Q&A: The Chicago rock five-piece spoke with Paste ahead of their upcoming LP to discuss channeling anger, leaning into collaborative energy, and what the “Smut sound” means to them.
Smut is reemerging with sharpened edges and a newfound sense of force. Tomorrow Comes Crashing is the Chicago-via-Cincinnati rock group’s most focused work to date, forged in frustration and held together by connection. Written and recorded with the band’s new rhythm section in place (drummer Aidan O’Connor and bassist John Steiner), the songs mark a shift from the sprawling grief of 2022’s How the Light Felt, in which vocalist Tay Roebuck reflected on and reckoned with the death of a younger sibling, towards something more immediate. Road-tested on a tour in support of SPELLLING and captured live at Red Hook Studio in New York with Momma’s Aron Kobayashi-Ritch, the album confronts the exhaustion of DIY life with raw precision and a deep sense of trust. Roebuck channels it with a cutting focus, whether reflecting on industry pressures (“Spit”) or the dehumanization of women online (“Syd Sweeney”).
Paste caught up with Roebuck, O’Connor, Steiner, and guitarist Sam Ruschman just ahead of release month to talk through the record’s inception, their 10-day recording bender, and their new lineup’s explosive energy. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Paste Magazine: So we’ve entered release month. How’s everyone feeling?
Sam Ruschman: I can’t wait to get this thing out there and for people to hear it.
Tay Roebuck: I’m incredibly proud of this one. I think I’m more proud of this one than any [album] so far. This is one of the first times I listened to the album a lot by myself. I just like it so much that I’m very excited to see how people respond to it. My fingers are crossed that people will like it a lot.
Tell me about the inception of Tomorrow Comes Crashing. Were you working on songs sporadically, and then it eventually added up to a record, or did you set out with a new direction in mind?
TR: We immediately started writing again after How the Light Felt. But I don’t think we had a specific direction in mind. That formed throughout the writing process. Once John joined the band as our new bass player, it felt like we had an idea of doing a more bombastic, energetic record.
SR: There were a few months where we didn’t know where to go. The last record was written over such a long period of time. There are songs on that record that date back to 2018, 2019. And because it was written over such a long period, and half of it was written during COVID, we didn’t have a general idea for the record. It was a collection of songs. This was the first record where we started from scratch and found the direction after we had a few songs under our belt.
When did you realize you’d found your lineup?
SR: Andie [Min] and I were looking for a drummer when we moved to Chicago five years ago. When Aidan joined, about a year into us living there, we just got along well with him. He’s the most energetic and technically gifted drummer we’ve ever had. That started pushing us in that more energetic and louder direction. Then John joined the band a year ago, and he brought a lot of that similar energy. It was totally like when the Power Rangers all have their different vehicles and they come together and make the big one. That’s really when it was like, “Okay, this is the band. This is what the band should be forever.”
I know you came to New York to record the album. Did the city have any kind of influence on what ended up being the final record?
SR: We wanted to make something that was nice and grounded and relatable, but we wanted to sneak little bits of weird stuff in there. And yeah, New York probably had a little bit to do with it.
TR: Aron [Kobayashi] had a bit to do with it.
I was going to ask how it was collaborating with him.
TR: We’ve never had a producer producer before, so we were all very excited to lock in Aron. It was an amazing experience. It’s so nice to have an extra pair of ears that can bring something new to the table. And I think he did on almost every song. Whether it was like, “Oh, let’s mess with a weird pedal,” or “Let’s take out that other part that other part’s not working. Let’s throw a harmony on here.” Even just small stuff like that. I felt like he was really engaged with us, and we worked super well together.
Aidan O’Connor: “Engaged” is a great word.
John Steiner: Yeah, he kept saying he’s listening from the audience perspective, which, when you’re developing songs for years, you don’t have that outside perspective, so it’s good to have that voice.
Were any specific experiences being used as a point of inspiration in the writing process? How were the songs coming together?
TR: Lyrically, I would say when we were writing, it wasn’t a concept album, necessarily. I will say, compared to the last album, [How the Light Felt] was very directional. It was about the death of my little sister. I wanted a departure from that. This time around, songwriting-wise, I went in a more storytelling route and was just flying by the seat of my pants with whatever inspiration hit. And it turns out a lot of it is about me being irritated by a lot of different things in the world.
Are there any moments from the sessions that stick in your brain? Any favorite songs?
AO: There were a couple of nights when we were recording where we had to crash at my friend Tanner’s house in Brooklyn, and I have a vivid memory of all of us waking up. We’re all on the floor, and we’re like, “All right, back to the studio.” And we were all in it. We were all excited and energized, despite having little sleep and sleeping on the ground. It was a really cool, for lack of a better word, “bonding” thing.
SR: “Crashing in the Coil” is probably my favorite song on the record, but I also remember a moment recording where there’s a part that has a lot of guitar tracks on it, just layers and layers of it. We were listening to it, and Aron said, “Oh my God, I can’t believe another guitar comes in at this one part.” And I was like, “Hell yeah.” That’s exactly the vibe that we want. Just dense, layered. I feel like that was a good cliff note for the process.
