Grumpster

Eight years into their career, it was an easy decision for Bay Area punks GRUMPSTER to self-title their third album. “It feels like we’re being reincarnated,” beams bassist and vocalist Donnie Walsh gleefully.

Mentored by Asian Man Records legend Mike Park and hailed by BrooklynVegan for a hard-charged sound that “sits nicely next to early Green Day and Operation Ivy” with “a fresh indie-punk vibe in the vein of Lemuria, Tigers Jaw and Joyce Manor,” Grumpster has brought the passion and uncompromising snarl of the East Bay’s salad days into the modern era since forming in 2017.

The band’s 2022 LP, Fever Dream (their first for Pure Noise Records), introduced them to the masses, earning Grumpster headlines in outlets like Kerrang (who praised the band’s “melodic punk nuggets drenched in syrup and slingshotted into the sun”), shows at the legendary 924 Gilman St. and national tours with the likes of Jawbreaker, Lagwagon and Joyce Manor from coast to coast.

Along the way, Walsh (he/him), drummer Noel Agtane (he/him) and guitarist Lalo Gonzalez Deetz (he/him) received a crash course in what it means to be a full-time touring act – along with a brand-new member who’d become central to their evolution. GRUMPSTER marks the album debut of guitarist and vocalist Alex Hernandez (they/them), who first joined the trio as a touring musician during the Fever Dream cycle and quickly became an integral part of the band’s sound.

“We’ve known each other for a really long time,” recalls Hernandez, who played with Agtane in another project before joining Grumpster full-time for the recording of 2023’s shred-heavy single “Hollow.” “I caught the first handful of Grumpster shows and have always been around. That morphed into me playing guitar with them live.”

“We’d been on four U.S. tours with Alex by the time we started writing this album, so the chemistry was built-in already,” Walsh says. “They’re a good singer and songwriter, so it was pretty easy to say, ‘You can have some songs on the album, too, if you want!’”

Produced by Brett Romnes (Hot Mulligan, The Front Bottoms), GRUMPSTER is the sound of a once-green act coming into their own as players and writers – as the now-quartet use their sweat-soaked punk rock flame not to set their past ablaze, but bravely light the path ahead.
Hernandez’s gruff vocals on tracks like “Bottom Feeder” and “Just For Fun” offer a grittier counter to Walsh’s more saccharine delivery, while new textures, tones, and grooves expand the band’s sonic playbook into post-grunge (“Grey”), fuzzed-out alternative (“Bern Needs His Meds”) and 6/8 surf rock (“SSBpt2”) without losing the passion fans have come to expect.

“This is the first time we got to write music since becoming a touring band,” Walsh says. “As soon as we were supposed to start touring, the pandemic happened. We got to come in to write this album having done hella shit and multiple U.S. tours. We were way more honed in than ever before on what it took to write music. As we kept working on the songs, we’d get further and further away from where we started and they started sounding cooler and cooler.”

“We wrote almost all these songs in the same room at the same time,” Gonzalez Deetz adds, “whereas in the past we’d bring pieces in together.”

The four members are quick to credit this more collaborative, face-to-face process for the album’s undeniable energy and live feel, allowing them to showcase the chops they honed in sweaty clubs across the country over the past few years while seamlessly working to continue pushing their sound in new directions.

“Musically I think we’re at the top of where we’ve been,” Agtane explains. “I was the best drummer I ever was going into recording, and I think everyone else felt the same way about their abilities. The performances we were able to capture were just next level.”

Those performances are accentuated by the close-knit, heart-on-sleeve lyricism of Walsh and Hernandez – the former’s more deliberate pen and the latter’s off-the-cuff creative ability – as they explore gender, anxiety, isolation, relationships, and more over the course of the album’s 11 songs. This sort of deeply personal writing has been at the heart of Grumpster since the band first formed, but it’s never been so sharply and adroitly distilled as it is here – set to elevate GRUMPSTER from a barn-burning neo-punk album to one filled with deeply resonant songs audiences can connect with immediately and for years to come.

“I’d say this album is about general suffering,” Walsh says with a laugh. “Being alive is suffering sometimes. Compared to Fever Dream, I wanted to be more transparent and honest in terms of the lyrics; no metaphors or anything like that. I’m over songwriting that’s trying to be clever. If I were to stumble upon this album as a listener, I’d know exactly what the songs were saying and take a lot from it – because it really do be like that sometimes. XX