We live in a world of instant gratification that doesn’t lend itself well to surprises or secrets. As soon as the latest episode of that hot streaming show airs, spoilers flood the Internet. Whenever Marvel releases a movie, a shoddy phone video of the post-credit scenes uploads to YouTube. The magic of being genuinely surprised doesn’t come easy these days.
Well, for ska fans, the announcement of MUTINY brings back that joy. Aside from a few cryptic social media posts, the group stayed a secret until their debut single, “This is a Eulogy,” debuted on February 13, 2024. When the dust settled and all was revealed, an amazing skacore band joined the ranks of an already stacked scene.
What makes MUTINY stand out, aside from amazing music, is the makeup of their band. While supergroup can be thrown around a lot, the term fits here, as the band consists of members from Voodoo Glow Skulls, Death By Stereo, Dissidente, and Adolescents. Not too shabby if you ask me.
To help highlight this moment in music history, MUTINY members Eric Fazzini (saxophone), Jordan “JP” Pepper (guitar), and Chris Ruckus (vocals and guitar) answered questions about the band, the release, and if there might be anything more on the horizon.
Lots of cryptic messages circulated online about a band debuting this week, and it ended up being a skacore supergroup. What was the genesis of MUTINY?
Eric: Dude, you have NO idea how hard it was to keep this a secret for nearly four years. That’s how long this project has been in the works.
So here’s the timeline.
JP has been one of my best friends for 20 years. We have been in and out of ska-punk bands together and apart. I moved to Pittsburgh in 2013 to go to school. I’m a hardcore ska nerd, so I used to scour the internet for any and all new ska bands.
JP was actually the one to first find Dissidente when they released their very first EP and sent it to me saying, “Hey dude, you HAVE to check out this band in Pittsburgh. they’re insane.” So I did. I immediately messaged Chris to try and impose myself. I shot him a message saying something like, “Hey dude, I play sax. Let me play in your rad Pittsburgh skacore band that needs horns.”
We messed around with writing sax for some Dissidente songs, but it just didn’t come to fruition. While that was going on, JP and I were trying with anybody that would listen to start a sort of “coast-to-coast” skacore band with members from our favorite bands. I don’t know if people know this, but doing a ska band is kind of like herding cats. [Laughs] So again, that went nowhere.
Then the world shut down from COVID. Nothing was happening, Voodoo Glow Skulls didn’t have any shows. People were just stuck. So I was like, why don’t we (JP and myself) get with Chris and just do something? They can do the string stuff, and I can do sax and just see what happens. We started demoing, and it just took on a life of its own.
None of us ever really thought it would get this far. We just kind of started asking people in bands we were a fan of “Hey, do you want to be a part of this?” A lot were busy doing their own thing during lockdown and writing their own stuff. It was difficult to get anybody locked in. So I just went with who I knew. I asked Mike, Efrem, and Jose first, and then all the dominoes just started falling into place, and here we are.
What was it about Ska Punk International that sold you on being the home of the band?
Eric: We really only sent the EP to a few labels in varying forms of completion to get their opinion. It was a mix of most just not responding, and some labels sort of saying, “Hey, this rules! But it’s a brand new band that nobody knows about, so let us know when you have the next thing.” Which is totally fine. It was a band that literally nobody knew about, so why take the risk? Plus, since the original plan was just to put it out DIY anyway, we weren’t expecting it to go farther than SoundCloud, Bandcamp, or something like that.
I met Chris SPI at Supernova when buying some Sgt. Scagnetti merch. I casually mentioned, “Hey dude, I have this project with some people, so I was wondering if you’d be interested in maybe putting it out on SPI?” He immediately replied, “Absolutely.”
JP: Plus, SPI has been putting out the most diverse, progressive roster of bands lately, so it’s nice to be in good company.
For your EP, you also teamed up with FRAIL to release alternate versions of your tracks. What gave you the inspiration to go that route?
Eric: JP and I have been HUGE fans of anything related to Japanese ska. We used to order random CDs from Tower Records Japan using the awful 2005 website translations, just sort of hope they would arrive at some point. One of the random bands was FrailHeadSqueeze, which is what FRAIL used to be called when they started. We’ve been following them for a long time.
My friend Hiro (DJ Do The Ska) hooked me up with Ryo some time last year just so I could totally fan out about FRAIL. Then I had the crazy idea: FRAIL has two singers, and MUTINY has two singers, so what if we had FRAIL’s singers translate and sing the vocals in Japanese? Luckily, Ryo said they would do it!
As a side note, Ryo said it was REALLY difficult because he sings all the FRAIL songs in English. So not only did he have to translate our crazy ramblings into Japanese, but he also had to make it so the timing worked with the music. I’m so grateful that Ryo and Shinji did it for us. Still blows my mind. Plus FRAIL coined the term “BrassCore,” and I absolutely love that.
