Stunt Drummer Embody Chaos in Creation on New Single “Warm Up” [Premiere]

One of the true joys of punk rock is its unpredictability, which Stunt Drummer takes to a whole new level with their songwriting. The band today premieres their new single “Warm Up.” It’s the sort of title track to their brand new album Warm Up, Tiger, which will be released this spring via Cavity Search Records. The song is a quick, intense dose of garage punk about literally warming up. The band, guitarists and singers Marty Buckenmeyer and Erik Becker, bassist Ethan Schee, and drummer J. Leaver, enjoy deriving songwriting inspiration from all sorts of different places. They try not to be bound by any rules or preconceived notions. When it’s time to jam and hone in on song ideas, there isn’t much that is off limits.

Commenting on the song, Becker states:

“The stutter stops and random sounds early on in that track; those came from an evening session when our drummer, J, couldn’t make it, so I filled in for him. Largely from my inadequate drumming (me fucking up) and Marty and Ethan still playing, random shit was happening, there was lots of space, and it was great. Luckily, Marty (the smartest one in the band) does a great job of recording our practice regularly on the phone, so when we listened to it later, we loved it and worked specifically to recreate what randomly happened. Good job, Marty. It’s hard to recreate the random magic when it happens, but on that, we felt like we had to here.”

Adding his thoughts, Schee says:

“A lot of parts of this felt like one of those improv games where you have to come up with something on the spot. I get to have a lot of the fun in this one, with the band breaking away, and I introduce a new riff. And I know when we were writing it, at least a couple of the ones I do, someone else pointed at me and yelled: ‘Go!’ There are a lot of times that it doesn’t work, but I think it did here. We’d been playing together for a few years at that point, and it probably speaks to our comfort level and ability to work together. We give each other a lot of freedom to just do something fucked up and see if it works.

“Lyric-wise I was obsessively listening to our practice recordings of this as it progressed as I tend to do, and one early morning I was doing some casual squats in my house before getting into work stuff and I think Marty called me about something and I was like ‘oh you know just doing some squats warming up for the day here’ and that’s how the lyrics got started. They are a bit of an abstract rant about callisthenics/exercise/getting older. You gotta warm up to keep the knife sharp and all.”

There is a certain chaos in creation that Stunt Drummer embodies as a band and a songwriting unit. Part of the fun of it all is striving for those moments when something unexpectedly starts to click. Then, soon after, you have a full-fledged song. That whole philosophy is embodied in the Warm Up, Tiger album title. The name is just a combination of the songs they had recorded. It’s a fitting title considering that most of the band’s songs are mashups of ideas that didn’t originally mesh well together.

Warm Up, Tiger is exploding with unpredictability. The band didn’t approach the songwriting sessions for the album with any hardline intentions. They allowed songs to naturally develop and take shape, which is why you hear so much diversity within them. There is plenty of classic punk rock intensity, but there are also moments you would not initially expect, like “Voodoo,” a near six-minute hypnotic break from the more typical two to three-minute bursts of punk. It’s that versatility which is one of the real strengths of Stunt Drummer. They are quite content to be the band that defies being pigeonholed and easily categorized.

Warm Up, Tiger Track Listing:

1. Pool
2. Chinese Windows
3. Warm Up
4. Voodoo
5. Vortex
6. Paul, The Pear Farmer
7. Switch
8. White Tiger
9. Dress

Stunt Drummer ‘Warm Up, Tiger’ album artwork