Photo by Jon Salazar
Smut’s latest album, Tomorrow Never Comes, is a tight, ten-track collection of ’90s-influenced alt-rockers with just a few hints at the band’s punk rock origins, particularly in their energy and unapologetic directness. This new release follows their deeply personal 2022 album, How the Heart Felt, written in the wake of a tragic loss by singer Tay Roebuck.
The band, originally formed in Cincinnati by Roebuck and guitarists Andie Min and Sam Ruschman, relocated to Chicago during the pandemic for a fresh start. There, drummer Aidan O’Connor and bassist John Steiner joined the lineup, bringing a fresh dynamic that further shaped their evolving sound.
With new members and more experience, Smut headed to Red Hook, Brooklyn, last fall for a quick, 10-day recording session. They teamed up with producer Aron Koybayashi Ritch (also the bassist for Momma), their top choice known for his ability to work with female vocalists and polishing tracks without losing their edge. The result was Tomorrow Never Comes, released at the end of June on Bayonet Records.
Smut partnered with Bandcamp for a listening party two days before the album’s official release, giving fans a first listen and a chance to share their thoughts directly with the band. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with many listeners calling it the best thing they’ve heard in 2025.
Immediately following the listening party, Roebuck, O’Connor, and Steiner joined me to discuss their journey, the move from Cincinnati to Chicago, how they stayed true to their roots, and their hopes for Tomorrow Never Comes.
You just finished doing a Bandcamp listening party for the new record. How did it feel?
AIDAN: It was super cool. I’ve never done anything like that. I haven’t even participated in listening parties like that. You play these shows, and you’re not looking out into the crowd, you don’t really know where you are, you can’t see anything. Then you do something like this, and they’re all there, and they’re talking. Oh, my God! They exist! They’re out there.
It’s instant feedback. It’s the first time people have heard the whole record and they are all reacting in real-time and at the same time. That’s a unique experience for a band because you don’t get opportunities like that often.
TAY: It’s exciting. I feel like I’m going to attend more of them as a listener because that was really cool to just have very first impressions as they’re happening.
If the album was a book, what section of the bookstore would it be in?
TAY: The Smut section (laughs). That is a section in some bookstores. It’s like a Thriller. That’s where my mind’s going.
AIDAN: Maybe in the Sociology section.
TAY: Or Mythology.
JOHN: Romance.
Who were the biggest influences in your life that got you into listening to music?
TAY: My dad was a radio DJ for a classic rock station. So since birth, there’s just been a lot of 60s, 70s, and 80s music playing in my house. I really locked onto Oasis in 6th grade, and then also Nirvana. I was obviously going through a very weird, angsty time in my life, but I distinctly remember hearing Nirvana for the first time and having that be a mind-blowing experience that made me want to make music of my own.
JOHN: For me, it’s hard to answer because I’m an only child. I remember getting a Britney Spears CD when I was like 5. I had a little CD player in my room, and I can think of different albums I would just play over and over again alone and listen to them. It was like a little world for me, you know.
Were your parents into music?
JOHN: Yeah, my dad got me into The Beach Boys. I remember when I first heard them I was like, “What the fuck is this? This is stupid!” But then later on, we got really into it. My mom loves The Beatles.
AIDAN: I remember when I was a kid, my dad would take us to Barnes & Noble, and we’d go through the CD section. I remember my dad did a test on us one day. He took my sister and he’s like, “Alright. Listen to this.” He put on “Black Dog” by Led Zeppelin. She was like, “What the hell is this? I don’t like this.” Then he went to me, I’m probably like 5 years old or something, and I’m headbanging. It was just in me. I just needed someone to be like, “There it is.” Then I started taking as much as I could. My dad played guitar, which actually my sister, who sings, was like, “Dad, I heard you used to play guitar.” He was like, “Yeah, I haven’t done that for 15 years.” And she was like, “Well, I want to play at the talent show. Can you dust off the guitar?” They started playing together, my dad and my sister. So there was always music happening.
My dad was making all these Guitar Center trips. I couldn’t be left home alone because I was too young. I hated going to Guitar Center, so I would just go to the drum room, and I just start banging on shit because it was so much fun. I have such vivid memories of the Guitar Center employees coming up to me and screaming at me, getting so mad at me because it’s like a Monday night, and a 5-year-old is just wailing on the drums. I didn’t like going to Guitar Center, but I kept going to the drum room, and I kept doing it, the rest is history, I guess.
I first became aware of Smut when you opened the Friko album release show in Chicago. Tay, you moved from Cincinnati to Chicago during Covid with some other members of the band. I’m sure it was hard to integrate yourself into a scene during the pandemic. As the world got back to normal, did you start to feel like you were part of the Chicago scene? Did you make friends with other bands? Is that when you met Friko?
TAY: I would say more than the Chicago scene, it was being an Ohio band. We met Friko because their bass player David lived in Columbus for a while, and we used to play shows at his house. There are a lot of people from Ohio in Chicago, and I think that people from Ohio is how we’ve met the majority of bands in Chicago.
