On the morning of 13 January 2025, news reports began circulating about an unidentified 64-year-old ambulette driver who’d been found dead in the back of his work vehicle in a quiet residential neighborhood in the Bronx. According to multiple New York City media outlets, the victim was discovered face-down in a pool of blood with “extensive trauma to his body”—wounds apparently incurred from having been beaten to death. Although a suspect has since been arrested and charged with murder, the circumstances and motive remain unclear.
By the next day, it had surfaced that the victim in question was musician Peter Forrest, best known as P. Fluid, one-time frontman of the Bronx-based genre-bending group 24-7 Spyz. The band—which Forrest co-founded with guitarist Jimi Hazel in 1986—incorporated thrash metal, hardcore punk, funk, ska, and reggae with traces of jazz. Alongside the likes of Fishbone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Urban Dance Squad, and Living Colour, 24-7 Spyz helped usher in an era of unprecedented stylistic freedom.
The late singer-multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, and US Army veteran fronted 24-Spyz under the moniker P. Fluid (get it?) until his abrupt departure in late 1990, singing on two pivotal albums, 1989’s Harder Than You and 1990’s Gumbo Millennium. He returned for 1994’s Temporarily Disconnected, only to leave the group again for good the following year. That final effort with 24-7 Spyz represented a prodigious leap forward in the group’s sophistication and range, but the first two albums are more widely remembered. That’s partly because they landed right in the thick of the musical uprising that shook the world by storm as the 1980s gave way to the 1990s.
It’s important to remember that what we now look back on as “alternative music” actually consisted of multiple branches on a rather tangled tree. Like many of their contemporaries, 24-7 Spyz found footing on a number of those branches. For example, they took Primus as the opening act on a US jaunt of headlining clubs in 1990. That was at a point when both bands were still viewed as the face of a nascent “funk-metal” movement that saw audacious, slapping bass players in the spotlight more than ever before.
Several other bands connected to that movement—Faith No More, Suicidal Tendencies/Infectious Grooves, Mindfunk, Death Angel, etc—either had roots in other sub-genres or would later come to be categorized under the broader “alternative” umbrella. Meanwhile, Fishbone and Living Colour were already being hailed—and challenged—as avatars of the idea that, yes, there were black musicians with an affinity for playing heavy rock. Like those two bands, the Spyz broke the stereotype that black artists were relegated to making R&B and hip-hop.
By the same token, Hazel and bassist Rick Skatore (who both remain in the group today) were unabashed about the influence that classic 1960s and 1970s soul music had had on them. Though 24-7 Spyz barely touched on rap, the fact that they grew up in the South Bronx meant they were inevitably steeped in hip-hop sensibilities. When Harder Than You made national waves in 1989, there was something deliciously confounding about a band that dressed like the love children of rappers and skate punks who could keep pace with the unbridled aggression of groups like Nuclear Assault, Agnostic Front, Sick of It All, and Ludichrist.
A decade after Bad Brains had set the bar for how ferocious hardcore music could get, the Spyz looked poised to inherit the mantle. There was one crucial difference: Bad Brains, believe it or not, had initially set out to play an amped-up permutation of jazz fusion. 24-7 Spyz, by contrast, looked to the Isley Brothers, Rufus, and Motown as their north star. Where Fishbone and Living Colour exuded an air of musical refinement, 24-7 Spyz dove into blurring genre distinctions like a bunch of stoned, giggly college kids buffet-hopping between ten different types of cuisine.
That said, if you didn’t know better, you could easily mistake the Spyz’s thrashed-up remake of Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie” for the work of the Chili Peppers, Scatterbrain, or Suicidal Tendencies. Which is to say: you have to strain to hear the soul influence. Drummer Anthony Johnson’s helicopter-like footwork didn’t exactly swing (at least not yet). Skatore’s slap-happy style bore little resemblance to the finessed grooves of James Jamerson, Larry Graham, and Nathan Watts.
On the other hand, it’s not for nothing that legendary Chicago Tribune/Sound Opinions music critic Greg Kot once described Hazel’s playing as “the fluidity of Wes Montgomery [blended] with flamethrower riffs worthy of Eddie Van Halen”. Indeed, Hazel’s unorthodox chord voicings brought undeniable color and texture to 24-7 Spyz. However, if you want to locate the soulfulness at the heart of their sound, Peter Forrest’s voice is the most obvious place to look for it.
