Nothing are an American shoegaze band formed in 2010 by vocalist-guitarist Domenic Nicky Palermo. The band is known for its unique blend of distorted guitars,
ethereal vocals, and confessional lyrics. They have released several albums, including
“Guilty of Everything” (2014), “Tired of Tomorrow” (2016), “Dance on the Blacktop” (2018), and “The Great Dismal” (2020).
The story of how singer and guitarist Domenic Palermo came to form the noise-rock band Nothing sounds like a Behind the Music episode gone bad. Growing up in the crime-infested neighbourhood of Kensington in Philadelphia, Palermo hung with a tough crowd that, in his own words, drove around with large amounts of cocaine and guns while listening to My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless. He was in and out of trouble, but he found a release in music,
In 2002, Palermo’s life was put on hold when he was arrested and charged with aggravated assault and attempted murder after stabbing a man in a fight. Palermo served two years in prison — where, he says, he did a lot of reflecting, a lot of reading and a lot of writing. After leaving prison, Palermo found himself in the depths of despair, but in 2011, in a last-ditch effort to find something to hold on to, he started playing music again, and writing songs. He eventually met guitarist Brandon Setta, and together they formed Nothing. Now a four-piece group with a love of loud, dark and seriously heavy rock,
Nothing are described as a cross between heavy metal and shoegaze, while later releases were said to have bordered on a dream pop style. The group’s sound is marked by “walls of distorted guitars”, “pummeling” drums, “angelic” vocal harmonies and “soul-searching lyrics that tell of hard times and pain of all kinds”
Nothing have always been rule-breakers. Shoegaze renegades who’ve rebuilt the stereotypically lightweight genre in their own bloody knuckled American image. Outlaw poets spilling existential dread on mile-wide canvasses of fuzz and reverb. Beginning as a Philly-born bedroom solo project in 2010, Nothing’s music has always captured the full scale of the human condition, both the blaring anger and the whispering sadness.
Guilty of Everything – 10th Anniversary Edition
In 2013 Nothing signed to Relapse Records and released the single “Dig”, which featured on the band’s debut album, “Guilty of Everything“, A profoundly thoughtful, beautifully crushing wave of droning distortion, the album is epic and stirring, even unnerving at times, but it carves a path toward enlightened serenity. Guilty of Everything opens with a warm, ringing guitar as Palermo, his gentle falsetto buried just behind the mix, sings of “summers spent in a well,” alone and far from home. It’s melancholy, but it feels like a reassuring balm to life’s ills — just before the song erupts with the pulverizing tumult that comes to define much of the record.
“Guilty of Everything” closes with the album’s confessional title track. “I’ve given up,” Palermo sings. “I’m on my knees… I’m guilty of everything.” It’s a sonic surrender to the void. But in Nothing’s world, giving up all hope can actually lead to nirvana; a release from the prison of fear that the things you dream of attaining or escaping will never be realized.
Nothing return with the 10th year anniversary edition of their landmark debut album, “Guilty of Everything”. Recorded and produced by Jeff Zeigler (Kurt Vile, War On Drugs, etc), “Guilty of Everything” is a triumph of a debut that successfully manages to be massively loud, darkly introspective and totally beautiful all at once.
Nothing’s Nicky Palermo comments on the bonus material, highlighting a cover of Big Star’s track, “Holocaust”: “We wrote and recorded this track right before I almost got killed in Oakland. We were out on tour with Cloakroom and Tony Molina, so before Doyle joined Nothing. Forgot it existed until a couple years ago while demoing with Nick in Oakland for “The Great Dismal“.
Hard to imagine a more crushing piece of music than the Alex version, but looking back and how things progressed following recording, this version really holds heavy weight as well to me. Looking back, it’s almost like an eerie premonition now of how quickly things can turn devastating.”
Tired of Tomorrow
The bands second album, “Tired of Tomorrow”, was released on May, 2016. The first single from the album, “Vertigo Flowers”, John “PBoy” Policastro from the band New Lows joined the band as a live bassist to tour for the record.
Philadelphia’s Nothing return with ‘Tired Of Tomorrow’, their beautifully profound follow-up to 2014’s widely-acclaimed ‘Guilty Of Everything’. Recorded over the course of a month at Studio 4 with Will Yip (Circa Survive, Title Fight),
‘Tired Of Tomorrow’ is a modern, nihilistic take on the triumphant fuzzed-out guitar rock of the 90’s, replete with huge hooks and brooding melodies. Much like the events it’s based on, the album displays an unparalleled balance of opposites and contradictions, rife with sweet-and-sour themes, downcast grooves, infectious choruses, and blissfully expansive washes of sound. With ‘Tired Of Tomorrow’, Nothing have worked the deepest influences of their youth and maturation into a confident, memorable album that is sure to soothe old wounds while simultaneously opening up new ones.
Nothing’s whole catalogue is astounding. Nice and heavy…nice and mellow. Its all there. Great textures.
Dance On The Blacktop
The band’s third studio album, “Dance on the Blacktop“, was released on August 2018, again on Relapse.
Nothing’s third full-length recording, “Dance On The Blacktop“, is the next chapter in the band’s tumultuous story and like its predecessors, pulls from all corners of life with a focus on the bleak and despairing. Captured by renowned producer John Agnello (Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr., Kurt Vile) at Dreamland Studio in Woodstock, NY, “Dance On The Blacktop” is a stirring collection of songs accentuating the band’s love for all sounds 90s from both sides of the pond; from alternative rock and shoegaze to the realms of pop and post-punk.
