And then Alexis Krauss opens her mouth and the whole catastrophe becomes, against all physical logic, a pop song.

Derek Miller spent years in Poison the Well, a post-hardcore outfit with the kind of sonic brutality that usually ends careers rather than launching new ones. Alexis Krauss was in a teen pop group called RubyBlue. When they met in 2008, there was no obvious reason this should work. A former shredder and a former pop singer walk into a New York studio and come out with something that sounds exactly like a 40-ton truck in a head-on collision with a singing cat. No other description fits.

Treats, their debut, arrived sounding like nothing else around it—which in 2010 was a genuine achievement. The noise-pop genre had been circling for years without fully committing, and here were two people who had committed completely, turned every dial past eleven, and somehow made it dance. Loud music that makes you want to move rather than just stand there with your arms crossed feeling appropriately assaulted. That’s the harder trick.

I kept coming back to it on headphones at a volume that probably constitutes a public health risk. There’s something almost therapeutic about music that simply refuses to be polite. Britney, Christina, Lady Gaga—all fine, all have their moments—but sometimes you need the truck.