PUP w/ Snotty Nose Rez Kids

Beer Garden Concert

Must have valid photo ID to verify age (21+) and identity at the door.

This show is standing room only.

Event Door Time: September 12th, 2023 – 7:00pm
Ticket Price: $28  – Tickets available at Etix.com and Bell’s General Store

About the artist:

It seems significant that there were bats in the mansion’s attic, although how significant it seems will have something to do with how you feel and what you know about PUP. None of it is a metaphor, and also all of it is.

The mansion, for its part, is very real—it is a sprawling residence-slash-studio in Connecticut’s most dispiriting mid-sized city where the producer Peter Katis has helped acts like The National and Interpol and Frightened Rabbit and Kurt Vile make records. There are gold records on the walls and warrens of strange new rooms that the band members discovered seemingly daily; the roof leaks when it rains, and the bats reclaim the attic after dark. PUP singer Stefan Babcock recorded all his vocals in the living room, at night. “The other guys were just trying to live their lives,” he said, “and Nestor and I would be down there screaming into microphones while they were watching TV in the next room.” Babcock remembered Katis telling him that the bats “go away” during the daytime hours. “I was like, ‘no, they’re sleeping,’” Babcock said. “They don’t go anywhere, there’s nowhere for them to go.’”

The band spent five weeks there in the summer of 2021, recording and mixing the typically furious and anthemic songs that would become their fourth album, THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND. The band—Babcock, bassist Nestor Chumak, drummer Zack Mykula, and guitarist Steve Sladkowski—more or less never left. “There were some days that were really great, like magical, everything worked and then we’d go to the kitchen and make a great meal,” Sladkowski said, “and then there were days when you’re like ‘I can’t remember the last time I’ve been outside.’” Circumstances—a global pandemic, still happening, not much fun to talk about and won’t be addressed further here—made cultivating a healthy, communal vibe more difficult, but the band powered through by having friends like Sarah from Illuminati Hotties, Kathryn from NOBRO, Mel from Casper Skulls, and Erik from Remo Drive pitch in. When the band got comfortable in its strange new home, the (figurative) walls came down. “As the weeks passed, we seemed less and less rational, objective, and sane,” Babcock says. “You can hear the band start to fall off the cliff, and because of that, I think this record is our truest and most genuine to date. There is nothing more PUP than a slow and inevitable descent into self-destruction.”

Every PUP record arrives with an implied “contents under pressure” warning; the tension between the band’s instinct for the melodic and its gift for chaos propels the songs forward while making them also seem close to flying apart in a horrifying spray of tears and gore. To listen to PUP enough is to spend parts of every day mentally echoing some hilariously self-lacerating, utterly undeniable choruses; you will find yourself thinking “this is the mosh part” at moments when you would otherwise be tearing yourself apart. It is one thing to feel, as Babcock sings on THE UNRAVELING’s “Totally Fine,” “like I’m slowly dying/and if I’m being real I don’t even mind,” but it is another, very different thing to find yourself shouting along with those words. “It’s funny that we’ve provided for ourselves by being fuck-ups and writing songs about being fuck-ups. We’ve been fuck-ups forever, and now we’ve got a responsibility, to others and to ourselves, to fuck up in a productive manner.”