There is a quiet sanctity in waiting in that breathless pause before joy arrives. The air thickens with anticipation. You begin to cherish the smallest details: the whistle of a kettle, the slant of late-afternoon light, the soft creak of your own breath. The pleasure isn’t in possession, but in the poised heart, the almost-touch, the stillness before the storm. In these suspended moments, the soul rehearses its own awakening. Even amid the mundane frictions of daily partnership, there’s still a quiet magic in discovering something new, something unexpectedly tender, in the person you thought you already knew.
N8NOFACE (say it like “Nate-no-face”) has already lived the kind of life most frontmen fake: a drug-drenched, death-defying descent that reads like a script Fred Durst might option, only to realise it’s too raw even for him. Long before Limp Bizkit tapped him for their Loserville tour, a carnival of chaos storming arenas across the US and Europe, N8 had been busy barely surviving his own B-movie biopic in Tucson, Arizona. There, amid the cracked desert concrete and flickering motel signs, he forged his sound: brutal, breathless, and blitzed by violence.
He began in the MySpace muck as one half of Crimekills, a scrappy, unhinged chiptune-punk duo bashing out one-minute missives in a closet-turned-studio. From there, the collaborations came: Eyedress, The Bloody Beetroots, Cypress Hill – and with them, a growing cult of chaos clung to his name. But somewhere along the way, after a move to Long Beach in the early 2010s, the chaos cracked into a healthier life of sobriety and clarity.
Now signed to Stones Throw, an unlikely but oddly perfect fit, N8NOFACE is straddling the snarling and the sensitive. Still rooted in synth-punk spit and static, his latest release Waiting to Wait for You hints at something more human: longing, fragility, the awkward ache of connection.
“It’s about still finding joy in watching your partner try outfit after outfit on; feeling like your whole night is waiting to wait, and you can’t wait to do it,” he says. “Most songs I have written have come to me through things I have seen or experienced (drug tales, border life and the streets), But I have always been a fan of love, and wrote about that too. Love found in the darkest places, sometimes by the scariest people. I always bounce back and forth from heartbreak in the streets or from a lover. This song explores the cool things about love, while still having a backdrop of the scary hard world around us.”
Listen to Waiting To Wait For You below and order the single here.
Waiting to Wait for You finds him in collaboration with Marcos Garcia (better known as Chico Mann, founding architect of Antibalas and Here Lies Man). Garcia, who’s also served as N8’s touring right-hand on guitar and keys, brings a haunted warmth to the track, letting longing seep into the static.
This spring and summer, N8NOFACE hits the road again, dragging the ghosts of Tucson into the limelight. First stop: this weekend’s Cruel World Festival, before linking up with longtime co-conspirator Eyedress for The Stoner Tour, a cross-country séance of scuffed beats and smoke-ring nostalgia. Dates are below:
Tour dates:
- May 17 – Pasadena, CA – Cruel World Festival
- Jul 08 – San Francisco, CA – The Masonic*
- Jul 10 – Seattle, WA – Neptune*
- Jul 11 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom*
- Jul 15 – Denver, CO – Summit*
- Jul 17 – Minneapolis, MN – Varsity Theater*
- Jul 18 – Chicago, IL – House of Blues*
- Jul 24 – Silver Spring, MD – The Fillmore Silver Spring*
- Jul 25 – New York, NY – Irving Plaza*
- Jul 26 – Boston, MA – Paradise Rock Club*
- Jul 28 – Charlotte, NC – The Underground*
- Jul 29 – Atlanta, GA – Buckhead Theater*
- Jul 30 – Nashville, TN – Brooklyn Bowl*
- Aug 01 – Houston, TX – House of Blues*
- Aug 02 – Austin, TX – EMO’s*
- Aug 03 – Dallas, TX – House of Blues*
- Aug 05 – Phoenix, AZ – The Van Buren*
* With Eyedress
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