Photo by Olivia Perillo

Artist: Cashier, the four-piece of vocalist and guitarist Kylie Gaspard, guitarist Joseph Perillo, bassist Austyn Wood, and drummer Zachary Derouen

Location: Lafayette, LA

Buzz: Browsing the Bandcamp tags listed under Cashier’s debut EP, The Weight, the Lafayette four-piece aren’t about to box themselves in any one distinct direction. Alternative rock and shoegaze get the obligatory nods because “keyword marketing,” but the tagged word that’ll probably catch your eye the most if it doesn’t already hit your ears before then is the pretty malleable term “bigmuff.”

Whatever that means, they’ve already put that to practice on stage opening for a diverse contingent of very loud guitar heroes like Dinosaur Jr., Nothing, and Narrow Head. The Weight has the promise of turning them into the heir apparent. Across the course of its six tracks, decibel levels blaze hard and subwoofers are blown out — though, cleaned of any muddiness — from both directions, carrying on in driving melodic melodrama with an ease in intensity. That’s out of necessity, as vocalist Kylie Gaspard shoulders some big emotional pulls over her back through it all. If they didn’t, this would probably sound like just another slacker rock album.

In the ’90s, Cashier would thrive in alternative rock’s golden era. In the 2000s, they’d be dubbed an intellectualized version of post-hardcore or art-punk, followed by some form of recontextualized indie rock and emo revivalism in the 2010s. Nowadays, everything fuzzed up in the red is distorted as a mere byproduct of the aforementioned ‘gaze scene. You don’t really get the sense these bayou rockers want anything to do with genre signaling beyond careening through the heaviness of life loudly. If anything, lifting off the labels helps free them of it all.

Sound: Speeding down the bayou in an airboat, wind whipping through your hair while being blasted by a stack of amps in surround sound.

Recommended: “A Curse I Know So Well”, “Like I Do”, and “Part From Me” from their newly-released EP, The Weight

Cashier’s The Weight is available now on Julia’s War.