Nomeansno were legendary. The punk band—active between 1979 and 2015, when the elder brother at the band’s core, Rob Wright, retired from music—had a unique live intensity and a progressive, rhythm-driven sound. Though that would expand considerably with subsequent releases, it is evident as far back as 1982’s Mama, their debut LP—which also has, in the song “No Sex,” a marker of just how ahead of their time they were, lyrically, challenging gender norms and strict rules we’re expected to follow.
The chorus goes as far as to deny the reality of the gender binary. It would take decades for the world to catch up.
Nomeansno are no more, but John Wright, Rob’s younger brother, has a new band, Dead Bob, named for the little hanging figure on the cover of Nomeansno’s You Kill Me EP (and for a Nomeansno song off Sex Mad, their second LP). A Vancouver supergroup, Dead Bob also includes Ford Pier (a former member of D.O.A. and the Show Business Giants), Colin MacRae (of the intensely proggy Victoria punk vehicle Pigment Vehicle), Byron Slack (of Invasives), and, rare among bands in the Nomeansno penumbra, a woman, Kristy-Lee Audette, who at 39 is the youngest member and the one with the briefest local history (Her main band is Rong. Their debut EP came out just before COVID-19 hit, back in 2019).
The members of Dead Bob. Photo by Rd Cane, courtesy of the band.
One is tempted to view her work through the lens of gender. Take the cover art for Rong’s Würst—their 2023 debut LP: an enormous, reddish sausage bends out of a banana peel. Is there perhaps some phallic symbolism at hand?
Audette chuckles, Zooming from her backyard in Vancouver. “You’re not the first one to say that, but it’s only men who say that,” she says. “I mean, where it actually came from, I had Jen and Sophie Foster [the band’s drummer and bassist, respectively, since replaced by Byron Slack and Emilor Jayne] over for dinner, because we had to figure out conceptually what the album art was going to be like. And I made pierogies and sausages, and … it just came from a joke: ‘Imagine peeling a banana and a sausage was in there: wouldn’t that be the worst?’ It just came from us riffing, trying to make each other laugh.”
A merch table at a Rong show, including the album Würst and the sausage in a banana peel. Photo by the author.
Okay, so maybe sometimes a sausage is just a sausage. But take the song “Same Team,” which kicks off the album. Amidst all the game references she’s packed in, Audette keeps returning to issues of gender roles—to a game played by “alpha bros and beta cucks,” where she finds herself constantly offside, “like what I’m doing is somehow inappropriate, even though I’m watching you do it all the time. So ‘Same Team’ is mostly about male/female dynamics that can show up. My experience is that of a woman in a predominantly male space, so there are these frustrations that I have, that I want to yell about.”
Then you see the back cover, with Foster wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words “Yes, Homo,” and you wonder, is the song also voicing Audette’s frustrations with the gender binary?
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“Yep. Absolutely. That’s something I’ve struggled with my whole life, where I’m just trying to exist organically, and not feeling like I belonged. Before puberty”—growing up in Airdrie, Alberta, where her anglophone family had moved from Quebec, in the late 1990s—“it didn’t seem to be that much of a problem. Like, I have mostly male cousins, and I’d just be rolling around with them, and everyone was chill. Nobody was like, ‘You’re not supposed to be like that.’”
She was sometimes derisively called a tomboy, but when she told her parents she wanted a bowl cut, she got it. “Then puberty happened, and there’s this pressure to present a certain way. And the dynamics of gender and what it meant to be a girl back then, I struggled with, because if you want to get really good at doing your hair and your makeup and doing your nails and dressing and stuff, that takes a lot of time and practice. It’s a skill. And that’s not where I wanted to spend my time, and when I did try to spend my time in those places, I wasn’t good at it.”
What Audette wanted to do was play guitar and learn music. She ended up studying trumpet, first getting a bachelor of music at the University of Lethbridge and then continuing in jazz studies at Capilano, as well as playing in a school percussion ensemble. She recently built her own synthesizer and compares the fussy soldering involved with the act of knitting, but many of her other youthful passions, like building HTML websites, were not what one would usually call feminine.
