Melvins and Butthole Surfers Alumni Ignite Gatta Morta

A New Supergroup That Nobody Needed—and That Rock Deserves

Gatta Morta is a psychedelic rock collaboration formed by veteran alternative musicians Buzz Osborne, JD Pinkus, Coady Willis, and Clinton Jacob, whose debut EP Burn Witch Burn fuses heavy riff-driven intensity with warped, exploratory passages to launch a new supergroup that feels both rooted in underground history and fiercely present.

The key point about the Gatta Morta supergroup is that it should not exist on paper—and that is exactly why it matters. Buzz Osborne Melvins founder, long-time Butthole Surfers members like bassist JD Pinkus, Big Business drummer Coady Willis, and Mr. Phylzzz architect Clinton Jacob all already have more than enough noise under their belts. Yet they chose more upheaval, debuting with the four-song Burn Witch Burn EP and lead single Black Hall, complete with a visualizer and digital release. This is not legacy coasting; it is a deliberate, late-career risk. In an era where many veterans curate their past, Gatta Morta sounds like a refusal to be archived.

Lineage in Collision: Why These Four Players Matter Together

Supergroups often collapse under the weight of their own resumes. Gatta Morta’s advantage is that its members come from scenes that never respected tidy careers in the first place. The lineup is blunt: Melvins’ Buzz Osborne, Butthole Surfers’ JD Pinkus, Big Business’ Coady Willis, and Mr. Phylzzz’s Clinton Jacob. That is sludge royalty colliding with psych-punk chaos and noise-pop mischief. Pinkus brings the deranged low-end sensibility that once helped make Butthole Surfers members sound dangerous. Osborne adds decades of bent riff logic. Willis contributes a drummer’s ear for off-kilter heaviness. Jacob, the self-described weirdo pop-noise architect behind Mr. Phylzzz, is the wild card binding it all together. This is less a side project than an ongoing argument between different branches of underground rock, staged in real time.

The way the band formed makes that argument feel earned. Osborne says the idea struck while he was touring last fall: he “realized I needed to start a band with these three” and that it was “a no-brainer” for a “new heavy/weird band.” Jacob describes a slow build of friendship, from sharing shows to having Osborne play guitar on a Mr. Phylzzz track, until the invitation left him “speechless” yet “100 percent ready.” That backstory matters because it shows Gatta Morta growing out of long-running creative overlap, not boardroom matchmaking. The project feels like the inevitable convergence of scenes that have been circling each other for years.

Burn Witch Burn: A Compact Manifesto in Four Tracks

Burn Witch Burn is being sold as a debut, but it sounds more like a statement of intent. The EP’s four tracks—Taco Bellboy, Victims of the Universe, Black Hall, and Clear Smoke—arrive as a surprise drop through Amphetamine Reptile, with Black Hall given extra spotlight via a visualizer and digital single through a separate label. On paper, a four-song EP is modest. In practice, it is a pressure cooker. The music “lurches between thick, riff-driven heaviness and warped, psychedelic passages,” stitching together the members’ histories into something unstable and new. Willis frames it best with his deadpan absurdity: “Gatta Morta wages asymmetrical psychedelic warfare in the name of romance.” That line is not just promotional flair; it captures the music’s off-center aggression and sly melodicism.

The EP’s structure underlines its intent. Opening with titles like Taco Bellboy and Victims of the Universe, the band signals its refusal to separate heaviness from humor. Black Hall, foregrounded as a single, functions as an entry point into their “solidly weird rock music that needs to happen,” in Osborne’s words. This is not a victory lap for their back catalogs. Burn Witch Burn instead feels like a compact manifesto: four tracks as proof-of-concept that these players can still sound unhinged when they want to. Even the small detail that the announcement piece had logged only 25 article views at one point hints at how far from mainstream radar they are operating, and how much that seems to suit them.

The Point of Gatta Morta: Refusing to Age Out of Weird

What makes Gatta Morta worth paying attention to is not fame, but intent. Osborne claims “it’s always a good time for the world to embrace a new heavy/weird band,” framing this not as nostalgia but as a requirement. Pinkus underscores the hunger behind it, calling the EP his first chance in too long to write a heavy record from scratch with “such high calibre players with such complementary styles,” and insisting they are “cat scratching the surface” of what they can do. Those are not the words of musicians content to be heritage acts. They are closer to a threat. When you place those sentiments next to another bandmate’s separate comment that his older material is “dated” and that being “old men now” is acceptable, you can see the fork in the road. Gatta Morta chooses the harder route: staying weird instead of staying safe.

In that sense, Gatta Morta supergroup is less a novelty and more a reminder of what alternative and psychedelic rock collaboration can be when it is treated as a live experiment rather than brand management. Burn Witch Burn may be only four songs long, but it argues that these musicians have no interest in turning their histories into museums. Instead, they are forming new mutations out of old DNA. The conclusion is simple: if the so-called elders of underground rock are still forming bands that sound this unstable, the genre’s future is probably safer than it looks. The rest of the scene now has to decide whether to keep up with them or get out of the way.