Archive of Our Own ^beta

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THE WRECKERS: A PRIMER

(we’re gonna call this a band primer because I know not everyone is comfy with bandom, so this is for everyone wondering who the hell these guys that just played The Tonight Show/won a Grammy are--if you’re coming over FOR the bandom see bandom primer here (if you’re coming specifically from Kpop bandom see Kpop to Wreckers primer here) and if you’re wondering why the hell there’s a Kpop primer specifically: we’ll get to that!)

THE MUSIC

The Wreckers are theoretically a punk rock band but they dabble and fuck around a lot. you probably heard “Sins and Last Stands” when it was everywhere on the radio a few years ago, yeah, that’s them, it was their first top 100 single. It hit #48! which is insane for a debut album from an indie band.

that album also had “Wreck and Rule” which is always their closer song and also the thing you’ll find people shouting outside their shows, and “True Crime” aka the screamo one aka the reason we kept getting skinheads at shows and the lead singer kept getting assault charges.

You like knowing what’s hot? here’s their latest album “Tread and Circuits” on Bandcamp.

You like bangers? you’re in luck. here’s “Burn” and “Swallow me Whole” to get you started.

you like love songs? here’s “Sirens (wailing)” (listen to the whole thing I swear it’s a love song)

you like slower and sadder? here’s “Wish I was There” and “Verity.”

you like weird? here’s their playlist of Weird Al covers from shows.

yeah. getting an idea of the vibes now?

THE BAND

so on lead vocals and guitar you have Impactor who kept getting assault charges for jumping into the pit to fight skinheads. we love him but also why is he like this. he writes most of the lyrics and is also the guy from the “HYDRATE” memes you keep seeing around because he does the vamping and banter while people retune instruments between songs and is aggressive about self-care. he’s the oldest band member and despite not having kids his DILF energy is off the charts.

the guy usually retuning instruments between songs is Whirl, on...fucking everything. there’s a whole playlist of songs where the liner notes are just “we bet Whirl couldn’t play this instrument and lost.” usually he’s on sax or backup guitar—which is sometimes the lead guitar?—but he’s also played the theremin, the otomatone, the accordion (I did mention the Weird Al covers), the flute, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting. the helmet always stays on. he says he’s the bastard child of Daft and Punk.

on drums and also vocals is Springer, The One With The Mullet. I hate the mullet. you hate the mullet. we all hate the mullet. he is never getting rid of the mullet. sorry. Springer does the second-most songwriting—that song “55¢” that crops up on a lot of emo playlists and also lists of insane drum solos is his. he also gets in the second-most fights. his social media is the best updated and genuinely hilarious and if you’re attracted to men I feel it’s a public service to let you know he posts workout videos.

on keytar—yeah, keytar, because he’s that fucking cool—is Perceptor. Here is a pinboard with pictures of him and his rhinestoned eyepatch at shows. his social media is buckwild because he’s got a fucking phd in biochem and that’s the only thing he really likes to talk about besides the band and dunking on visually inaccessible UI. he’s the straight man in show banter dynamics but like. none of these men are straight. Probably.

so until two years ago the band was these four + touring bass players and then on one of their tours they ended up with Drift aka former Kpop idol Deadlock as first touring and then permanent bassist. they didn’t like. advertise this. Deadlock fainted on stage during one of his concerts and vanished for months and then Drift started touring with the Wreckers, half the time wearing a lower face mask on stage, and even once we put the pieces together we still have no idea where he was for like five months in between the fainting and the tour. I don’t think anyone even knew he could play bass? but he’s really good and we love him and you should watch this compilation of him parkouring out of the band’s social media videos because that’s apparently the niche he wants to fill. according to interviews he had no clue who they were when he joined but he knew Something Unbearably Pretentious, the duo who was opening for that tour, and they’ve been doing fucking amazing since he went main-lineup.

like, without putting anyone on a pedestal, the Wreckers are genuinely pretty cool and grounded guys. they all had day jobs for the first couple years the band was together and have repeatedly said they’re just here to make music, getting famous is a side effect and not one they’re interested in aside from it giving them enough income to make more music. they’ve repeatedly done shows wearing drag—like, good drag, not dudes trying to be funny by wearing dresses. they talk about some kind of dark shit in some of their songs so like, cw for that I guess, but their music is genuinely good if kind of all over the place and almost every artist they’ve worked with has said they’re good people and professional coworkers.