Like his then-bandmates, Peter Forrest was certainly an omnivore fond of pushing the musical envelope to extremes. Even at his most ear-piercing, though, he could convey deep feeling that we rarely associate with vocalists who scream their heads off. When he stopped to actually sing, the impact was powerful enough to take your breath away. Forrest carried those same qualities over into his post-24-7 Spyz work, most of which he released under the moniker BlkVampires (later BlkVampiresX).
Over a ten-year stretch from 2005 to 2022, he released roughly two dozen songs—one full-length album, two EPs, and four singles. (Five songs on BlkVampires’ self-titled debut appear to be 24-7 Spyz rough mixes from Temporarily Disconnected.) Admittedly, there’s crudeness in the production values. Much of the material doesn’t quite sound fully realized, and Peter Forrest could have benefited mightily from an attentive producer and a capable mastering engineer. Even so, the recordings are not without their charms. Warts and all, Forrest’s body of work still abounds with the appeal of an outsider artist who’d committed to his own vision—a vision as captivating as it was offbeat.
On first blush, Forrest’s post-Spyz reinvention as a corpse-painted, top hat-wearing Blacula–inspired alter-ego fronting a cabaret-style outfit appears utterly incongruous with the athletic, screeching figure we last saw pinballing across stages three decades ago. But BlkVampires retained many of the same qualities that first endeared Forrest to fans in 1989. Even removed from 24-7 Spyz’ whirling sound cacophony, Peter Forrest still swerved all over the musical map. After Spyz, he continued to run the gamut from face-melting metal to feathery a-cappella gospel harmonies that reflected his Baptist upbringing—touching on many other styles in between.
Though Peter Forrest clearly drew from icons like Prince, Terence Trent ‘Darby, Maxwell, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, his adoption of vampire and goth aesthetics once again landed him in a space long assumed to be a white domain. But if Forrest was making larger statements about Afro-goth subculture and the metaphorical implications of vampire lore and race, it’s not readily apparent in his songs. (Tunes like “Blkenstein and “Cryogenics” contain some pretty enticing suggestions, though.) He ventured into similarly fertile terrain outside of music, co-authoring a Hasidic horror novel—yes, you read that correctly—set in Brooklyn’s “ultra-Orthodox” Crown Heights neighborhood.
The book, The HarlequinX, garnered a 2013 write-up in the Jewish magazine Tablet. The genesis of The HarlequinX’s premise is so outlandish that it’s hard to tell whether Peter Forrest had followed his muse to a creative masterstroke or to a level of absurdism that would’ve made Mel Brooks proud—or whether he’d been riding the line between the two all along and we just never recognized it in the context of the Spyz. Either way, kudos to Forrest for daring to write about such an insular community from an outsider’s perspective and for ingratiating himself with community leaders in the process, which the Tablet article covers in fascinating detail.
Peter Forrest’s social media posts offer scant clues about the source of his inspiration, who he was, and how he saw the world. A handful of posts from his Instagram page—such as this one from Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign rally in the Bronx or this one comparing Kamala Harris to bird shit—would seem to indicate that he supported Trump. Sometimes, however (like with this re-post or this one), his political sympathies aren’t so clear. (BlkVampires also posed for a photo with Rev. Al Sharpton in 2015 following the release of their single “Eric Garner”.) Evidently, Forrest preferred leaving cryptic breadcrumbs for his followers to make sense of. Browsing through the various quips and jabs, you often have to pause to assess whether you’re in on the joke.
Even still, Peter Forrest’s posts betray a hilarity that’s hard to deny. With his snappy wit, he’d have been well-equipped to brand himself as an online personality. One can only imagine the banter he’d have gotten into with an engaged following. However, it’s hard to tell how much Forrest actually wanted to be a public figure again. For one, he rarely showed his face without the face paint, and he offered virtually no glimpses into his day-to-day existence—a dramatic contrast with the way musicians tend to behave online. While shades of that old flamboyance shine through, you get the sense that Forrest was keeping hidden behind a protective barrier of sardonic memes.
