No Trend were one of Washington's most creative groups of the punk era: a singer (Jeff Mentges) even more ferocious and emphatic than Henry Rollins; a guitarist (Frank Price, author of the material) incapable of producing regular chords, mostly noise; and a rhythm section which, on the other hand, was first-rate. The result: songs-catastrophes.

They debuted in 1983 with a three-song EP, Teen Love (No Trend, later reissued as a five-song EP), and a sound inspired to the cacophonous and chaotic hardcore of Flipper (Mass Sterilization Caused By Venereal Disease, a storm of rhythm, distortions and screams that is emblematic of the wildest side of the group), but also contaminated by psychedelia (Teen Love, with the only guitar solo worthy of being called such in their entire career) and no wave (the guitar part in Die is a prolonged hiss, the singing is a sinister roar a` la Captain Beefheart).

The tentative album Too Many Humans (No Trend, 1983) featured Jack Anderson on bass and Greg Miller on drums.

A new lineup (Mentges, Bob Strasser on bass, Dean Evangelista on guitar and Ken Rudd on drums) recorded A Dozen Dead Roses (1985), which includes an EP recorded with Mentges' girlfriend Lydia Lunch, Heart of Darkness (WindowSpeak, 1984). Theirs is an extreme concept of music as emotion that gives rise to psychedelic gags like Mindless Little Insects, whose lyrics (the title) are repeated in different tones over an "acid" funk a` la Contortions and the usual tumult of guitar dissonances; or like Blow Dry, in which over a sharp screech of the guitar and little else an obscene litany is recited with the possessed tone of Hitler. In Two Seconds Till Non Existance the singer vomits hoarse obscenities in an ungainly bacchanal of dissonances and saxophone. But the group was emerging from its most punk phase, as demonstrated by more orderly and linear compositions: Cancer, led by the mechanical figure of the bass; One Last Dream, breakneck rock and roll with a background of noir saxophone and spaghetti-western guitars; Heartache, which deviates towards the depressed and decadent atmospheres of the Psychedelic Furs and P.I.L.

The recordings of their early years were collected on No Trend (Teenbeat, 1995). Kiss Ass was a little less noisy, but even more desperate. Shunning the hysteria of hardcore, No Trend had built a suggestive bridge between new wave and punk-rock.

Their third and final album, Tritonian Nash-Vegas Polyester Complex (Touch And Go), came out in 1986, immortalizing them at the height of their musical anarchist abilities, capable of re-interpreting their terrorist curriculum with the imagination and eclecticism of a variety showman who does not hesitate to recycle and disfigure his funk (Overweight Baby Boom Critter), hard rock (Freak), free-jazz (Space Disco) and country (Copperhead) sketches. Here they sounded much closer to the chaotic self-indulgence of the "no wave" than to their original hardcore.

They rank among the greatest practitioners of noise in music and among the most radical hardcore bands.

A fourth album, including the rock opera No Hopus Opus, was released only three decades later: More (2001).