anyway, they’re touring for Tread and Circuits right now and I definitely recommend catching them live if you can—they’re fucking amazing live, the music will either slap or break your heart, and honestly I’ve seen worse banter at professional improv comedy shows. they’ve also got a stipulation in their contract that everywhere they perform has to have accessible seating which isn’t always a guarantee with punk rock shows but they fucking do it even if it’s just a swathe of folding chairs they had to set up as part of their sound check, which I as a haver of shit hips appreciate. while you’ve got a minute please also send thoughts and prayers that their next mixtape EP doesn’t have any screamo because after “True Crime” got some circulation they rescheduled the show I had tickets for twice because Impactor had to deal with assault charges after kicking out a skinhead. Wreck and Rule, broskis.

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a lot of people really liked my other post so I figured I’d do an update so I have something to link to when the same stupid discourse starts going around again. if post one was like Wreckers 101 this is like. Wreckers 400. heads up these are ranked from least to most controversial and if you try to start discourse on my post I WILL block you <3 we’re not doing that shit today

Item 1: ‘wait what’s a walkout topic’ So the Wreckers give interviews and sometimes in the middle of interviews they’ve been known to just. stop giving the interview and just get up and leave. someone did a compilation here of radio clips where you can hear it happening and one time they did it on a local morning news show. there’s apparently a whole thing where there’s some stuff they put in their contracts that they can’t be asked about before they go give an interview and some interviewers try to ask anyway because they’re jackasses and at that point the interview’s just over. so everything we have on certain topics isn’t from interviews, it’s from like, tweets and independent investigations and liner notes and stuff.

there are some jackasses in fandom who will try and climb up your ass if you talk about a walkout topic because it’s ‘against the band’s wishes’ but like. the Wreckers have made it crystal goddamn clear they don’t want to be asked about this stuff so updating new fans on it is the best way to keep anyone from tweeting at them or god fucking forbid asking them about it at shows. so here’s your rundown of stuff you’ll see referenced, and what you should know about it so you don’t act like an *~asshole~*!

Item 2: perceptor’s eye he always wears an eyepatch or something like it for shows. usually bedazzled. or he’s got sunglasses on in public. he used to be a researcher and then there was a lab accident and now the eye doesn’t work and I don’t care what anyone else tries to tell you that’s literally all we know. whether he still has it or not, that’s private medical information, he hasn’t shared it but it doesn’t keep dumbasses from asking about it anyways.

Item 3: Verity Carlo this one isn’t really a walkout topic because Springer will talk Verity up every time he gets another asshole being nosy in an interview but if I have to see one more goddamn post about him ‘leaving the band’ because he played one of her shows I’m going to commit several felonies. Springer and Verity Carlo are friends. sometimes if their tours don’t overlap he plays drums for her when she tours. he’s got drum and producing credits on like half of her catalog. (also, even if they were dating — which we’ve got literally zero evidence of, people—it would be NONE of our fucking business, seriously, get a grip.)

Item 4: whirl’s real face okay if you see someone use this phrase I promise they’re not being a dick this has just literally been the way everyone has talked about Whirl’s helmet from day 1 including Whirl. the helmet always stays on. there’s uh. hints in the liner notes for “ Burn” and “ Monster” and “ Glasses, Hour, Shot” and some other stuff early on in the band’s career before Whirl got aggressive about the helmet always staying on that make some people think he’s got some fairly significant facial scarring underneath which I am saying here as respectfully as I can because once again. this is private medical information that has not been officially shared, the speculation can get fairly tasteless especially from people who aren’t in the fandom, and part of the reason we use ‘Whirl’s real face’ so much is to fuck up the search results if anyone tries to leak photos. so if you don’t know, now you know, welcome to the club, did you see what Whirl had on his face at the last show?

