4/22/25 ADDS
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SMUT

Tomorrow Comes Crashing
(Bayonet Records)
Add date: 7.1.2025
Release date: 6.27.2025




Smut is the project of lyricist Tay Roebuck, guitarists Andie Min and Sam Ruschman, drummer
Aidan O’Connor, and bassist John Steiner. Roebuck, Ruschman and Min started the band a
decade ago in Cincinnati, Ohio. Since then, they’ve played alongside Bully, Wavves, and
Nothing. After years in the Cincinnati DIY scene, they made their Bayonet Records full-length
debut, How the Light Felt. The record was a revelation. Pitchfork called it “a rigorous, decade-
spanning study,” and a “well-oiled spin on late-’80s guitar pop.” Under the Radar called it “pop
perfection,” that “blends subtle hooks with wistful lyrics.” It was a record that explored grief
through the lens of melancholic dream pop, using drum machines and layered, intricate
melodies.

How the Light Felt brought the band to Chicago, a city with more room for their growing sound.
They still faced the modern struggles of the working musician, though: instability, objectification,
financial precarity. The band channeled this period of touring, personnel changes, and personal
upheavals into their latest offering, Tomorrow Comes Crashing.

Tomorrow Comes Crashing, Smut's first record with O'Connor and Steiner, sees the band re-
energized and trained on the limitless potential that comes with making music with people you
love. Galvanized with a new lineup, Smut focused on creating a record that possessed the
same towering intensity as the records that first got them into music: Three Cheers for Sweet
Revenge, Relationship of Command. The outcome is ten of their most intense, bombastic, and
focused songs to date.

Catharsis bursts through the seams throughout Tomorrow Comes Crashing. “Syd Sweeney,”
inspired by the actress, is the record's centerpiece. It's about how profoundly strange it can be
to be a woman, to be misunderstood by people who don’t even know you. The song is driven by
chugging guitars and big, rolling drums. In other words: stadium rock about perception.
Paramore meets Dookie. “She connects to the youth and the girls in the water/All she amounts
to is someone’s daughter,” sings Roebuck in one particularly poetic moment. The song comes
to a thrashing metal-inspired breakdown. It’s ecstatic.

It is a record interested in capturing those big emotions that come with falling in love with music
for the very first time. Lead single “Dead Air” begins with crystalline guitars, fall-air crisp bass.
Then Roebuck’s vocals come in. Her voice enters honeyed and dreamy, ala Harriet Wheeler,
then turns into a wide-eyed scream. Lyrically, the song describes a break-up: “I heard you say
forever,” Roebuck sings, sending a final 'forever' into the ether with a lilting melody.

To make the record, Smut recorded “as live as they could,” alongside Aron Kobayashi-Ritch
(Momma) in a studio in Red Hook, Brooklyn, over the course of ten days. “We have so much
energy right now,” says Roebuck. Right before they went off to New York, Roebuck and Min got
married, with the rest of the band by their side.

The recording was a true labor of love — driving from Chicago with all their equipment, returning
from 12 hour studio days to sleep on friends' couches and floors, Roebuck completely blowing
her voice by the end. Smut has always been DIY. Because they love it. Because they have to
do it– there’s no other option. Tomorrow Comes Crashing is the culmination of that DIY spirit:
making a record that completely encompasses the intensity, moodiness, and emotion of their
journey so far.