Tad 後藤

Jack Endino tracked God's Balls for less than $3,000 in a basement studio with no heat, and you can hear the fucking frost on the strings. Tad Doyle wasn’t some skinny kid in a cardigan pretending to be miserable; he was a butcher by trade and his band sounded like they were actively crushing a car with their bare hands. They were the biggest, heaviest thing in the early Sub Pop orbit, but they lacked the pop sensibilities of Nirvana or the stadium-sized choruses of Soundgarden. Instead, they leaned into the sludge, playing through cheap gear and blown-out amps that gave the early Seattle scene its actual dirt. The label drama with 8-Way Santa nearly killed them before they even got a real shot. Using a found photo of a couple for the cover led to a massive lawsuit that forced a recall, and then Pepsi sued them over the logo parody on a single. By the time they signed to Giant for a major label push, the industry was already looking for the next slicker thing. They were too metal for the indie kids and too weird for the hair metal holdovers, stuck in a middle ground of high-volume aggression that felt dangerous even when the production got cleaner. Most of their later output after 1995 is a footnote for most people, but those early slabs are required listening if you want to understand why Seattle got loud in the first place.

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