Item 5: one of these men is gay married god okay this should be like item two this shouldn’t even be a controversy, they’ve all SAID they don’t have a problem with people thinking any of them are attracted to men, except last year this fucking ship war drama blew up on twitter. don’t do that again. we know one of them besides Drift* has a husband and that he’s private and like the meme is funny but this is once again none of our fucking business!! so I’m just gonna paste the story from called-you-a-disgrace and then we’re gonna move on:

I went to their show like six years ago back when they played this basement grunge venue in my town and Impactor was doing one of his mic riffs towards the end and said something about “Yeah, we’re only going to do a couple more songs and then we’re gonna head out,” and the crowd was kind of tipsy and someone yelled that they should stay and party and he went “Oh sure we could but someone’s husband gets cranky if we keep him up past his bedtime.” And then someone else in the crowd who was drunk got really aggressive and started yelling slurs and Impactor jumped off the stage to fight them, and Springer ended up breaking a drum and they never actually finished the set. Great show till that point though.

*this is NOT a statement about Drift’s sexuality I’m literally just saying the story is from before he joined the band

Item 6: Drift leaving Kpop Drift’s entire career before the Wreckers actually used to be a walkout topic but he admitted in the Rolling Stones piece that yes he used to be Kpop idol Deadlock, so that’s kind of uhhhhhhh uncertain territory? he hasn’t done any interviews that want to talk to him as Deadlock, just as part of the Wreckers, so the part of the fandom police that screeches at you if you talk about anything the Wreckers don’t hasn’t really decided what they’re doing about it yet. they were already SUPER outnumbered by all the fans that came over from Kpop for Drift. if you saw the first post I made months ago about how we don’t know what Drift was doing for the five months in between Deadlock’s last show and when Drift started touring with the Wreckers, my update is that we STILL don’t know! and that’s FINE! he doesn’t take questions, he doesn’t go on social media, and he’s not in Kpop anymore. his old company is also blowing up for reasons that are probably related to him leaving since he was one of the biggest stars on their label but there hasn’t been enough fallout yet to say whether it was the cause or effect. but hoo boy can you find some deep discourse leviathans swimming about this. long story short anything that says he faked his death to end his career is exaggerating for drama.

Item 7: Springer’s dad in jail god where do I fucking start with this one.

So you’ve probably seen the ‘when you start listening to the Wreckers and think they’re a normal band :D/when you find out Springer’s dad is a serial killer ...D:’ meme going around well uh. moment of silence for those of us who were in fandom when the fifteen-year anniversary of the trial for the Tarantulas Killer rolled around and someone put together that the star witness, the defendant’s ten year old son who was living in his house during the murders, was the same guy whose rock band had just had a song break onto the Billboard Top 100. And then an extra long moment of silence for Springer because woof, dude.

There’s a pretty solid book called The Noise Maze about the murders and trial that came out a decade ago. and also like a billion podcasts, but I don’t like to recommend the podcasts because one or the other of them will almost always try to get a clip or something from Springer even though this is probably the band’s single biggest ‘we’re not taking questions about it’ topic. because it’s also one of the biggest topics people fucking act like vultures about.

this is top of the list for most controversial because there are people who think it’s cool and fun to analyze everything Springer’s got a writing credit on through the lens of ‘his dad who’s a serial killer’* but like. folks. that’s a human person.jpg. I’m not with the ‘we must never speak of the things the band does not discuss’ crowd but for the love of god can we have not only some nuance but some sensitivity, even, for a guy whose career depends on being on stage in front of a public who cannot stop fucking bringing up to him how his dad murdered people in their basement when he was a kid.

*(instead of his other dad who’s a lawyer) (they got divorced) (it was before all the murder)

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Reblog on the above post:

God you people are all so weird about Springers writing like obviously not all his songs are about his childhood but SOME of them clearly are and pretending they aren't really flattens out the argument. Like are you people really going to argue that "True Crime" isnt about his dad being a murderer? Give me a fucking break. Even the less obvious ones are really clear if you pay attention or know anything about the case. Like "55c" really clearly matches up to the account he gave the courts about running away from home and contacting his other dad via payphone. Learn some media literacy.

being told 'Learn some media literacy' from a guy who explicitly refers to "True Crime", the song about being traumatized by true crime enthusiasts invasively digging into his traumatic childhood, and then proceeds to invasively dig into his traumatic childhood is the kind of shit you can only find on tumblr god bless

The meme: