This feature appears in FLOOD 13: The Tenth Anniversary Issue. You can purchase this deluxe, 252-page commemorative edition—a collectible, coffee-table-style volume in a 12" x 12" format—featuring Gorillaz, Magdalena Bay, Mac DeMarco, Lord Huron, Bootsy Collins, Wolf Alice, and much more here.
BACKSTORY: N8 first made waves as one half of the punk-chiptune duo Crimekillz before moving to Long Beach and releasing five hardcore and synth-punk albums that culminated in his signing with Stones Throw Records in the spring of 2025
FROM: Tucson, AZ
YOU MIGHT KNOW HIM FROM: Supporting Limp Bizkit on 2024’s Loserville Tour, or from guest spots on records from artists including Ho99o9, Eyedress, and Hollywood Undead
NOW: After inking a deal with Stones Throw ahead of the release of last year’s As of Right Now, the artist’s Dave Sitek–produced follow-up Tomorrow’s World is slated to drop this week
N8NOFACE’s motto is “genre killer.” Zooming in from his home in Long Beach, the punk rocker details the reason his music feels so freeform and futurist: “I’m weird into quantum physics and I like thinking I’m everything all at once,” he explains. “Genre killing in the name of quantum physics” seems an apt guiding ethos for a man who’s tagged every project he’s released as “thrash hip-hop electro punk indie” on Bandcamp.
His last release—2025’s brooding, love-laden As of Right Now—might not seem like the type of head-smashing synth-punk the Tucson native cut his teeth on, but it’s unapologetically N8. “I’ll take a song that maybe sounds like it could be Suicide or [The] Cure, and yet the story is something you’d find in a fucking Kool G Rap song,” he tells me. “I’m shapeless, I’m formless—I want to explore all frequencies.”
N8’s musical upbringing was punctuated by listening to New York Five-Percenter hip-hop and British goth rock in private. “Growing up in Tucson, close to the border, you either listen to LA gangsta rap or Texas rap,” N8 explains. “I was the weird guy who’d be listening to Godbody music. I had to go listen to bands like The Cure or Suicide alone by myself, because that shit was getting no play in my people’s cars.” When he began making music as one half of Crimekillz with his friend Scumbag Tony, this penchant for genre-mixing began to rear its head. The two would mod Game Boys out to make chiptune, only instead of “just remaking Zelda beats, we were like, ‘Let’s make punk beats and I’ll scream.’”
photo by Valerie J. Bower
“I’ll take a song that maybe sounds like it could be Suicide or The Cure, and yet the story is something you’d find in a fucking Kool G Rap song.”
Crimekillz’s punktune style lit up the LA DJ scenes during the MySpace era, leading to connections that include N8’s longtime partner Valerie Bower—a DJ and photographer who’d shoot and play the parties N8 came up for. (“She’s the brains behind [N8NOFACE],” N8 admits. “She keeps me together.”) Once Crimekillz separated, N8 took his career solo, releasing heaps of blitzkrieg synth-punk tracks that seldom broke one minute in length. He attributes the short runtimes to his battle with addiction. “A lot of people don’t get that a lot of my old music was me just being real fucked up on meth and crack.” While the drugs kept the runtimes short, they never shook N8’s passion for making music. “I always just did this shit because I love it.”
Now over five years clean, N8 finds that his creation process has become more fun and more spiritual, and urges others who find themselves where he once was to buck the idea that drugs are a necessity for creating. “Now that I feel sober, I’m able to get to an emotion quicker and tap into it faster,” he tells me, explaining how sobriety wasn’t the suck he imagined it would be to his creative practices.
The fruits of this newfound process are evident on As of Right Now, where producer Chico Mann challenged N8 to develop his songs into full-fledged, three-verse pieces. The creation of the album started with conversations they had while on tour together, where Mann backed N8 on guitar and synths. Inspired by the likes of Johnny Marr and The Smiths, Mann pitched to N8 a pack of titled instrumentals for their collaboration. N8 took the pre-written labels as a challenge, writing the songs out to fit Mann’s visions. “As of Right Now” became a reflective song on lost love, while “It’s Happening Again” was inspired by N8’s friends who fall in love with every waitress who serves them. When asked what Mann’s reaction to this writing process was, N8 laughs. “He’s like, ‘Could I get a writing credit?’ Nah, motherfucker!”
“Now that I feel sober, I’m able to get to an emotion quicker and tap into it faster.”
Mann’s production style continued N8’s longstanding centering of the synthesizer, whose ability to manipulate sound makes it the Tucson musician’s ideal vessel for completely unique music. Speaking on his affinity for the instrument, N8 says that he “likes that there’s this wave, this frequency being run through it. Me turning these knobs and stuff, I get a unique sound.” His focus isn’t on chords, but rather the fascination with physics that drives his genre-killing instinct. “Sometimes when I track a song and then turn that synthesizer off, that sound is gone,” he tells me sheepishly. “But in a weird way, that’s kind of my fuckery.” His priority, then, is process, feel, and the future. “The synthesizer—being a futurist—that’s the wave, man.”
Having recently joined artists like Madvillain, DâM-FunK, and Sudan Archives among the ranks of legendary indie label Stones Throw Records signees, the future is certainly the wave for N8NOFACE. As a punk rocker whose first attempt at writing was mimicking the bars he listened to as a kid, the label’s hip-hop roots made it an ideal landing spot. Signing has also given N8 access to a greater toolkit than ever before, moving his recording space from his closet at home to producer and TV on the Radio co-founder Dave Sitek’s Federal Prism studio, where they recorded his first album since signing with the label, Tomorrow’s World.
A synth-powered ride through cyberpunk backstreets, N8 sets up the project by asking the question it was built up: “What will the gutter punks be listening to in 2077?” Working with Sitek and his “insane wall of oscillator synths,” as N8 describes the studio, Tomorrow’s World eschews heavy industrial sonic tropes for a more nuanced approach. “I envisioned a future more of broken sound and lo-fi,” N8 explains with a sly grin. “I love the soft, and I love the crazy things with jagged, sharp edges. So we balanced [Tomorrow’s World] with both.”
Reflecting on the opportunity to sign with Stones Throw and recording with Sitek, N8 tells me candidly that he’s “just really excited for the future. They’re really letting me explore and do what I want.” The smile creeping up beneath that iconic charcoal mustache says it all: The genre killer is ready to delve into all the frequencies he can. FL
N8NOFACE at Cruel World / photo by Kevin Allen
