Band Names You've Been Mispronouncing This Whole Time

It's not "hame," like the late '80s teen idol Corey Haim, or "hime," like you're starting to say "Heimlich!" but then you choke to death. It's "hy-uhm," which is also the last name of the three sisters in the band, responsible for the '70s-soft-rock-meets-'90s R&B hit "The Wire" in 2013. Still having trouble? It's the last two syllables of l'chaim, the Hebrew toast "to life."

It's "bone ee-vair," not "bawn eye-ver." Justin Vernon removed the "h" from bon hiver, which is French for "good winter," because "hiver" reminded him of "liver." Vernon was having liver pain, a side effect of his mononucleosis, when he came up with the name. It's your classic "misspell-a-foreign-phrase-and-name-your-band-after-it-because-it-reminds-you-of-your-ailments" story.

There's nothing mysterious about the name of South African rap-rave weirdos Die Antwoord: it's just Afrikaans for "the answer". It's pronounced "dee ant-werd," not "die ant-VERD," like you're doing a bad Albert Einstein impression.

The members of Die Antwoord, by the way, describe themselves as "fre$, futuristik, flame-throw-flow-freeking zef rap-rave krew," which has to be the micro-est of microgenres.

Yes, Cleveland "avant-garage" icons Pere Ubu took their name from Père Ubu, the main character of Ubu Roi, a play by French playwright Alfred Jarry. But this doesn't mean you need to pronounce it like you're Inspector Clouseau. It's just "pear oo-boo," as frontman David Thomas demonstrates above.

Thomas says he chose "Pere Ubu" it because it fulfilled his weirdly specific criteria for a good band name, which is as follows: "(1) It shouldn't mean anything but it should seem to mean something; (2) it needs to look good and sound good; and (3) it should have three syllables." With that in mind, we submit the following: Tesla Bo, Faux Sartre, and Mega Bach. How'd we do, David?

Chillwave artist and producer Chaz Bundwick took a multilingual approach when choosing his stage name, Toro Y Moi. It starts Spanish, with "Toro" (bull) and "Y" (and), but ends French, with "Moi" (me). So it's pronounced "toro ee mwah," not "toro WHY moo-ee," like you're commiserating with cattle.

As for why he chose the name, Bundwick says it literally just came to him as a teen. "It's something that I made up when I was 15 in the car. It was pretty much nonsensical." Kids say the darndest things.

Yes, the Swedish indie-pop singer's name looks like "Likely," which would be a pretty awesome name for a Swedish indie-pop singer. However, it's actually "Licky Lee," which sounds like what the kids call the creepy guy who lives down the block and won't stop wetting his lips.

By the way, if you think "Lykke Li" is a tricky stage name for Americans to master, she could have gone with her given name: Li Lykke Timotej Zachrisson. We'd love to hear Ryan Seacrest mangle that.

Considering Canadian electronic music producer/DJ deadmau5's whole thing is to dress up like a giant mouse, you'd think there'd be no confusion over his name, but here we are. No, it's not "dead mau 5" or just "dead mau." The "5" is meant to stand in for an "S," for whatever reason, so it's simply "dead mouse."

He named himself, incidentally, after a dead mouse he found inside his computer. TM1, deadmau5.

Scottish synthpop band Chvrches say they chose to use a Roman "V" so "Google wouldn't confuse the group with actual churches," which was pretty brilliant. Search results for "churches" anywhere on the planet buries the band's page, but searching for "chvrches" gets you nothing but band-related results. But the band says it backfired a little bit, because people frequently ask how it's pronounced. It's simple, really: just start to say "church" and then go "vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv" when you get to the "V." (Just kidding! For the love of all that is holy, the band is just pronounced "Churches," because a U is now a V in Chvrchland.)

Japanese duo Cibo Matto's early songs were often crazy songs about food, so it makes sense that their name is Italian for "crazy food." It's pronounced "chee-bo motto." Another translation is "food madness," which sounds like our kind of crazy.

Swedish neoclassical metal God Yngwie Malmsteen's name isn't pronounced "ing-wee," "yahweh," "yeezy," or "ying-wy": it's "ING-VAY mahlm-steen," like "No one plays as eff-ING fast as ING-VAY, bro."

