We show that a large family of groups without non-abelian free subgroups satisfy the following strengthening of nonamenability: they each have a rich supply of irreducible representations defining exotic C* -algebras. The construction is explicit. (c) 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http:// creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/).