Sean Kennedy appears in our Summer 2024 Issue with cover stars Wallows, Drain, Maya Hawke, the Linda Lindas, and Winnetka Bowling League. Head to the AP Shop to grab a copy.
Sean Kennedy’s body looks like the Fruit Roll-Ups tattoo tongue print of a Hot Topic bin sale (in a good way). In their Chinatown tattoo studio, the vocalist of the five-piece emoviolence outfit OLTH walks me through the marks (both physical and mental) that music has made on their life.
A shaky-handed portrait of Ronald McDonald lovingly administered by OLTH’s guitarist Danny Evans stretches horizontally across Kennedy’s calf, a work-in-progress blackout swallow by bassist Dean Violante soars over their forearm, and the entire lyrics to Neil Young’s “Motion Pictures (For Carrie)” scratches across their ribs — to name a few. If I were to catalog each scribble, inside joke, and fully formed anthropomorphic action figure etched into their skin from head to toe, I would need a much longer word count. And by the time I finished, there’d be additions, overlaps, and new layers of personal meaning to unlock. As Young once said three verses below Kennedy’s right nipple, “I’d rather start all over again.”
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The swallow is their most recent — aside from the free Ilegal Mezcal logo they got on their inner arm at the Neil Young and Crazy Horse show in Forest Hills earlier that week. The concert marked Kennedy’s first time seeing their musical/tattoo idol live. “I was skeptical if it was going to live up to what I imagined. I love Neil Young, and I know he’s getting up there, but it brought tears to my eyes. It was really sweet.” The mezcal logo, however, is less heartfelt. Three loosely shaped bunnies stack one on top of the other in an obtuse reference to the Goddess Mayahuel, the Aztec personification of agave, who gave birth to an “infinite number” of rabbits at the end of a cold winter or, simply put, three bunnies mating. The meaning lies where you make it.
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The horny bunny logo tattoo may be entirely random, but tucked within the outline of the swallow’s soon-to-be-filled silhouette, it serves a purpose beyond the procreation of its species — to communicate the impermanence, irony, and self-imbued meaning that forms Kennedy’s style in tattooing and music.
Kennedy spent their teen years taking NJ transit from their home in Bergen County into New York City — where they attended all-ages hardcore shows at venues like ABC No Rio.
Just ahead of the advent of TikTok, and COVID-19, the scene of Kennedy’s early adulthood was still relatively IRL, and, without the algorithmic push toward niche communities, proportionally homogeneous, but Kennedy followed the beat of their own drum. The wall of their studio is an impressive cornucopia of their particular cultural tastes, with horror movie collectibles, star-spangled sketches, Hello Kitty stickers, and band merch collaged across it.
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According to Kennedy, a perfect band tee should be “filthy, really well loved, and simple like a tattoo. Something you want on your body all the time.” A few examples are strewn around the studio — Murder in a Minute’s “i’ll stop stabbing when you stop screaming” hoodie and the iconic insignia of Black Flag’s My War tour merch. “Raymond Pettibon, awesome artist,” Kennedy says of the man behind punk imagery from Sonic Youth’s Goo to the Black Flag logo, which is allegedly the most tattooed symbol of all time.
Though Pettibon wasn’t all too pleased with the cultural saturation of the four-barred insignia, which came to appear on T-shirts and tattoo sleeves from the U.S. to Latvia, Kennedy’s approach to fashion is less uniform. “I always felt like there was such a uniform for whatever niche it was. Indie kids looked like indie kids. Punk stuff for the most part was just like cosplay, and it never worked. It was always like hitting a wall for me. There wasn’t anything I could do or change in my style or appearance that would make me fit in.”
Now, 28 years old, 6 feet 3 inches tall and twirling a lock of long black hair, it might be surprising to some that fitting in was ever part of Kennedy’s MO. But between working at LVMH through most of their early adulthood and trying to find their footing within a no-tattooing family, Kennedy’s early self-expression was steeped in compromise, and the confusion that comes with exploring gender and identity. However wrought those years may have been, Kennedy took them in stride, allowing their upbringing to guide them to who they are today.