You’ve got band members across the country in multiple different bands, as well as the folks in FRAIL. How did the recording process work for the EP?
Eric: It all started as a COVID project, in the truest form. We did a lot of stuff from our houses, apartments, or just wherever. Chris Ruckus is actually is a whiz at recording demos. It’s insane. He just churns stuff out like some sort of skacore robot.
In Pittsburgh, Chris took the outlines of some songs that JP and I had and sort of molded them with some programmed drums. Then we sent the tracks to Mike to write real drums so a human can actually perform them. He did the drums in California with Jay Stolo at Straight Jacket Studio. JP flew out to Pittsburgh to record his guitar parts, same with Efrem. Then Adam did his bass tracks in LA, and Jose did his trombone tracks in his apartment.
It was just a whole mess of recordings from all over the country that Jay Stolo somehow turned into a masterpiece.
A manga telling the story of the band and the songs is part of the release. How did that come about?
Eric: Chris and I are the anime/manga nerds in the band. It was mostly Chris’ idea, and I like that sort of stuff, so we just rolled with it. I’ll let Chris elaborate on that more since that was 100% his baby from start to finish.
Chris: I had burned out writing political lyrics for Dissidente. While I still wanted to write about topics that mattered to me like climate change and class warfare, but honestly, it just got too depressing writing about the real world. I had brainstormed a dystopian mecha story for years and years and figured we could use that backdrop to still write about important topics. Once Eric started bringing in other members from bands I literally grew up listening to, the plot of the manga started becoming sort of autobiographical, albeit with giant robots.
What are you most proud of when thinking about the finished album?
Eric: Honestly, we were able to keep the secret for SO long. Nearly four years. Some of us were convinced it would never come out [Laughs]!
This might be some folk’s first exposure to Japanese skacore. Are there any other bands that are must-listens in your opinion?
Eric: Just off the top of my head, and as a sort of Japan-only mix of traditional to skacore: Hey-Smith, FRAIL, Gelugugu, Fishdog, Scafull King, Kemuri, Oi-Skall Mates, The Autocratics, U Can’t Say No!, The Sideburns, Cool Wise Men, Blue Beat Players, Pe’z, Cutie-Pi, D.D.D, Dallax, Doberman, Coquettish, Skalapper, Ska Freaks, Force B. I gotta stop there or this is gonna be the longest answer.
There’s a lot of press about the resurgence of ska music in general, but I feel like the absolute quality of skacore music coming out these past few years has been glossed over. What’s your opinion on the state of skacore in 2024?
Eric: Skacore is a hard one to sell because it’s not really ska, and it’s not really hardcore. It just is. It’s a very love or abhor style within the ska community. We love all types of ska in all iterations and waves and tones and everything. It just happens that this is what we wanted to put out. Skacore has my heart, and this specific “type” of skacore that MUTINY does has been something I have wanted to make since I was like, 14.
It’s wild that it took decades to finally find the right like-minded people to put it together. I know there’s a lot of separation on what “ska” is, but this is our interpretation and evolution. We hope it inspires others to make their type of “dream ska” become a reality so I can love their versions, too.
Who are the standout skacore bands these days?
Eric: It would be impossible to answer this question without mentioning The Best of the Worst. They’re absolutely phenomenal, and their music rules so hard. Same with PWRUP. Their newest album is an absolute skacore masterpiece. Those are my top two skacore bands out right now, aside from FRAIL of course.
JP: I’d also throw in Still Alive, Stuck Lucky, and Chilled Monkey Brains.
Any plans to perform live as MUTINY? With all the related bands between your members, that would be one hell of a lineup.
Eric: We have a couple of things in the works. With all of us being in other bands and having jobs, it is going to be hard to schedule shows. But we DEFINITELY want to get out there and show people the live performance! Right now, we only have two shows set for this year: Ska Punk International Fest in May and Supernova Ska Fest in September. We are so stoked to be a part of these two shows. We have a special surprise in the works for people attending Supernova, but we can’t talk about yet.
Leave it to us to have even MORE secrets. [Laughs]
I assume the answer to “How would you build your dream supergroup lineup?” would be each member in MUTINY. So instead, I want to ask, “What is the best supergroup of all time and why?”
Eric: I haven’t really considered MUTINY to really hit “supergroup” status yet. I think there are a LOT more Ska musicians we want to collab with.
JP: It’s a toss up between boygenius and Audioslave, easily. For their cultural impact at their respective times, and the powerhouse of talent in both bands.
Should we expect more music in the future for MUTINY, or was this a one-time deal?
Eric: You can definitely expect more MUTINY music coming in the near future. We are currently demo-ing our next thing, and we are stoked at how it is coming out. It was originally going to be a “one-time deal” but here we are, a real band with real songs ready to see what happens.
MUTINY Socials: Twitter, Instagram, bandcamp, Facebook
Editor’s Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.