The Death Metal Florida T-shirt has become one of the more baffling sights on Lower Manhattan’s streets: bold Helvetica across someone’s chest advertising a place that does not exist. It came from a 29-year-old server named Brandon Santana, who made the first ones in a friend’s basement and is now, somewhat reluctantly, sitting on something that will not stop growing.
Santana works at GQ-profiled Dimes Deli, the diner that helped the Lower Manhattan micro-neighbourhood earn the nickname Dimes Square. The shirts grew out of that world: scenesters, independent magazine workers, Chinatown gallery openings, late parties. Nobody commissioned them. Nobody funded them. Santana screenprinted ‘Death Metal, Florida’ onto used, inside-out Gildan tees and gave them to friends. The rest followed on its own.
Where the Death Metal Florida T-shirt Idea Came From
The origin sits somewhere between insomnia and a hardcore playlist. In November 2022, Santana had been listening heavily to bands like Death, Morbid Angel and Obituary, all of which originated in Northern Florida. Santana himself grew up in Southern Florida. ‘It just all came together one day when I was lying in bed,’ he says. ‘And I was like, I want to put it on a shirt.’
Before that, the seed had been planted by a college friend who made a T-shirt featuring a map of Mount Vernon, Washington that looked nothing like Mount Vernon, Washington. That particular brand of ultra-insider, slightly solipsistic humour unlocked something for Santana. His stated mission now is ‘to confuse people as much as possible.’
The initial run circulated through his social circle of artists and downtown regulars. As people wore them out into the world, the slogan generated its own momentum. Today, Santana says the Death Metal Florida following is worldwide. Designer Willy Chavarria has enquired. Photographer Ryan McGinley has enquired. One message arrived from a former flatmate: ‘She said that Zoë Kravitz saw it and liked it.’
A Label, a Retailer, and a Bathtub Screenprint Operation
Death Metal, Florida is not only a T-shirt. Under the same name, Santana runs a music label managing a group called German Suplex, which he describes as playing ‘noise rock, not death metal at all.’ He also produces an exclusive collection for Retail Pharmacy, an independent fashion retailer in NYC’s Chinatown, keeping the output deliberately scattered and hard to pin down.
The design references are equally scattered. Santana draws from the tattoos of homeless people, page 71 of Criterion-adjacent photographer Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and a photograph he took of a woman he describes as his ‘ex-girlfriend doppelgänger.’ The timeline on that one has since become complicated: ‘She wasn’t my girlfriend at the time. Then we started dating, and then she was my ex-girlfriend, and now I guess we’re sort of back together. Or it’s complicated… I think we’re together.’
His current draft, worn to the interview on a mosquito-swarmed bench in Seward Park, was screenprinted in his Bed-Stuy bathtub. It came together after he watched Larisa, a 1980 documentary by Soviet-Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov, dedicated to his recently deceased wife. While writing a Letterboxd review, Santana thought of a David Lynch line from Twin Peaks season 4: ‘Fix their hearts or die.’ He paraphrased it as ‘Live for your wife or die,’ put it on the shirt, and added a heart with Larisa spelled out in Ukrainian Cyrillic script.
Strangers regularly try to buy the experimental designs off his back. He finds this embarrassing, considering them ‘complete fuck-ups’ he cannot reliably replicate. The attention makes him uneasy in a more general way, too.
Trying to Stay Ahead of the Moment
‘I’m afraid of blowing up,’ Santana says, which perhaps explains his next project: an in-the-works screenprint of a tablecloth featuring an image of his girlfriend sleeping. ‘The reason I chose the tablecloth is because it’s so far from clothing,’ he explains. The man who built a following by confusing people as much as possible is now using that same logic to keep his distance from whatever comes next.
