Horror Movies, Reddit, and Digitally Crushing Songs: An Interview with Smut

Photo by Jon Salazar / Illustration by Taya Welter

It’s clear to hear on Smut’s latest album, Tomorrow Comes Crashing, out now on Bayonet Records, that the band is having fun. The songs are loud and bring the shine of their renewed lineup and fully showcase their sense of cathartic spirit. Since the release of their 2022 effort, How The Light Felt, the band moved from Cincinnati to Chicago, brought in drummer Aidan O’Connor and bassist John Steiner, and has allowed themselves to create music that shifts them away from the loss that shaped the sound of their previous record. 

I spoke to vocalist Taylor Roebuck, bassist John Steiner, and guitarist Sam Ruschman about the process of creating the album and Roebuck’s songwriting process. 

Helen Howard: I really loved your last record, so it was fun digging into and revisiting How The Light Felt as well as listening to the new album. I’m interested in hearing about where you guys picked up for this record and the writing process. What was it like starting to craft it?

Taylor Roebuck: It was a lot more fun this time around! How The Light Felt was, in my mind, a little bit of a departure from our previous sound. The subject matter was about my sister, who had died, so it was kind of just like a different tone altogether. After we had finished touring and playing all those songs, which I'm very proud of doing, it was kind of sad. On this one, we had a lineup change partially through where John joined the band as our new bass player. We hit the ground running. It felt a little bit like a return to form, implementing the screaming and the more rock sounds from older EPS we had released. 

HH: I wanted to kind of touch on that aspect of grief that’s present on the last record. I feel like this record doesn't focus as much on some of those maybe darker feelings. I was curious if there's anything else you'd like to share about the differences in writing, maybe how that was different, or how that affected the rest of the recording and creative process. 

TR: On the last one, it was obviously very sensitive subject matter. I felt very vulnerable with those lyrics, which feels great writing them, but then when it comes to actually performing them, it's a little exposing. This time around, writing these lyrics, I feel like I wanted to shift focus from feeling sort of melancholy to what I would consider my sort of default, which is a little more pissed off about things. I feel like the last one was really intense, and I consider myself to be a pretty emotional and intense person, but it's a bit easier for me to write on this last album about broader subjects to feel emotional about, as opposed to something very specific and intimately about me. I feel like the one song on the new album, “Sunset Hymnal,” is a sad song. It's about a funeral. I think that song is the closest I get to being as open as I was on the last record, but hopefully that's not a negative. I just wanted to think a little bit bigger this time around.

HH: I was also going to say, I feel like this album feels bigger and brighter, and it's dreamy, like the rest of your discography, but there's something more cathartic and larger than life about it. I  know you did a lot of the recording as live as you could, so I'd love to hear about that process, or what went into some of those stylistic choices, and how you built that sound to be more heightened. 

Sam Ruschman: I think our last record was unintentionally, sonically, a little on the sleepier side of things, just a little more subdued and a little quieter, with the exception of a couple of songs. 

With Aidan, our drummer now, joining the band, when we were playing the older songs with him, he just brought this certain energy to it that we really liked. Playing with him reminded us of the stuff we used to play, which was a little more on the rockier side of things. We definitely wanted to get back into that sound and showcase that. Before we had recorded things, we'd really honed our live set well with our current lineup. We really just wanted to showcase that on the record because it brings a different energy that translates a bit better than if you were to record bit by bit. There's a lot of guitars on every song, just layers and layers. We just really wanted it to sound super dense. There's a lot of weird, little sounds baked into stuff and vocal manipulation that our producer worked on. We kind of come slightly from a shoegaze background. I wouldn't say we're necessarily a shoegaze band, but we like that aspect of it and incorporating that into our music in our own way. 

HH: I know what you mean. Shoegaze is such a strange umbrella term where it can put a finger on a certain sound, but also there's so much more to it than just that term. There can be easy comparisons when you're making ‘90s or shoegaze adjacent kind of sounds. I'd love to hear about influences you have that people wouldn't necessarily draw a comparison to, or are more of an internal kind of influence. 

TR: I'll speak for myself and Andie, our other guitar player. It would be My Chemical Romance, more of a 2000s sound, but during the sound war, maximalism, and just way too intense and dramatic. That was something that Andie and I were both really trying to lock into on this one, for more thematic kind of sounds that a lot of 2000s emo and rock music have. 

John Steiner: Coming into the band and the new material that they had and fleshing out the rest of it, I revisited At the Drive-In. They were one of my first favorite bands, and the record Relationship Of Command specifically. It's very live and raw and big. I tried to emulate some of that.

SR: I always love using jazzier sounding chords, and I try to put those into our songs where I can and where it makes sense. I also got really into like '90s death metal when we were writing this record. Obviously, it's not a metal record, but I was trying to put a little more like chuggy guitar stuff into it, which is something I feel like we hadn't done much before.

HH: Both John and Aidan are newer additions to the band. I love it when that lines up with a new record, a new lineup, and a new aspect of the band unfolds. I'd love to hear about how those changes influenced the process of making the record, just kind of having new life in the band.

TR: As a band, we’re wholly collaborative. We’ve had quite a few members throughout the decade since we've been a band, but every new member pretty much fundamentally changes the sound of the band a little bit. That’s one of the beauties of being a fully collaborative band. Everyone has an equal say and gets to add their own spin on things. Specifically, Aiden and John work so well together. I feel like their combined energy felt like this amazing injection of that sort of cathartic feeling that amplified the music because of them. Me, Andie, and Sam were just happy they joined.