Of course, Peter Forrest left some hints in the music. Of course, Spyz staples like “Social Plague”, “Ballots Not Bullets”, and “Deathstyle” defined his socially-conscious perspective right out of the gate. But Forrest was arguably at his most compelling when he was at his most unguarded. In the spoken-word Gumbo Millennium interlude “Some Defender’s Memories”, for instance, he tells the story behind his enlistment in the Army and even encourages the audience to look at military service through a more sympathetic lens.
With its meshwork of melodic bass figures ringing softly in the background, “Some Defender’s Memories” provided a poignant respite to 24-7 Spyz’s all-out freneticism. Likewise, though it’s not clear how much Peter Forrest was singing from his own experience on “Dude U Knew” off the same album, his way of investing the lyric, “I’m just like you / afraid to bleed” with naked vulnerability stands as one of the most haunting moments in his body of work. We can also look to the BlkVampires song “My Own Father”, where he sings, “Sometimes I seek my own father / I keep looking for a hero / A person I should admire.”
For whatever it’s worth, Peter Forrest’s music after his departure from 24-7 Spyz barely registered with the public. Other than the Tablet piece, a blurb-length concert review in The Source (“the bible of hip hop”), an artfully written EP review in the legendary horror magazine Fangoria, and a handful of blog posts (like this one from 2012), Forrest left a pretty meager footprint in the music press.
For Rolling Stone’s obit, contributor David Browne had to reach all the way back to a 2018 interview from horroraddicts.net to dig up a quote from Forrest. (He did appear as a plaintiff on The People’s Court once in the 2010s, but he wasn’t in character. If any fans were watching at the time, they likely wouldn’t have recognized him.)
Nevertheless, the music he made on his own only further highlights the stunning incandescence of his voice. By turns, he came across as sensitive, fiery, ethereal, convivial, and aloof. He conveyed sweetness, anguish, lust, and concern. He presented high-minded ruminations on life, love, and injustice while capturing the humdrum of everyday sensations. He transported us from the sublime resonance of a church choir to the grimy bathroom at CBGB and then back again. Well into middle age, Peter Forrest stretched his abilities in about as many directions as we can expect the human voice to travel. His voice, in fact, contained a multitude of voices.
In a lengthy interview that Jimi Hazel gave to the Bronx Historical Society in February of 2024—just under a year before Peter Forrest’s murder—Hazel recounts in depth how Forrest quit 24-7 Spyz just as the band’s momentum was cresting. Forrest announced his departure onstage on the final date of their run as the opener for a stretch of Jane’s Addiction’s historic campaign supporting their era-defining 1990 classic Ritual de lo Habitual. Hazel explains that he and Skatore were completely blindsided by Forrest’s decision, though tensions had been building throughout that whole year.
Speaking on camera for over three hours, Hazel spends the last 40 minutes unpacking the dynamics that led to the unraveling of his relationship with Peter Forrest. Looking back, the band was on a measurable upward trajectory, and Forrest appears to have been responsible for derailing it, at least according to Hazel’s account. At times, as we so often see long after bands break up, it’s abundantly clear that Hazel still harbors resentment over Forrest’s decision. Almost 35 years later, Hazel still didn’t understand why anyone would, as he sees it, sabotage a situation that had been going so well. After Forrest quit the second time, he and Hazel never spoke again.
It goes without saying that the finality of a person’s passing tends to soften the heart and nullify grudges. Posting on Facebook, Hazel wrote with both candor and tenderness about his long-estranged former bandmate’s death. From the sounds of it, it wouldn’t have taken someone dying for Hazel to be open to reconciliation: “He’d mentioned to [a mutual friend] not long ago that he wanted to speak to me,” Hazel’s post reads. “If he’d called, I would’ve answered. I have no idea what might’ve come from it, but I have a deep-rooted feeling that the long overdue conversation we should’ve had would’ve been a beautiful thing.”
There’s much more to the post, but it ends with a plea from Hazel, who lost his own father just days before Peter Forrest’s passing: “Please know that tomorrow isn’t promised to ANY of us. If you need to make a long-overdue phone call to begin the process of making things right with someone, PLEASE DO IT TODAY!!!!!”
Sage words indeed.