Jocks refuses to dumb it down (too much) on ‘Speedbuster’

The four musicians in Jocks entered into the project knowing little more than they wanted it to be a punk band. Everything else was left unfold organically, from the instrumentation – singer Nate Wilder said at one point he advocated for a dual synth lineup in which the two keyboardists would “face each other, like typists or something” – to the lyrical content, which the frontman first developed as he muttered to himself while pacing back and forth during practices.

The band settled into a herky-jerky groove in fairly short order, however, helped along by the reality that the four are all comfortable playing in different musical formations. In addition to Jocks, Wilder co-fronts Big Fat Head and plays in the Wastemen; keyboardist Brian Baker is in Brian Damage, DANA, and Brat Curse, among others; bassist Mario Malachi fronts Hydrone, in addition to support roles in PAL, Tetnis, and more; and drummer Chris Mengerink plays with Yakuza Heart Attack, Hi Helen, Brian Damage, and so on. 

“Everyone’s so busy that even when we got the lineup, we were like: ‘Well, we’ll play this one time ever’; Maybe we’ll get together and practice’; ‘Maybe we’ll record something,’” said Wilder, who added that Malachi eventually took the reins, leading the charge on scheduling while also writing the bulk of the initial riffs toward the band’s debut album, Speedbuster (Clean Demon/Painters Tapes), which the musicians will celebrate in concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Friday, May 9. “It’s so tertiary to the other stuff we’re doing that it doesn’t have a lot of the stress other projects might carry, even subconsciously. We just enjoy it. It’s fast and fun and we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel, while also not wanting to churn out another thing that exists in the endless droves of punk music [being released]. … We’re from Ohio, and so it’s just like, who gives a shit? It’s a fun thing to do on a Friday. And if we finally make a tape and put it out, then that’s cool too.”

Wilder is no stranger to talking (or writing) about his hometown. On Big Fat Head’s debut album, Digital Citizen, from 2021, he delivered “Columbus, Ohio,” a jangly tune on which he sang of his love for Wendy’s and his distaste for “Lex Wexner’s tits.” With Jocks, he turns his attentions to the state at large on “Cow,” writing about the quicksand like pull living here can exact (“I don’t want to stay/But I can never go”) while lampooning the national stereotypes he’s sometimes bombarded with being from a so-called flyover state. And yet, Wilder said his attitude toward the place he continues to call home has softened in more recent times.

“I definitely find more joy in it that the last time we talked, and I’m coming to grips with the fact that there’s a lot of cool shit happening everywhere, counter to what I had said before, where I was like, ‘All the bands suck, so I had to start one,’” Wilder said, paraphrasing his 2024 admission that he helped to form Big Fat Head because “there weren’t a lot of freaky punk bands in town.” “But, yeah, we’re accepting that we’re a little more locked in to where we are, and now we can sort of spread that Midwest bug.”

Fittingly, Jocks pulls musical inspiration from at least one group of fellow Ohioans, with Wilder expressing the band’s desire “to sound like Devo on crack,” building its lo-fi songs on spastic synths, serrated, start-stop riffs and stentorian, sing-speak vocals. “We wanted to take egg punk and then fuck it up,” he said, pointing to bands such as Coneheads and C.C.T.V. as similarly formative to its sound.

But Jocks distances itself from other contemporaries experimenting in egg punk (sometimes referred to as Devo-core) with its lyrics, Wilder leaning into wordier, more high-concept storytelling rather than the relatively simplistic, nursery rhyme-style lyrics sometimes deployed by other modern practitioners of the form. “I don’t want to rip on that shit too much, because that’s a whole scene we could potentially be part of, but at the same time I think that’s why I prefer to say a million words in a song,” Wilder said. “Trying to find a good, corny hook with colors or the alphabet or shapes would just be easy. And it’s like, why?”

Instead, Wilder embraces the project as a space to unravel everything from the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (“Shinzo”), which the singer saw echoed in Luigi Mangione’s December 2024 killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, to the “great man” theory explored by Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel Crime and Punishment.

“It’s self-perpetuating this idea in your head that you’re worth something greater than other people, maybe, and then realizing it’s absurd but doubling down on your own confidence and just making a mess of things,” Wilder said. “I don’t know. I wish the songs were funnier, but the music is so fast and the riffs are kind of evil, so it just kind of lent itself to saying something fucked up and rolling around on the floor.”