“At a young age, in my teens, I had to decide whether I wanted to buy albums or T-shirts,” Justin Anderson says. “I guess the narcissist in me wanted to wear the bands I listened to rather than have a record collection. I opted for the shirts and have been collecting for about 12 years.”
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Anderson’s collection now runs approximately 225 shirts deep—90 percent of them black—and includes genres of music you expect to traffic in grim colors and outrageous designs of gloom: heavy metal, doom, psych, grindcore, thrashcore, and a slew of other “cores.”
The majority of Anderson’s collection comes straight from the bands, with the sale either conducted online or at a merch booth. And just because he’s smartly ditching out on the tees from his heavier years, that doesn’t mean he has plans to stop compiling.
