Jump into the pit with Six Flags Guy

On And Nothing Did So What, the 2023 debut full-length from the combustible Columbus slowcore quartet Six Flags Guy, singer/screamer Jonah Krueger leaned heavily into Kafka-esque flights of fancy, filling the band’s songs with surrealist characters who hang taxidermized flies from the ceiling and spend weeks-long stretches confined to darkness. 

But on the album’s last track, “Work Song,” the singer and guitarist finally dropped this guard, delivering sing-speak lines about sipping yesterday’s coffee on an empty stomach in a failed attempt to shake the malaise that has overtaken him. “I’m tired,” he offers atop a majestic slash and burn of guitar as the epic song crawls toward the eight-minute mark. “I’ve always been tired. I’ll always be tired.”

“That was the first song I really wrote in the band where it came from an emotional, personal place,” said Krueger, who is joined in Six Flags Guy by guitarist RJ Martin, bassist Colton Hamilton, and drummer Sean Pierce. “I was more comfortable writing from the perspectives of these absurdist characters. … But on that one, it was very plain and simple, which was something I was scared to do. And then, lo and behold, that’s the one, of course, that turned out to resonate with people, and they would come up to us after the shows to talk specifically about that song. And I think that emboldened me and had me ready to write more from that place. And so, going into this new record, it was like, fuck it. We’re actually going to bear ourselves a little bit and really get some demons out that we’re working through.”

These include both Krueger’s lifelong struggles with anxiety and depression, which he described as entwined within his DNA – “It’s literal fucking genetic shit I inherited from my parents, who I love and who are great,” he said – and the knotted, largely downcast emotions that emerged during a concentrated stretch of weeks a few years back when a confluence of factors combined to leave the frontman feeling temporarily caught in a sinkhole.

“I had just moved to a new city. I had a weird, friend breakup thing that was really weighing on me. And there was probably a romantic thing going on, too. And I just felt very isolated,” said Krueger, who turned to writing in that moment, penning the bulk of the songs that would become Six Flags Guy’s excellent new album, You Look Terrible, which the band will celebrate with a release concert at Cafe Bourbon Street on Saturday, June 7, joined by Big Fat Head, Bomb Bunny and DJ VeryGoodPlus. “And looking back now, it’s like, wow, there’s a lot of space on the record. And there’s a lot of sitting in this melancholy and thinking, ‘I know this is going to end, but right now it feels like this is the only thing that has ever been and ever will be.’”

The loneliness Krueger experienced in those weeks, which coincided with his move to Columbus from nearby Athens, ripples through slow-building tracks such as “I Miss My Friends,” a song that labors under gravitational forces before exploding nearly six minutes into its runtime, burnished strains of guitar and near-whispered words giving over to feedback-heavy riffs and skin-on-fire vocals, Krueger repeatedly howling the song title like a man desperate to again feel some sense of connection.

“For me, writing is extremely therapeutic, and there’s a release in finding certain chord progressions or little licks or riffs,” Krueger said. “And, obviously, dynamics are big in this group, where we sort of ride that tension until there’s this giant explosion of distortion and noise, which is very cathartic. … Even years later, it’s like, oh, I’m not in that same place, but you can still tap into those same emotions. We were practicing last night, and I was letting all of these inhibitions out, almost like an exorcism where you can visualize this black venom coming out of your mouth. And you feel so much better after.”

These personal revelations are balanced on the record by humorously caustic turns aimed squarely at this era of late-stage capitalism, which Krueger described as “a cancer that is everywhere and eats everything.” These include “Ikea Way Gemini Place,” which traces the routine of a commuter en route to their job – a gig that consists of jumping daily into the same giant pit – and the rubbery, Shellac-evoking “The Children Yearn for the Mines.” Taken from a much-memed phrase satirizing the relaxing of child labor laws, the song has taken on additional meaning under the current administration, which is populated by ghouls like commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, who earlier this year turned up on MSNBC to sell a vision of an American dream in which multiple generations of a family line will spend the bulk of their lives slogging away in the same manufacturing plant. 

“And, of course, the people saying that, their children aren’t the ones who are going to be doing that work,” Krueger said. “And that’s the crux of the song, really. Don’t you want to get in there? Aren’t you a real man? C’mon, get in the mines. And then I’ll take my 80 percent off the top and you can keep your 20 percent. And it’s the fat cat, the company man. All of this shit. And it’s certainly this current moment but it’s also existed since the Industrial Revolution, if not for millennia before that.”

Throughout You Look Terrible, Krueger vocalizes these long-simmering frustrations during spoken-word passages delivered in the record’s more languid moments, describing his role in those moments as that of “the half-drunk rambler.” Beyond the release these exultations can inspire, the passages can also inject a degree of flexibility into the music, enabling the frontman to address new grievances as they surface in the moment.

“Especially once we get them on track and there’s some record of what I quote-unquote think they should be, then I feel the liberty to spice it up a little bit … and talk about some political story that’s really bothering us or something funny that happened at the venue before the show,” Krueger said. “But that’s part of what I love about this band and the style of music. You’re always sort of riding the line of keeping that very serious and absurd and weird and brooding tone with this sense of fun and that larger punk rock spirit that exists beneath everything.”