“I feel like if I was that age, this year, I would think that I was trans,” she says. “I really didn’t want to be a girl, back then. But being an adult, I know that that isn’t who I am,” she says. “Everything I do is feminine, because I’m doing it. Nobody gets to decide what femininity is.”
So what are the gender dynamics of touring with Dead Bob? Does she ever get “girled” by the band? Talked over? Have to step back from boy-on-boy squabbles?
“I’m not going to lie, that is something I was kinda worried about, and something I wasn’t super eager to get into again. I haven’t been the only girl in a band in quite some time. And because it’s been such a dude-band from the go, I had my concerns about how I would be accepted from the audience, like, being tokenized: ‘Oh, they have a girl. A diversity hire.’”
But Audette’s concerns proved unfounded: “People were like, ‘Oh, dark horse. Who’s that?’ And it’s not actually the gender part of my existence in Dead Bob that’s the most alienating. It’s the generation gap.” Even Byron Slack, the next-youngest member, is eight years older than her, “on the cusp of Gen X, and then John’s on the older side of Gen X, where he’s almost a boomer but not quite. So it’s like this Gen X band, and I’m a millennial.”
Being the sole millennial comes with responsibilities. Audette is the band’s de-facto app-master. “For example, if we’re touring around, I’ve become the person who books the accommodations, because I use apps and coupons and points, and I can keep things pretty cheap. And I know how to cross-reference the map with where we’re going, so that we stay somewhere out of the city, so our gear is safe.” She also consults crime maps, especially in the U.S., or handling aspects of social media.
Occasionally she does have to assert a female point of view, however, and push back against some patriarchal norms. Take the case of Dead Bob’s newest single, “No Fun,” based on an old Nomeansno demo with lyrics by Rob Wright, for example. “One of the lyrics was, ‘We don’t need no pussy.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m not saying that. That’s alienating an entire part of the crowd, because women aren’t going to say that.’ So we were trying to change it, and Ford picked ‘action,’ which is perfect, because the sentiment is still there.”
If there is a patriarch in the musical penumbra around Dead Bob, it’s Rob Wright, whose fearsome roaring vocals, mathy, compelling basslines, and master-craftsman lyrics could inspire terror in the weak-hearted. Audette has, of course, crossed paths with him, but she wasn’t in the slightest intimidated.
Kristy-Lee Audette performs with Rong at Vancouver Hot Sauce Fest in 2025. Photo by the author.
“I’ve only met him one time, during our sound check at the Rickshaw, when we played there with Victims Family. All the Victims Family guys and everybody in Dead Bob is friends with him and knows him… so I didn’t immediately go up and introduce myself. And he’s like, ‘I’m not going to stick around for the show, but I’ll stick around for the sound check.’ And one of my favourite sound-check trumpet riffs—like, there’s so many epic trumpet songs, right?—but one of my favourites is the Godfather theme. So I bust into that, and Rob, his face just lights up, he gets so excited and leans over to the person next to him, like, ‘The Godfather! Yes!’… This has been my sound-check song forever, and nobody’s ever really cared that much. So then after sound check, he just beelines to me, and he’s like, ‘Hi, I’m Rob. I love The Godfather.’ So that’s how I ended up meeting Rob.”
What of the band name, Rong? It seems like it might be a riff on Nomeansno’s most popular album, which won a Polaris heritage prize and has since become the namesake of a local beer, brewed by Slow Hand Brewing, following John Wright’s recipe. It was also the name of the Wright brothers’ label, Wrong Records, and was occasionally manifested in the slogan, “two Wrights make a Wrong.”
“That was kind of a big coincidence,” Audette says, chuckling. “The name came from a street sign, like a ‘wrong way’ sign, but it was broken, and the W was missing—so it’s wrong, but it still sounds like ‘wrong,’ so it’s right, but it’s wrong. So that’s funny.” At that point, she was “loosely familiar” with Nomeansno and knew they had an album called Wrong—“but it had nothing to do with my band or what I called it. But I get that question a lot, like, ‘Is this a Nomeansno thing?’ No, it’s not. And then John asked me to play in his band. I’m like, ‘Well, no one’s going to believe me now.’”
Dead Bob plays at Green Auto August 22, and Rong plays at Grey Lab on August 29.
Read more travel stories about Vancouver’s punk scene.
