Baby Got Back Talk is a D-I-why?-because-we-gotta punk party from New York City. They signed with Wiretap Records in the spring of 2022. Their label debut, Existential Shred, was named one of Punknews’s Best EPs of 2022. New EP Wince, Repeat finds the band reprising their partnership with producer John Naclerio (Just Surrender, The Audition) at Nada Recording Studios. Shortly after the release of Wince, Repeat, the band was named one of idobi Network’s 100 Rising Artists to Listen to in 2024.

Baby Got Back Talk’s latest project is Articulate At That Level, a compilation album of poc and/or women artists who are bonafide philosophers of rock and roll. Co-curated by the band and Rob Castellon and released to coincide with Black History Month, the collection and title are a wry rebuke of Rolling Stone co-founder Jann Wenner, who failed to include even one woman artist or artist of color in his book of interviews with musical figures he calls “masters.” (When questioned, Wenner defended himself by saying he wanted to speak with “philosophers of rock” and women and artists of color “just didn’t articulate at that level.”) To further confound Wenner’s thesis, vocalist/bassist G’Ra Asim published an essay in The Boston Globe describing the purpose of the album and the importance of making alternative music an equitable space that’s hospitable to people from all walks of life.

   Brought together by a mutual friend and a providential Craigslist ad, Asim, synth op/vocalist Rhiana Hernandez, and lead guitarist/vocalist Jake Lazaroff formed Baby Got Back Talk in 2017. They’re now joined by Sir Fabein Lee on guitar and Jacopo Arnoldi. BGBT is what punk looks like in the 2020s: driven by a DIY ethic, conversant with social issues--especially as they pertain to gender and race, enabled by interweb, bankrolled by day jobs, powered by a rad likeminded community, resonant with the most venerable iterations of rock and roll but firmly committed to injecting some new flavor into the mold. Baby Got Back Talk released a pair of independent EPs in 2017’s Take This The Wrong Way and 2018’s Up In Open Arms. Their full-length debut, 2020’s Genre Reveal Party, was mixed by Paul Leavitt (All Time Low, Senses Fail, Yellowcard). 

• Performed at AfroPunk Festival 2019

• Performed at Punk Island 2018

• Performed at #Say Her Name Campaign 5th Anniversary Remembrance Ceremony

• Featured on the Grey Estates, the Alternative, Chorus.fm and Don’t Bore Us

• Featured in Boyz n the Void: a mixtape to my brother (Beacon Press), a nonfiction book authored by vocalist/bassist G’Ra Asim

• Named one of Alternative Press’s 17 Black Alternative Bands leading the next generation

• Named one of AfroPunk’s Top 8 Punkest Bands on the Planet

• Named one of The Utah Daily Chronicle’s 5 Black Alternative Bands You Need to Know in 2021

• Featured on National Public Radio’s  “St. Louis On the Air”

  
  

A rollicking rebuke to the idea that rock isn’t Black music

As an English professor, a musician, and a Black person, I’m ready to shred misconceptions about who is and isn’t fit to jam.
Black History Month is getting a lot more punk rock. Today sees the release of “Articulate at That Level,” a mixtape featuring musicians of color and/or women artists who are bona fide philosophers of rock. My band, Baby Got Back Talk, curated this playlist as a cross-section of the gnarliest noise emanating from today’s underground…