SR: It felt like when you have an old car, and it's really dirty, and you take it to the car wash for the first time in a long time. It's all shiny and new-looking. Maybe that’s not the greatest analogy, but that's kind of what it felt like. The music wasn't wholly different, but with new talent, it just felt like a new lease on life for the band. John and Aidan are also just such great musicians, and they really know their shit too. It helps for sure, and it makes it great. 

JS: When I joined, I didn't know how it would be or how much input I would have. But ever since the first practice, we were just shedding songs. It’s cool, very collaborative. 

HH: On the topic of rotating members, since you guys are from the Cincinnati DIY scene, as someone who’s gone to lots of DIY shows in the Midwest, I feel like that’s so common. You guys were involved in it for a long time before relocating to Chicago, so I’d love to hear about your history with DIY spaces and shows, and how that changed and also inspired the music too.

TR: When we started the band in Cincinnati at that point in time, we were, in essence, a punk band. It was a lot of screaming and breaking stuff. Something that was really awesome about that scene was that every single band, while we lived there, had at least one female member. I thought that was incredibly normal. Now it is so normal, but it’s interesting to think back to 2013-2014, and every band on the bill had a significant female presence. I didn’t really think about unitl we started more actively touring, and I was like, “Oh, that was actually very special and unique to that scene at the time.” Since we’ve been a band for so long too, as a whole, that scene has changed. I think there’s more of a post-punk and dark wave scene, but it was pretty punk at the time. It was a fun sort of aggro time. But we were a baby band in Chicago. When we visited back, we were shocked to learn that local bands get paid for shows now. For the first six or seven years as a band, we were the locals who played for free. It was crazy to go back post-pandemic and be like, “Wait, y’all are getting paid?” 

HH: To touch more on female representation, the song “Syd Sweeney” on this record was one that really stood out to me, lyrically, especially. I'd kind of love to hear if there's a story about that song in particular, or just how that song came about?

TR: That song, in my mind, is a very straightforward song, which was a bit unique for me as a songwriter. It stemmed from a very specific moment I had where I was on reddit, and I was looking at the horror movie subreddit for recommendations of things to watch. I’m a big horror head! There was a movie that Sydney Sweeney was in, so I was like, “Oh yeah, I recognize her, let me look her up on reddit.” Mistake number one. It was just a bunch of nude photos of her in Euphoria. It weirdly shook me where I was like, “Isn't that awful that this girl is an actress who's just one in a line of many actresses who are like doing their job, working really hard, doing what they like, and having ownership of their own body in the way that we all should, and people on the internet without fail, just try to reduce them to like an object?” It really tapped into something for me, and it felt like womanhood in a nutshell. In any field where we are pursuing something, and it doesn’t matter how talented or hardworking you are, the way you look and how you present yourself matter to a degree that never will for men. It's incredibly unfair to know that no matter how hard you try, there's going to be weird assholes who only care about what you specifically look like. As a performer and a musician, I had a real chip on my shoulder for a while about really wanting, especially with the last album, people to listen to what I’m saying in the songs, because I was really pouring my heart out there. I would get off stage, and people would come up and be like, “Do you know who you look like?” And then they would just talk about how I look like Halsey or like any other brunette woman on earth. And I was just like, “Yeah, but what about the songs, though? Like, what do you think about, like, the art itself?” I was pretty heated when I wrote that one, for sure.

HH: You’re always treading in such crazy waters on reddit. I feel like that's an example of how the cathartic aspect of the music just really comes through so well. As you're getting closer to this record being out and reflecting a bit on the process, I'd love to hear about any certain song or moment on the record that you're especially proud of or really excited for the world to kind of hear?  

JS: There's a lot to be proud of, but one thing I'm specifically proud of is when you kind of go back to what we're talking about earlier, when you listen to the record, the drums and the bass and I think a lot of the guitars too, on every song is live. We're in the room playing together, and that feels really good.

TR: For me, I feel like a really proud moment in recording that I'm just really excited about that's already been shown a little bit, is Aron Kobayashi Rich, who produced the album, had that weird, digital distortion tool called an auto bit. He just pulled this out and was like “Oh, you want to hear something cool?” And then started messing with it, while Sam was playing a guitar part. All of us at the same time were just like, “Oh, we want this all over the record, if we could figure that out.” It was just a really fun moment to have something sort of spontaneously happen that felt like it added a lot of that digital crunch. It made it sound to me like the songs are almost like breaking apart because of how like intense they're getting, but it's really just the auto bit sort of distorting things. Every time I hear one of those parts on the record, I'm like, “Hell yeah!” I love that sound.

SR: To kind of piggyback off that for me, I'll always remember the recording of this record as just, like an incredible time. There was just something in the room. I think it was partly because of how well we all work together, but also how much we got along with Aron. It was a perfect fit, I think it's like our best batch of songs we've done yet. I feel like when we were in the studio, we all just felt that. The stuff that we were just kind of coming up with was super pulled out of the ether. It happened on the fly. We just were trying everything we could, and so much stuff that came out of that was just gerat and made the songs so much better. For me, it was just the whole process of recording. It was just such a good time.

HH: I feel like you can hear that too. The way the songs are structured is so cool because you kind of don't know where it will go next. I love the improvisational aspect too because it's so live, I feel like that comes through. I know you guys have a release show with villagerrr, who I love, so I'm super excited for you guys for that. I’m excited for the world to hear the record. 

TR: I'm so excited for our album release show. Our hope is that we tour quite a bit more this year after the album comes out, which would just be awesome. We just want to play it for as many people as possible, because I'm really proud of it. And we just got off a tour with SPELLLING that was so much fun. That's kind of the thing I'm most excited for, is just playing songs for the rest of the year.

JR: Yeah, we want to be on the road! 

Tomorrow Comes Crashing is out now on Bayonet Records.