Upcoming Releases

Smut — the Chicago band comprised of vocalist/lyricist Tay Roebuck, guitarist Andie Min, bassist John Steiner, guitarist Sam Ruschman, and drummer Aidan O’Connor  — announces their new album, Tomorrow Comes Crashing, out June 27th via Bayonet Records, and shares the new single/video, “Syd Sweeney.” Tomorrow Comes Crashing marks Smut's first record with O'Connor and Steiner, and sees the band re-energized and trained on the limitless potential that comes with making music with people you love. Galvanized with a new lineup, Smut focused on capturing the big emotions that come with falling in love with music for the very first time. The outcome is ten of their most intense, bombastic, and focused songs to date.

 

Catharsis bursts through the seams throughout Tomorrow Comes Crashing. “Syd Sweeney,” inspired by the actress, is the record's centerpiece. It's about how profoundly strange it can be to be a woman, to be misunderstood by people who don’t even know you. The song is driven by chugging guitars and big, rolling drums. In other words: stadium rock about perception. Paramore meets Dookie. “She connects to the youth and the girls in the water / All she amounts to is someone’s daughter,” sings Roebuck in one particularly poetic moment. The song comes to a thrashing metal-inspired breakdown. It’s ecstatic.

 

Roebuck says: “Women in entertainment are exceptionally talented, smart and beautiful, because they have to be. Sometimes they want to explore sexuality and vulnerability in their work. Then the pitchforks come out, how dare they be amazing AND sexual? You can only be one or the other! Why is talent and hard work seemingly erased once you’ve seen a woman naked?”

 

“It makes sense then to interpret it as a horror film, where we have the dividing tropes of final girls and sexy bimbos who die first for being too damn sexy,” Roebuck continues. “We put the sexy woman in the movie so we can see her be sexy and then kill her for it. It’s a lose-lose. Being a woman in art is to be objectified one way or the other. Success is the monster chasing you, waiting for you to be a little too sexy, knife ready.”

 

 After years in the Cincinnati DIY scene, Smut made their Bayonet Records full-length debut, How the Light Felt. The record was a revelation. Pitchfork called it “a rigorous, decade-spanning study,” and a “well-oiled spin on late-’80s guitar pop.” How the Light Felt brought the band to Chicago, a city with more room for their growing sound. They still faced the modern struggles of the working musician, though: instability, objectification, financial precarity. The band channeled this period of touring, personnel changes, and personal upheavals into Tomorrow Comes Crashing.

 

To make the record, Smut recorded “as live as they could,” alongside Aron Kobayashi Ritch (Momma) in a studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, over the course of ten days. “We have so much energy right now,” says Roebuck. Right before they went off to New York, Roebuck and Min got married, with the rest of the band by their side. The recording was a true labor of love — driving from Chicago with all their equipment, returning from 12 hour studio days to sleep on friends' couches and floors, Roebuck completely blowing her voice by the end.

 

Smut has always been DIY. Because they love it. Because they have to do it — there’s no other option. Tomorrow Comes Crashing is the culmination of that DIY spirit: making a record that completely encompasses the intensity, moodiness, and emotion of their journey so far.

Tomorrow Comes Crashing tracklist:

1. Godhead
2. Syd Sweeney
3. Dead Air
4. Waste Me
5. Ghosts (Cataclysm, Cover Me)
6. Burn Like Violet
7. Touch & Go
8. Crashing in the Coil
9. Spit
10. Sunset Hymnal