Atlanta-based rapper and singer Makonnen Sheran — stage name iLoveMakonnen — went platinum in 2014 with "Tuesday," despite recording under a name that reads like a LiveJournal handle. It's not "mack-on-in" or "muh-kon-nen," by the way. It's "muh-conan," like Conan O'Brien (but not like Co-NAN the Barbarian).

Yes, it looks like MACKEL-more, but the man himself says it's "mack-luh-more." He came up with the name during a graphic design class in high school, where he created a super hero character called "Professor Macklemore" for an assignment. Because high school, he soon started calling himself that, as well. He says he later dropped the "Professor" part because he realized it was "wack." Using that logic, that haircut will probably be the next part to go, right?

Indie rock band and '90s feminist icons Sleater-Kinney took their name from Sleater-Kinney Road in Washington state, and it's pronounced "slayter-kinny," not "sleeter-kinny" or "sleeter-kinnay."

Here's a trick for remembering it: Slater from '90s relic Saved by The Bell loved Jessie Spano, Bayside's number-one feminist. See? So don't be preppie and say "sleeter."

Funny thing is, before 2012, this band was just called "Dive." That's how they're pronounced now. They're named after a pretty decent Nirvana B-side track. Supposedly the name change is out of respect for some Belgian industrial band you probably never heard of.

Then again, Zachary Cole Smith, the founder of the band, has gone on record saying "a name is nothing" and that he's never been particularly attached to any name for the project since he started it in his bedroom years ago.

Psychedelic retro-synth surf-witch band MGMT (okay, you describe them better) has a name that's short for "Management." In fact, they used to be called Management but realized another (professional party!) band had the legal rights to the name.

So the name looks like "management" and used to be called "management," BUT DON'T CALL THEM THAT. You know, for legal reasons. They're called "EM GEE EM TEE," just spelling out the acronym. But there are way weirder stylistic choices this band made during their career to contemplate than their name.

Christopher Dexter Greenspan's oOoOO is one of the pioneers of the "witch house" music genre, with which we could potentially populate this entire article with examples of increasingly silly barely pronounceable band names.

Considering Greenspan's gothic, otherworldly aesthetic, you'd think the band name is maybe based on the sound a ghost makes or something. Truth is, the name was originally supposed to be unpronounceable, like an obnoxious online chat handle or something, but apparently it's pronounced "Oh."

As in "Oh, that's kind of disappointing somehow. I thought it sounded like a spooky ghost."

MØ is a Danish singer who performs atmospheric electropop dance tracks reminiscent of Grimes and Twin Shadow. Her stage name has a double meaning. It's both her middle and last initial, because nobody would go to the concert of a band called "Karen" (her first name). It also means "virgin" or "maiden" in her native Danish, which casts a demure contrasting shadow over her stage persona, which is prone to stage-diving, chainsaw-wielding, and other aggressive rowdiness.

We don't have anything clever to say about that because that sounds freakin' awesome.

As for the pronunciation, it sounds sort of like "meh" and sort of like "mə" and sort of like "moo," but also like none of them because Scandinavian languages decided they needed three dozen vowels and they all have to sound like something that doesn't quite translate to English. Even hearing her say it, we've spent days trying to say it ourselves and can't get it quite right.

PVRIS changed both their sound and their name pretty early in their career. Hearing their synthesizer-heavy, new goth sound, you'd hardly believe they started out as a metalcore band from Massachusetts called Paris.

But once they started getting big, according to them, "One of the guys from like Fleetwood Mac has a side project named Paris," so the name had to go. They didn't want to lose their following, so they changed the A to a V (but kept the same pronunciation) and it was all good with the lawyers.

Still kinda looks like "PURVIS" though.

HXLT is the project rapper and clothing designer Nigel Holt (formerly known as "Hollywood Holt") took on when he signed to Kanye West's record label G.O.O.D. Music. It's pronounced "Holt" because it's just his name with an "X" in it. "X" for extreme maybe? But seriously, that's kind of boring compared to the rest of his backstory.

Apparently, he met Kanye when hanging out with the brothers from Good Charlotte, which has to be true because why in the world else would anyone namedrop Good Charlotte after 2003? Then the lot of them wound up in Kanye's studio, and Holt showed off his demo tape, which Kanye then used as the backing track for a Beyoncé song. Next thing he knew, he wound up recording albums for Kanye's record label.

It's the kind of ridiculous story one would scoff at as unrealistic in a movie, but there he is.