Smut Discuss the DIY Scenes and Wedding that Made Their New Album ‘Tomorrow Comes Crashing’
Three weeks ago in early June 2025, when wildfire smoke made the Midwest skies orange and the air hard to breathe, Tay Roebuck, Andie Min, Sam Ruschman, Aidan O’Connor and John Steiner of Chicago band Smut were hanging out in a park and catching their breath from the night before. The band had just returned from performing with Wishy at Detroit’s Lager House for one night only. They immediately drove back to Chicago after the show, arrived home around 3 a.m. and tried to sleep before going to their day jobs.
“It was an awesome time,” confirmed Ruschman, who plays guitar. “We also just spent a month on the road with SPELLLING and their fans were really into us. Which was cool because their older stuff is a lot different than our music. We’ve been playing our newest songs for a while. Honestly, we’ve just been really stoked on them and we love playing them in front of people.”
Those newest songs are tracks from Tomorrow Comes Crashing, the band’s latest album, out June 27 on Bayonet Records. The aforementioned songs include singles “Dead Air,” “Touch & Go” plus quintessential summer 2025 rock tune “Syd Sweeney,” which, yes, was named after the actress. The song is notable for its several sections: an intro, a ballad segment, chorus, guitar solos, and a slamming hard rock finale. All this takes place while all five members of Smut go to town on their instruments.
These songs, and all ten that appear on Tomorrow Comes Crashing, were recorded during one of the most monumental stretches of life anyone in the band has experienced: Roebuck and Min tied the knot.
“ The rest of the band were the groomsmen,” recalled Roebuck, who sings in the band. “It was awesome. We went to Ohio, got married, and I think it was like two weeks later when we packed up and drove to New York. We were all staying on people’s floors the entire time. Waking up super early, driving to Red Hook, Brooklyn and eating exclusively out of the grocery store below our studio in Red Hook. Shout out to Food Bazaar. We were so tired, but it felt really big at the same time. It’s good to have things feel really crazy because it makes it feel intense and cinematic.”
“We intentionally removed ourselves from our regular day-to-day lives,” said O’Connor. “We wanted to make the recording feel like an event. It felt like going on a field trip. We broke through this wall of exhaustion and got a second wind of hysterical energy. It was so much fun.”
O’Connor, who plays drums, is appearing on a recorded Smut album for the first time on Tomorrow Comes Crashing, and so is Steiner, who plays bass. Smut’s members all now live in Chicago, but the band’s original players formed in Cincinnati, Ohio a decade ago. They eventually made the jump to a bigger city in time for their Bayonet Records debut, 2022’s How the Light Felt. It’s been a central location of success for the group, who have used Chicago as a home base before embarking on tours. They have even tapped into playing local DIY shows at venues like the legendary Not Not warehouse.
That celebrated connectedness and DIY culture is central to all members of Smut’s DNA. Roebuck, Min and Ruschman were all very involved with the underground scene in Cincinnati.
”There was this taco shop called Tacocracy that would run shows out of the back,” recalled Roebuck. “There were so many places in Cincinnati that just doubled as venues because they were like locally owned businesses that wanted music culture in that neighborhood because it wasn’t anywhere else. I grew up just a little down the road in Louisville, Kentucky, and there was a place I went to in middle and high school called Skull Alley. It was an all ages venue next to a pizza shop. It was not professional, but there was a little fake bar and they’d give you AL8s and Coke in glass bottles to make you feel grown up. Every punk band you could imagine came through. I was there every weekend. That sort of scene shaped where we started as a band and where we’re circling back to now.”
While Roebuck, Min and Ruschman were cutting their teeth in Southern Ohio, Steiner was a whole coast away growing up out west.
“ I’m from Stockton, California and there was fucking nothing going on over there,” Steiner declared. “Me and my buddies were the only people into indie music that we knew of. We met this guy who owned a strip mall. He was really into jingle pop. He thought we were so sick. He basically gave us the keys to a vacant unit and said ‘throw shows!’ It might have been an old Verizon store. This was in 2012 or 2013, very recession era. We’d get bands from all over the region, like Weed and CCR Headcleaner. That was just such a defining experience in my life.”
O’Connor was also a coast away–growing up in New Jersey–with a similar story to tell.
“There was this thing called Terry’s Serendipity Cafe, which was not a cafe, and I don’t know who Terry was, but sometimes the cafe was a church basement, sometimes it would be in a synagogue, sometimes it would be in the park. And when it was in the park, it was called the Underground Festival or something. None of it really added up or made sense. It was a bunch of high schoolers just trying to like throw shows for each other. And I think Terry was kind of like this puppet master in the back. I learned to play as much as I can. It was how I got comfortable in front of people. You gotta make it every single night,” O’Connor said.
Smut’s collective DIY experiences all took place in different pockets of the United States: but each member suggests that their e upbringing was very important to the process of producing Tomorrow Comes Crashing.
The band’s new album takes on everything from hard rock to pop. They tried so much to have fun, stick to their roots and to not put too much pressure about fulfilling one certain genre.
“ I think we have a lot of different tastes going into the melting pot of our songwriting,” said Ruschman. “I think that’s why everything kind of comes out a little different.”
“ I think we were a little bit in our heads about what kind of sound Tomorrow Comes Crashing could be,” said Roebuck. “Then we decided that ‘if we’re playing it, then it’s gonna sound like Smut.’”
The best way to get a taste of what Smut sounds like will come when their newest full-length record arrives on Friday, June 27. Pre-order and pre-save copies of Tomorrow Comes Crashing here.
Fans of the band can experience the new record in all its fresh and live glory when Smut performs a record release show at Schubas Tavern in Chicago on Saturday, July 5. The band will be joined by Villagerrr. Tickets for that performance can be purchased at this link.
“ The process of making this album was a great time for everyone,” remembered Min, who plays guitar. “If it was fun for us to make, then it’s got to be fun for listeners, too.”
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