TR: Right now, my favorite song on the record is “Sunset Hymnal.” I just think that it’s so anthemic in a way that I love the theatrics of it. I also totally blew out my voice while recording “Touch and Go.” I had six bottles of honey, whole cloves of ginger, cough drops, all kinds of throat things, and I was dumping it all into a disgusting mug and chew-drinking it between takes. It was the last vocal song we were recording. I remember that very fondly. I was like, “We’re doing what we’ve got to do.”
JS: I think my favorite moment was, I can’t remember what song it was, but Tay laughed at the beginning of the track before her vocal comes in, and then at the end, we were finishing up over dubs and we were all kind of loopy and Aron slowed it down and put a bunch of echo on it, and so it sounded like [mimics gurgling laugh echo] and we were all just doubled over laughing for probably two or three minutes.
TR: I think it was “Syd Sweeny.”
JS: It didn’t make it on the final track.
AO: Deluxe edition.
Was there a specific reason Sydney Sweeney was the one who got the song named after her?
TR: That song was inspired directly by an experience I had. I watched some horror movie that she was in and was looking on Reddit about it, and I typed her name into the Reddit search bar, which is like…
Risky.
TR: It was literally just porn that popped up. It sucks that, on the internet, women who are trying really hard to be something can be diminished into a sexual object. I was just disappointed in the world in that moment, and then I started writing that song immediately after that happened. Just about how weird it sucks to be a woman who’s just trying to be something, you know what I mean?
Yeah, just trying to exist.
TR: Yes, there’s no escaping people looking at you and judging the way you look regardless of the art that you’re putting out, which just pisses me off. Hence the song.
Do you feel like you put that sense of innate frustration in other places?
TR: Yeah, all over it. “Spit,” most definitely. That’s probably the most agro song. That one’s broader frustration with the industry itself. I think even “Touch and Go,” I’m pretty frustrated on, as far as the lengths people have to go to be successful and what that means during a lot of the making of it. We all work full-time jobs and have to sacrifice all of our free time and all of our money to be able to be a band, which we would rather do than anything else on Earth, which is why we do it, but sometimes the grind gets to you. The grind grinds back, and then you’re just pissed off and that’s what you’re writing about, and that happened for at least half of the record.
I ingested the frustration as a Veruca Salt-adjacent, which I was very into. Were there any things you were listening to/watching/reading that had an impact on your songwriting?
TR: I think there were different influences for each of us. For me, it was 2000s emo music. I think that locks in that sort of frustrated feeling pretty well.
AO: I got really into funk and jazz as a kid, and that’s how I learned drums, so I was trying to get back to the first music picks that I loved and really listened to all the time. I feel like I was channeling that on this record, focusing on space and groove.
JS: I thought a lot about the notes that you don’t play, and I was listening to the Stone Roses. I was trying to go between the Acid House Madchester for the base, and then At The Drive-In. The two spectrums.
AO: It was like jazz, funk, and then Deftones for me, totally.
SR: I was really into ‘90s death metal while we were recording, and incorporated it into the guitar playing when I could. Obviously, it’s not a metal record, but I like to think that I was able to take some of that stuff and throw it in there.
I feel like the moments of the softer, lush grunge—I’m thinking of “Waste Me”—the wordy verses and things like that reminded me of something to the point where I couldn’t put my finger on it at all, but it felt like I’d heard it before, in a good way. Were those softer, atmospheric moments intentional?
SR: We don’t really think of a sound and then say, “Every song has to be in that sound.” We’re all a little bit old school in that way. You listen to old records like the Beatles, and every song sounds different. We try to take that ethos into our stuff. It’s not a question of like, ‘Oh, this one’s going to be the soft one.’ I think it just ends up that way because we do what the song requires, and we think of each song as its own thing from start to finish.
TR: You just reminded me, Sam, that when we were writing the album, we used to have this conversation a lot, that as long as we are playing it, it’s going to sound like Smut. And we sort of went by that to be like, “Let’s do as much different as we can per song, because it’s not going to not sound like us.” It would be more fun to just explore each one individually.
What did the process of picking singles look like? Was there a message you wanted to send with the earliest bits of the album?
TR: We picked singles based on vibe a lot. I think the first single, “Dead Air,” felt like a good transitional song from the last album to the current one. It wasn’t too heavy, and it had the same elements that the last album did, just developed into a more aggressive sound. And then for “Syd Sweeney,” I think we just wanted to come out guns blazing after the initial single and put out one of the more aggressive songs. And then “Touch and Go,” I don’t know, it’s like a pendulum. Let’s put out a soft one after the big one.
Definitely, like, “This is the scale of extremes you should expect.” And then going off that, is there anything you’re hoping people will take away from the record?
TR: I think this album, in the opposite way of the last one, is very emotion-driven. We’ve talked a lot together about how cathartic it feels to play, and we decided to record the album to make it sound like we sound live because of that cathartic feeling. So I guess what we would want the audience to receive is that feeling. I just want people to be able to thrash around and feel as big as they want to feel listening to this one.
