Nip Slip Keeps the Bold Theater of Rock Alive in North Texas

Temperatures were below freezing on the evening of Jan. 19 outside of Anderson’s Eatery and Distillery in Denton, yet Bowie Brae still yanked off his shirt midway through his band’s set. It’s not a proper Nip Slip show unless some nips are slipped.

The crowd had thinned some after the amateur drag show that preceded the band, some people favoring the warmth inside the bar. But a dedicated audience still remained outside for Nip Slip’s set, forgoing the fire pits and heat lamps to stand front and center before the stage. Some were huddled together, wrapped in blankets and cold weather gear while others were scantily clad in the lingerie and drag costumes in which they performed.

All of them were dancing, whether it was appreciative headbanging from inside a blanket cocoon or swinging a partner around the paving stones.

Brae can’t be confined to the stage, even if there had been room on the small, portable platform for anyone else beside bassist Al Guest and drummer Craig Fleming. Brae throws his whole body into singing. He punctuates lyrics with grand flourishes of his arms, falling to his knees, slithering in parallel rhythm to the microphone cable snaking around his feet.

There’s a direct line of inspiration between his stage presence and that of Gerard Way, lead singer of My Chemical Romance, in the androgynous physicality of their movements paired with growling vocals. Brae locked in tight with his bandmates – guitarist Robert Hokamp and triple threat Niin Castro rotating between the keyboard, melodica and trumpet, who were both stationed on the ground with Brae – singing face to face, leaning into their shoulders and backs.

It’s like a party on the last night before the world ends, the next day being Trump’s second inauguration. For young queer people in a red state, like Brae, his bandmates and so many of the crowd at Anderson’s this evening, tomorrow could very well be the beginning of a type of targeted apocalypse. This night, however, is for music.

The joy of the performance is its own brand of resistance against all the forces threatening to extinguish the kind of fire inside people like the members of Nip Slip and their audience. For the second to last song of the set, “Queer Mongering,” the band sings in one voice: “You say there’s a problem (you panic and fray)/ I’m not the problem (you believe what they say)/ You’ve got a problem (I’m not what you hate)/ I won’t go away.”

Nip Slip have stuck their flag in the ground and they’re gaining traction. The band was recently nominated for Best Rock Act at the Dallas Entertainment Awards and Castro for Best Trumpet. Although they didn’t take the awards home on the night of the ceremony, the nominations still speak volumes for the following the band has built up in the three years since they formed the group, as both the nominations and award winners were entirely fan-voted.

Guest was the first to find out they had scored the nominations and called Castro and Brae, who happened to be at a candy shop in Austin at the time.

“Oh my goodness,” Brae says with a laugh, hands covering his face. “We were freaking out in this poor candy shop. Everyone was like, ‘Are they OK?'”

The news served as another affirmation of the local community’s love for its homegrown artists, especially in Denton, the third city in the state to be certified in the Texas Music Office’s Music Friendly Texas Community Program.

“Denton is definitely the most loving and friendly town for artists and especially musicians,” Brae says. “And it makes me giddy walking to a bar and people being like, ‘Oh, that’s the guy from Nip Slip!’ It’s fun seeing people wearing shirts or putting stickers around town.”

When the band first made their official Instagram account, Brae recalls seeing their followers rocket up to about 1,000 in the span of a week and thinking, “Wow, we must be really popular.” Until he noticed those followers were largely men assuming the account was for something other than music.

“But a lot of them stayed!” he says. “So I feel like that says a lot about us.”

Castro credits Guest with the band’s name.

“Al has a talent for coming up with names that just sort of stick,” he says.

It’s not a bad way to get noticed in the fierce competition in the internet and streaming age when platforms like TikTok and Instagram both level the playing field and over-amplify the noise of millions of users threatening to drown out creatives scraping for an audience. One post can go viral and make you famous in a day, as songs are layered and remixed into new versions on TikTok by complete strangers making their own art inspired by yours.

That can be its own type of beautiful thing. Unless the algorithms just don’t pick you up at all and you’re deprived of those precious seconds of screen time to grab the brief attention of a stray user who might’ve taken interest if they knew you existed.

Nip Slip straddles the line between the traditional hustle of a small-town punk band playing as many gigs at as many different venues that’ll book them and feeding the social media promotional machine to satiate fans with videos, teasers,and fliers for upcoming shows.