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The child of an Irish Catholic Deadhead, Kennedy was destined to tattoo. When the skull-and-crossbones, lightning-bolt-laden visual language of their family’s sensibilities collided with the Marvel comic books they collected throughout their youth, a new universe was born. “I really like to expand on Jack Kirby’s art. Really bright pop-y stuff was always super fun to me. It’s also kind of psychedelic and fits all these different categories of images that are burned in my brain.” The resulting style looks something like a biblically accurate angel and the cast of Courage the Cowardly Dog put in a blender while on LSD, and it’s beautiful.
It’s the kind of style you only stumble upon through the rare combination of experimentation, self-awareness, and chemistry commonly misconstrued as “dumb luck” — the same mix that makes OLTH so special. OLTH’s five-piece outfit came together by way of adolescent debauchery and divine intervention in the New Jersey-to-New York hardcore scene. Each of its members — Kennedy, Evans, Violante, Ben Finkelstein, and Malcolm Hoyt — have spent time in and out of other bands before coming together in 2022 to form OLTH. Six months later, the band’s debut album, every day is sOmeOne’s speciaL day, was born, and it’s been nonstop since.
“When we formed as a group, it was like, ‘OK, go quit your day job. Give it all for this shit,” Kennedy recounts.
The name “OLTH” was forged in the hell-fires of a band group text. By the next morning, each member had marked the fated four letters across their arms, legs, or knuckles. Since then, the nonsensical monosyllable has taken on a profound, metaphorical significance for fans.
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“It means nothing. It’s just a sound. It’s interchangeable. What’s that called? Onomatopoeia? It is what it sounds like,” Kennedy confirms. “I love how fans have just run with it. We’ll show up in places like Boston or somewhere random, and they’ll show us that they freshly tattooed OLTH on their arm or their inner lip. That’s fucking cool. It’s all unexpected, but it’s dope.”
Band members have also gotten clever with creative license. Most recently Violante got an OLTH/THC tramp stamp tattoo where a weed leaf and a bong make up the O and the L ala stoner rock meets hardcore in the basement of your local bodega.
Though each member plays with the ironic, heterogeneous hodge-podge of digital culture, their reverence of the legacies of punk, hardcore, metal, and screamo music carries through.
“The scenes look so different now than the shows I was going to as a kid,” Kennedy says. “It’s beautiful. It’s so fucking cool to see all types of people just fully be themselves in whatever way. I could not be like that when I was 16 going to shows.”
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If you look around at an OLTH show, you’ll see a wide swath of punks, scene kids, tweakers, LARPers, normies, crowdsurfers, and nose-bleeding headbangers. Band members have famously sustained injuries, from ribs broken in the pit to faces split on guitar stems. Surprisingly, the one thing that’s stayed intact is the sweet lyrical stylings of Kennedy’s whistle-scream.
Kennedy’s shriek registers just inside the 20K hertz of the human hearing range and is equidistant between Addison Rae’s “Von Dutch” remix scream and the early howls of Orchid. “No sore throat. No losing my voice,” Kennedy boasts. “I used to play in this grindcore band when we were kids. After we played a couple shows, something just switched in my brain — [I realized] doing the vocals that way didn’t affect me. It was just like, ‘Yeah, keep going up.’ So when it came time to start this project, I was like, ‘Well, I guess that’s what I can bring to the table.’”
OLTH’s style of screamo is equal parts self-sacrificing and satirizing. The most heart-wrenching turn of lyric precedes the most unintelligible sound you’ve ever heard: “I’ve wasted so much time/All of it thinking of you.” Without shying away from sentimentality, OLTH temper fits of terror with the kind of instrumental tenderness usually reserved for kicking rocks across an abandoned parking lot in Western Massachusetts. From the rubble emerges a sound riddled with private jokes, personal histories, and the desire to make even more nonsense from the mayhem of modern existence.
