Promises hosted the third Stand Up / Fight Back benefit this past weekend featuring a wide variety of heavy music. The two-night fundraiser supported local organizations MKE Trans & Queer Depot and The Coalition to March on the RNC.

Milwaukee acts Destros, Riotnine!, Garden Home, Snag, Sex Scenes, Courtesy, Milorganaut and Graysea performed along with Fargo-based Maul and Chicago-based Disperser on Friday evening. On Saturday, Milwaukee acts It Is Dead, Pay Dirt, Murder Generation and Mind Harvester performed along with Chicago bands Racetraitor, Natural Abuse, Ready For Death, Sarin and Selenoplexia as well as DeKalb act Blunt.

Courtesy consists of vocalist-guitarists Noah Skilling and Jack Clausen, bassist Charles Cantrell and drummer Bethany Flanders. The band’s emotive style uniquely blends emo, post-hardcore and indie rock.

Originally from the Delavan-Elkhorn area, Courtesy formed around 2018 out of high school friends jamming together. “We kind of started as two halves of a band,” Clausen explains. “Our original drummer’s name is Grant but he went off to college so we found Bethany after that. We were going by Lodi Arlington at first, but the name wasn’t really sticking so we narrowed it down to something more concise and memorable, and then we settled on Courtesy.”

Influences on the band’s sound range from Nirvana to Cardiacs to Interpol to Sonic Youth, although Flanders comes from a metal background which has given the band an additional edge. “I’m into the wildest and most experimental metal,” she adds. “To name one locally, Meth from Chicago is my favorite band. Upon joining Courtesy, I thought the songs were great and fun to play but I wanted to make them a little more “me”, so I have a double-kick pedal that I’ve done blast beats a couple times with, for example. I’m adding more weirdness and heaviness to the music.”

Courtesy released their sophomore album “Songs Only You’ll Understand” back in 2021. On the band’s songwriting process, Skilling notes, “It’s kind of changed a little bit since we’ve got Beth now. But everything we do comes very organically. We all write songs and bring our own ideas to the group.”

“One of us will have a cool riff and the rest will just start playing along with it,” Clausen jumps in. “We don’t really sit down and decide that we’re writing a specific kind of song. If we like it, we build on it.”

Courtesy’s latest single “Cascade” dropped earlier this month. “That was actually the first song I ever wrote,” Skilling laughs. “I was like 13 or 14 and wrote it in my dad’s basement before I knew any of them. We had some studio time between our second and third albums – when we recorded our songs “Roland” and “Castle On A Cloud” – so we cranked it out then.”

“There’s one more song to come out from that session too,” Cantrell mentions.

Skilling reflects on his lyrics, “They’ve also changed over time. Our first record I wrote from the time I was like 14 to the time I was 18, so it was a lot of angsty hometown shit. With our second record we tried to get more experimental, and now the record we’re currently working on is even more different and all over the place. I’ve been writing a lot about experiences with heartbreak, bars, drugs…it’s been a very therapeutic process for me.”

Clausen adds about the new record, “The whole thing carries more hardcore influence with a lot of patience on melodies.”

Courtesy are in the mixing stage of aforementioned third album, recorded by Abe Anderson, which they hope to have out by the end of the year. They play X-Ray Arcade on April 7th and embark on a four-day Midwest tour the first week of May.

Murder Generation comprises vocalist-guitarist Rich Altenbach, vocalist-bassist Trisha Peterson and drummer Tom Picard. The punk band formed back in 2018, as Altenbach explains. “I put the feelers out there that I was sick of all the passive male energy in music and I wanted to cleanse myself of that. Trisha and I got together immediately.”

“It kind of took off right away from there,” Peterson adds. “I had been in another band that just got done and I wasn’t really doing anything else or actively looking, but Rich and I went to high school together and we reconnected at an event through our friend Travis (who does Radio Free Galaxy). We were playing together for about a year but finding drummers is so hard…I had known Tom for years through other means, and we had asked him in the beginning but he was doing something else at the time. A year later or so I asked him again and he’d ended the project he was previously doing, so he said sure, and here we are.”

The band’s name comes from a song they wrote about growing up with an increased prevalence of school shootings, serial killers and sensationalized violence in society. “Rich really has a way with words, and I think a lot of our stuff is not necessarily politically driven but definitely socially driven,” Peterson notes. “We write a lot about things we think are bullshit.”

Altenbach and Peterson make a great team and collaboratively piece lyrics into songs together. On how Picard enters the fold, Peterson continues, “He’s an atypical drummer, and I think he creates a different feel than maybe we initially had in our heads. Sometimes he’ll play a beat that goes in a different way than we thought it would but we’ll really like where it goes. We used to collectively get together and write stuff but now we’re doing things a little more organically while at practice.”

“It’s been way more freeing to do it that way so that we get the full input from everyone,” Altenbach jumps in. “Plus, it can be really difficult when I have a riff in my head and bring it to practice, then I have to mentally disconnect my previous expectations because whatever we do becomes better than what I would’ve come up with by myself.”

The band released a self-titled debut record in 2019 and then followed it up with sophomore record “Strangerhood” in 2021. “We have a couple new songs that we’ve already incorporated in our set,” Peterson says. “Then we’ve got 2 or 3 more in the process. I don’t think we’ll be doing a full record next; I think we have the idea an EP this time.”

Murder Generation play in Cincinnati and Louisville this weekend. In Milwaukee, they’re at Sabbatic on April 20th and then at Last Rites on June 12th. Additionally, Altenbach and Peterson have a new band with Rocky Corona on drums called Street Ritual. They play their first show on July 14th.