Slip of the Tongue

They’ve got two EP’s on Spotify, Sun Ride (2023) and Human Demotion (2024), and some singles, such as “Queer Mongering,” that you can only hear live right now. Like many acts of the current music era, Nip Slip isn’t confined to any singular genre or sound, which Hokamp credits as one of their strengths. Their mixed blend of inspirations still come together in a cohesive style that speaks of the band’s strong sense of self.

Nip Slip songs feature epic and haunting keyboard synths reminiscent of ’80s art-rock acts like Styx, bouncy beats and Castro’s trumpet paying a tasteful homage to ska groups of the ’90s – and, of course, the dark, heavy guitar and drums of punk and grunge eras. Their music is also peppered with a Latin flavor from cumbia-inspired tracks such as “American Maricón,” featuring some of Castro’s best trumpet work. He somehow manages to find the breath on this track with the trumpet while taking the lead on vocals, narrating in Spanish the story of growing up as a gay Hispanic man straining against machismo, family and religious disapproval.

That strong sense of self coming through the music is largely derived from the band’s cohesion as collaborators and friends. While pondering the key components of songwriting make them say, “Yeah, that’s us. That’s Nip Slip,” they referenced each other.

For Castro, it’s Brae’s distinctive voice. “Once he even opens his mouth, I think it’s a big part of our identity and sound,” Castro says.

Guest points to Castro’s trumpet. The two met at Texas Women’s University as music majors, where Castro initially studied keyboard for a music therapy degree. Before Guest officially joined the band, she wasn’t a bass player and had been invited to hang while Castro, Fleming and Brae were jamming.

“They were like, ‘Hey could you bring us some beers? Like the beer guy, the band manager!'” Guest remembers.

Knowing the band was in need of a bass player, she was more than a little miffed at being reduced to the “beer guy.”

“They pissed me off so much I was, like, ‘I’m going to learn bass,'” she says. “And I kind of just learned a whole instrument out of spite. Worked out nice, though.”

The band is a regular booking at Andy’s in Denton, a dive bar staple for the local music scene now sadly entering its final days before closing its doors after 30 years. Nip Slip just played their final show at the venue on Superbowl Sunday as the half-time act for a “Gay Sports” themed drag show as an alternative Sunday event for those less interested in football. At Andy’s you get a real sense of the up-close, raw energy you’ll only get from local punk rock scene stars like Nip Slip. You can catch the band next on March 25 at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios in Denton.

On stage together, Brae and Castro call to mind two mad scientists electrifying the music to resurrect and call forth some larger-than-life entity with their wild eyes and near pantomiming of the songs’ narratives. There are artists who perform their music and sing you the words as if to complement the music, and there are artists who draw you into the story, demanding your full attention to the lyrics because the words haven’t been written –  just to give the singer something to do with the space they take up on stage. Nip Slip is the latter kind of artist.

That loud and bold kind of theater is Brae’s full intention at every show. His parents met in a traveling church choir and Brae remembers his mother teaching him to sing harmonies before he even learned to read.

Bartender Erica Pipes dutifully cleared off the bar when she heard the opening sultry strains of “Forbidden Fruit” in preparation for a half-naked Brae, having stripped down to his boxers and socks, to crawl across the counter-top, crooning the refrain, “Never going back,” into the mic.

“I don’t let just anybody up there,” Pipes says. She remembers seeing Brae and Castro performing with another local group, the Wee Beasties (who did end up winning Best Punk Act at the Dallas Entertainment Awards), and thinking, “Oh this kid is definitely going to be in the scene fronting something at some point.”

As a musician with bands such as Tricounty Terror, Pipes has deep roots in the music scene and has bartended at various venues since 2007. She’s worked at Andy’s since 2011 and watched all manner of acts hit the stage, ranging from punk and metal to hip-hop to Midwest emo and more. Nip Slip stood out to Pipes as a “loud, in your face, queer act with punk vibes” and a bold message for trans equality. She personally booked them for the Gay Sports drag show, which she also co-produced with her girlfriend, a drag artist in the lineup that evening.

The closing of Andy’s might be the end of an era, but the scene is still alive and well in bands like Nip Slip, who carry the torch for younger generations.