Anal Cunt

Anal Cunt, often abbreviated AxCx, was an American extreme metal band from Massachusetts, active from 1988 to 2011. Fronted by vocalist Seth Putnam, the band operated at the outer edges of grindcore and noisecore, pursuing the fastest, most brutal, and deliberately most offensive music they could produce. Song titles were often shock-value provocations, mixing crude humor with deliberately vile or absurdist statements, making the band as much a confrontational art project as a musical act.

Over more than two decades the lineup shifted repeatedly around Putnam as the constant, with numerous musicians passing through the band including Tim Morse and Josh Martin in later years. Musically, Anal Cunt moved between blistering short-form grindcore and, on some releases, slower, sludgier detours, always filtered through a nihilistic, confrontational sense of humor that made them notorious even within extreme underground music circles.

Seth Putnam died in June 2011, effectively ending the band, and former member Josh Martin died in 2018. Anal Cunt's legacy remains deeply divisive: reviled by many for its content, yet influential within noisecore and grindcore circles as an extreme example of the genre's capacity for provocation and dark, transgressive humor.