“I want to clarify, this song isn’t about anyone here,” said Max “Platinum” Caster before performing his song “Performative Feminist” to a milling crowd of some twenty people gathered in the basement of a guitar store in Williamsburg. It was the latest show put together by Sofia Pipolo, a local writer-turned-florist who has also been putting on punk shows under the moniker “Eel Pit” for the last two years. “Our total audience end of night was 50+” Pipolo reported to me in an email after.

That night, she opened her latest show with Caster, a remarkably buff wrestler of some renown (fmr. holder of multiple prestigious belts who goes by “Best Wrestler Alive,” per his Instagram handle), who also moonlights as “Platinum Max,” his rap persona (“Worst Rapper Alive,” per the name of Max’s latest self-released mixtape) –– among other acts that filled the air under the voluminous ceilings of Main Drag Music. After Caster, there was Jeerleader, a local band that has been going since the pandemic, and then there was Strange Neighbors, another band that’s been going for just about as along; the group’s singer Aidan Von Strange once said in an interview that “Avril Lavigne convinced me that being a rock star was my life’s mission.” They were fittingly the most well-dressed of the lineup, and perhaps the most earnestly theatrical about it.

The headliners were LVP, the hardest punk among the acts. A quartet of young Brooklyn men, they had just posted their latest EP: I Feel Too Many Things, But I Don’t Have the Room. In this room, they performed songs from that quite energetically, moving around a lot, accompanied by a dancing man in a bath robe and a skull mask.

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Photos taken by Michelle Maier.