Across the course of 45 minutes, Nothing weave together nine tales of heightened confusion, anxiety, paranoia, depression and chronic pain juxtaposed against angelic yet apocalyptic, reverberating walls of shimmering sound. “Dance On The Blacktop” is a fervent, emotional tour-de-force, the sound of a band at the peak of their individuality. For fans of Smashing Pumpkins, Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Beach House, Melody’s Echo Chamber and Radiohead.
The Great Dismal
On October 2020 “The Great Dismal” was released on Relapse Records. Promotional videos were released for the songs “Say Less”, “Bernie Sanders”, “Famine Asylum”, “April Ha Ha (Ft. Alex G.)”, and “Catch a Fade”. Production was handled by Will Yip, who previously produced the band’s second record, “Tired of Tomorrow”.
This is the first album to feature Doyle Martin replacing Brandon Setta on guitar and vocals, as well as Aaron Heard replacing longtime bassist Nick Bassett.
“The Great Dismal”, Nothing’s album explores existentialist themes of isolation, extinction, and human behavior in the face of 2020’s vast wasteland. Closing in on the band’s ten-year mark, frontman Domenic Palermo finds himself stringing together songs of misanthropic tales of Philadelphia with a refined and refreshed take on Nothing’s classic sound. “The Great Dismal refers to a swamp, a brilliant natural trap where survival is custom fit to its inhabitants,” Palermo states. “The nature of its beautiful, but taxing environment and harsh conditions can’t ever really be shaken or forgotten too easily.”
The ever progressive Nothing keep true to their chaotic outlook on life, keeping a keen eye to avoid repetition. With a radical cast of talented contributors such as harpist Mary Lattimore, classical musician Shelley Weiss, and singer/songwriter/producer Alex G., “The Great Dismal” showcases yet another essential side of the band’s trademark American Post-Shoegaze.
Don’t Look For Light In Tunnels
In July 2021, Nothing announced a limited edition vinyl-only album titled Don’t Look For Light In Tunnels as a celebration of their tenth anniversary. The album was recorded at Machines with Magnets in Pawtucket, Rhode Island with producer Seth Manchester. The album was “a two part thought experiment” where the “vision was to capture the sound of nothing on both a sonic and subsonic level” and influenced by Alvin Lucier’s process music album I Am Sitting in a Room.
The album was released on February 2022.
A Short History of Decay
Their latest album, “A Short History of Decay,” released on February 27, 2026.
The band has had several lineup changes, with Palermo being the longest- serving member following the departure of guitarist-vocalist Brandon Setta in 2019.
From the rattling train lines of Philadelphia’s Kensington to the isolation of Texas’ Sonic Ranch, the road to A Short History of Decay has been anything but straightforward for Nothing.
Nothing have always been rule-breakers. Shoegaze renegades who’ve rebuilt the stereotypically lightweight genre in their own bloody knuckled American image. Outlaw poets spilling existential dread on mile-wide canvasses of fuzz and reverb. Beginning as a Philly-born bedroom solo project in 2010, Nothing’s music has always captured the full scale of the human condition, both the blaring anger and the whispering sadness. “, Nothing’s fifth solo album and first for Run For Cover Records, widens that aperture even further, providing the most hi-def rendering of Nothing to date. The band have never sounded this colossal, never felt this intimate, never been this honest.
With the strongest arsenal in Nothing’s ever-shifting line-up locked in – guitarist Doyle Martin (Cloakroom), bassist Bobb Bruno (Best Coast), drummer Zachary Jones (MSC, Manslaughter 777), and third guitarist Cam Smith (Ladder To God, also of Cloakroom) join singer-songwriter Domenic “Nicky” Palermo knew he had the manpower to make the band’s most ambitious record yet.
Co-written and produced with Whirr guitarist Nicholas Bassett, and with additional production and mixing work from Sonny Diperri (DIIV, Ju- lie), “A Short History of Decay,” is the most evolved musical statement in Nothing’s catalog. Songs like “Cannibal World” and “Toothless Coal” are cataclysmic lashings of mechanized industrial-gaze that sound like My Bloody Valentine — except more extreme.
On the other end of the spectrum, the ornately morose “Purple Strings” boasts a beautiful string arrangement that includes harpist — and two-time Nothing contributor — Mary Lattimore. That baroque delicacy permeates other “A Short History of Decay,” highlights, particularly “The Rain Don’t Care,” a lilting ballad that channels the worn-down elegance of Mojave 3, and also “Nerve Scales,” a pattering bop that resembles Radiohead in its marriage of otherworldly atmosphere and mortal precision. Palermo calls the new record “a final chapter.”
Not the end of Nothing, but the conclusion of a story that began with Nothing’s 2014 debut, “Guilty of Everything” another album about time, regret, and confronting uncomfortable truths — and now resolves with a short history of decay. As much a snapshot of Palermo’s past as it is a leap into Nothing’s future.
Now on their bands fifth studio album, “A Short History of Decay” (out now via Run For Cover Records/Civilians), sheds the protective haze that once cloaked the band’s heaviest moments.
Vocals are drier, closer, more human. Their palette has expanded, introducing electronics, sampling and more exposed production against themes of aging, illness, mortality and the slow erosion of both body and memory. For frontman Domenic “Nicky” Palermo, the new record is less a reinvention and more of a reckoning – with time, with survival, and with the ghosts that have followed him from his upbringing through incarceration, loss, addiction and two decades of turbulence inside and outside of the music industry.
We caught up with Nicky to talk about growing up, societal re-entry, the industry burnout that followed their last album, The Great Dismal, the heaviness of time, and why “A Short History of Decay” feels like the clearest reflection yet of who he is – and who he’s been running from.
Studio albums
- Guilty of Everything (2014,)
- Tired of Tomorrow (2016,)
- Dance on the Blacktop (2018)
- The Great Dismal (2020,)
- A Short History of Decay (2026,)
The Fat Angel Sings 