Noise is love. Noise is life.
- Molly Caldwell
- Mar 19
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 6
The 2010s were the last great decade of noise. We lived through a golden era of sonic assault—loudness that wasn’t just noise but a statement, a challenge, a revolt. We live in a different world now. No more garbled MP3s bleeding from your headphones. No more random volume spikes to jolt you awake. Matt Mayfield can rest easy. Quiet has returned. But for a time, music was loud. Not just loud, but excessively loud—distorted, blown-out, worn like a badge of honour. Even when it wasn’t overtly loud, it still sounded loud, thanks to the resurgence of low-fidelity, or lo-fi, production halfway through the decade. Garage-revival punk bands like King Khan and BBQ Show, Ty Segall, Thee Oh Sees, and everyone signed to Burger Records traded in nostalgia, mining the myth of gravelly punk authenticity. The Black Lips’ Los Valientes del Mundo Nuevo leaned so hard into the swerve it almost crashed under the weight of its own simulacrum—a "live" album supposedly recorded in Tijuana (🙄) yet so meticulously produced you could have swore it was performed by a symphony orchestra. Noise was never just about the noise itself. It was about stripping away enough polish to make it seem like it had real grit. A handshake for the “boys-only” club, signalling: “Don’t worry, we’re still punk, even though we signed to Vice Records!!” but instead of trying to be discreet, they broadcasted it through vintage amps and microphones.
When I was a teenager, I LOVED garage-punk-revival.
Like loved loved it.
Unlike the quiet indie or generic pop music I had heard previously, I actually saw myself reflected in this magic mirror of noise: frantic, arrogant, and youthfully pursuing everything and nothing all at once. Like, literally same. No longer did I feel like I had to muffle myself and be palatable. Just like the music, I too used loudness as an authority, a grasp towards trying to be taken seriously. I thought general noise would help me achieve my goals: unstructured, unintentional, and just for the sake of it; be too loud to ignore. My volume level revealed my ultimate fear: being so small and so quiet and so unseen that I would quite literally disappear entirely.
Ever since I was a little girl I’ve had only two settings: loud and louder. “Could you keep it down?” they’d say, and I’d apologize, but no, I really can’t. Inside voice? Sorry, don’t know her. Whispering? Lol nope. I’ve just always considered it as an oral symptom from a Napoleon Complex. But in a world where I took up such a little amount, I taught myself how to occupy space. How to make my way to the front, because at the back I cannot see the stage with everyone else blocking my view. I became a pint-sized opera singer cramming as much as as possible into her lungs for the back of house seats, like I’m Rick Rubin producing an album for Taylor Swift. I am Sisyphus but I am screaming the boulder up the mountain.
Treats by Sleigh Bells is probably in my top 10 albums of all time. Also made during the lo-fi renaissance, it had such an “I-don’t-care” attitude when everyone else was trying so hard. Cool guys were looking at noise and distortion as an emblem of authenticity, but Sleigh Bells truly understood how to wield it. Before you even press play on Treats, the album art warns you. High school cheerleaders, all organized with pom-poms, but their faces smeared like they watched the cursed video tape in The Ring. Something comfortable, understood, and vaguely familiar but also ominous—innocence and purity but it’s dipped in transmission fluid. It’s trying to decipher between smelling caramelizing sugar or hot melting plastic, but you press play anyway.
Tell ‘Em opens the album with an assault. Artillery-fire guitar chugging, picture Blue Monday ran through a fuzz pedal and left to overheat. Behind it, Alexis Krauss’ voice—something akin to a Disney princess who dropped out school and moved into a DIY punk squat—doesn’t compete with the noise; it’s perched on top of it, like a flyer being held up by a base of supportive teammates, daring gravity: FAFO. Sleigh Bells treated distortion the way a hip-hop producer treats a sample—lifting from the mundane, warping it, rewrapping it into something new. Treats biggest single, Rill Rill, does this literally, built around a repurposed fragment of Funkadelic’s Can You Get to That. But Sleigh Bells didn’t just recycle music; they upcycle distortion itself, repurposing the excess, the auditory waste, until the noise becomes part of the song’s composition.
Crown on the Ground, canonized as the ultimate anthem for hot-mean-girls by Sofia Coppola, cuts through speakers with a precision that feels almost violent. The production makes it sound too loud, even when it’s quiet, as if it is the final boss in the Loudness Wars. But if you just push through the noise a little more, something else emerges. The shattering, shrieking sound—a guitar riff if you’re squinting through layers of feedback—slowly settles into something melodic. It stops being distortion and starts to act like horns, like a medieval trumpet heralding the apocalypse, or at least the end of music-as-polite-small-talk-pleasantry.
The first song I heard off of Treats was Infinity Guitars. There was something baffling about hearing what sounded like the home-team cheer squad scream out lyrics like “dumb whores” and “best friends” as their war cry. Alexis Krauss chants ahh-AH-ahh while Derek Miller brings the song to a climax with something resembling Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound but if it was mangled from being thrown off a balcony in 2007 Williamsburg. By the end, my heart was racing, my nervous system short-circuiting and trying to recalibrate. A truly Lacanian recognition of myself in the sound.
Not only a loud speaker—I’m a loud person.
My clothes are loud, my makeup is loud, my presence is loud. I’m turned up to 100%, maxed out in every direction. People say my loudness drowns out quieter voices (tbh fair,) but more than anything, I can’t help it. Loudness wasn’t a phase or a performance—it was survival. It was the only way I knew to stake a claim in a world that refused to make room for me. I didn’t adopt it; I grew into it. I taught myself loudness like a second language, one that could reach across time and call back to every version of myself who had once felt too small to matter.
But at some point, loudness became something else. My volume stopped being a warning flare and started becoming an exaltation. It was no longer just about resisting erasure—it was about declaring presence. Loudness became how I thrived and my volume became a form of refusal, a way to claim space. It moved from defiance to desire. From fight to flourish. Beyond intuition, being loud feels like it’s in my bloodstream now, coded into my very being. No seriously, I really cannot be quiet.
I think a lot about the ~politics~ of being a loud girl. Especially a loud East Asian girl. There’s a whole cultural mythology around Asian femininity: quiet, polite, submissive. Japanese women especially get flattened into this stereotype of serene compliance. Japanese women are so hyper-stereotyped that Pornhub gave us our own award-winning category. Even though I’m obviously not white, people constantly fumble trying to pin down my race—then act shocked when I say I’m Japanese-Canadian. As if someone with my decibel level couldn’t possibly have descended from a “stoic” culture. As if being visibly small, visibly Asian, and audibly not quiet is some kind of paradox, truly inconceivable.
The idea of being “too much” is older than any one era or identity. It winds through history like an undercurrent—flickering at the edges of culture, always returning us to the same question: who gets to take up space, and who must shrink? Whether in the form of female hysteria, chromophobia, or fascist aesthetics, the root is the same: a fear of the uncontainable. The ecstatic. The emotional. The unruly. In other words, a fear of the Dionysian—of everything wild, excessive, and often feminized. These qualities have always been policed.
Loudness, brightness, feeling too deeply—coded as feminine, dismissed as irrational, marked for containment. In the 19th century, women’s emotional expressions were pathologized as hysteria, their attempts to speak reframed as symptoms of a disease. Colour, too, became suspect. As David Batchelor writes in Chromophobia, Western culture has long associated bright, saturated hues—especially pinks, reds, and yellows—with excess, vulgarity, and danger. The so-called “loud” colours are loud in the same way that emotions are loud: disruptive, defiant, and impossible to ignore. . What’s considered “too much” is almost always what refuses to stay small, what won’t be subdued. And so, the first thing to be silenced is often the thing that insists on being heard.
In the modern era, we find this fear of excess embodied in subtler forms: algorithms that regulate our every interaction, mediating our conversations and our content. We're conditioned into an inoffensive polished silence that wears the guise of safety, equity, and civility but is, in truth, a controlled uniformity designed to stifle anything that resists containment. Think of Tumblr and “female-presenting nipples.” We’re at the edge of a new kind of silence. Everything’s been sterilized. Censored. Bread and circuses blended into the generic, Millennial-pink paste that chicken nuggets are made from. When reviewing Treats, Pitchfork declared at the end “The visceral thrill of Treats may not last forever, but neither does life; right now, this feels like living it.” But 15 years later? It still slaps. It slaps even harder now imo, because our current position has not only the volume turned down, but the entire culture neutered: beige moms, clean girl aesthetics, Scandi-minimalism.
It’s not just being “shushed” by the CEO, but being kicked out of the building by brawny security guards. When we lose noise, we don’t just lose sound—we lose the language of refusal. We lose a whole archive of unruliness, a lineage of those who have screamed, distorted, and feedback-looped their way into being heard. Is excess too gaudy for our current circumstances? (Noise-pop? In this economy?) Or is quiet just the latest version of control?
With everything telling us to quiet down, I remember that noise, though wild and unhinged, can be a weapon. It can be living. I listen to Treats by Sleigh Bells in 2025 and turn it up the maximum volume, because I’ve made a life out of refusing to be quiet.