I do feel like I would love to be more enmeshed in the music in the music scene than I currently am. I go to shows, but I don’t ever get to meet people. But, David Fuller from Friko has known us for a long time and put Niko from Friko onto us. They’re really great people.
Aidan and John, are you guys from Chicago?
JOHN: Neither of us are from Chicago. I’m from California.
AIDAN: And I’m from Jersey.
Did you wind up in Chicago for the band or did you end up there for some other reason?
AIDAN: I came to Chicago for school. I went to film school in the Loop. And then I just kind of stuck around. Covid hit and I got real bummed out. I needed to play some music. So I was just scavenging the internet trying to find anyone who would play music with me, and that’s how I found John. And that’s how I found Smut, all through just random internet searches and bothering people and DMing people incessantly.
So you send the Smut Instagram account a DM and say, “I want to play drums in your band”?
AIDAN: They posted on their story when they first moved to Chicago that they needed a new drummer in Chicago. And I was like, “I’m a drummer, and I’m in Chicago.” So I just kept sending them music, and I didn’t hear back for a couple of months. I was doing nothing at the time, you know. I just kept sending messages out. I was hitting up Smut. I was bothering Arctic Monkeys, I was bothering J Mascis. It was just the most weird group of people. I was just DMing out of boredom. But Smut was real. I was actually trying to get into that band.
TAY: And it worked out.
John, how did you end up in Chicago and in the band?
JOHN: My girlfriend, Miriam, and I made a kind of flippant decision to move to Chicago. We’d visited once, and I didn’t know a soul out here, but I didn’t really realize that until we got here. I was like, “Fuck, I don’t know anyone here.” I’d just quit the band I was in. Then Covid hit. I got really depressed, and I guess, kind of similar to Aidan, I just started hitting people up on Craigslist and Twitter. Aidan and I both ended up playing in the same person’s band for a couple of practices. I remember looking at someone, and someone said something about the band Prefab Sprout, and Aidan was like, “I like Prefab Sprout,” and I locked eyes with him, and I was like, “This is my guy right here.”
The Chicago scene in the 90s was a hot bed for talent. So many bands got signed to major and indie labels. That was 30 years ago, but do you still feel the history of those bands, does their legacy carry on?
TAY: I think if you like those bands, then Chicago is a really cool city to live in because you know the history. But, I feel like with the younger music scene, it seems to be its own thing. A cool feature of the city is getting to go to a place like the Rainbow Club and taking a photo in the photo booth where Liz Phair’s album cover was taken, stuff like that. And knowing where certain things were is super cool. It’s cool for us because I think we all like 90s music a lot. But I don’t know how much it affects the younger bands that are here now.
AIDAN: You look at how much cities change over even after a year or two. You think about Chicago. All those cool venues that you see in those videos on YouTube of so-and-so live, it’s like many of those venues don’t exist anymore. They’re dead. Maybe they’ve turned into a store that sells coolers and they have a plaque on the wall that says, “Nirvana played here.”
JOHN: I was thinking about the Fireside Bowl. When I was a kid, I would watch videos of At The Drive-In or My Chemical Romance playing at the Fireside Bowl. Then, when I saw it in person, I was like, “Holy shit!” But I went inside and it’s just the most old-school bowling alley, regular place.
The Friko release show was in March 2024. Where does that fit in with the writing and recording of your album? Was the album in progress?
TAY: For that show, the majority of the album was written, and we were testing a few of those songs live even back then. We recorded in the first week of October last year. So, from March to October, we knocked out the last third of the album relatively quickly, and then we were straight into the studio.
How does going to Brooklyn and recording with Aron from Momma compare to recording your first album?
TAY: The last one, How the Light Felt, was recorded in Cincinnati, Ohio, at a studio that our former drummer owned that he had just finished building. It was really nice, but we didn’t have a producer. Our drummer recorded it and then showed us how to record him for his drum parts. We all went in one at a time in the neighborhood that we lived in, and it felt very casual but also almost like surgical. The way we were recording, it felt very weird to have each individual member go in and record every track before the next person would start. So this time around, we definitely made sure to record it as live as possible, where we just really put everyone in a room and played every song together, front to back. Then we would do overdubs and stuff later on. But it felt like this time, that live energy was really there, which is what we were yearning for after the last one.
For the last album, when you were recording individually, did that feel to you just how things were done? Or, did you know you were bound by the circumstances and it just was what it was?
TAY: Honestly, that was the first time we had professionally recorded anything. We recorded that way because the equipment we had allowed for one person at a time. We didn’t have all the gear to set up a ton of mics and figure all of that out. It was very simplistic in a way. I think we just recorded it that way because that’s how we could record it at that time. So we were excited that it felt like a more professional world opened up for us, where we’d have the possibility to do things in creative ways.
I won’t ask about finances. But obviously, I think recording in your drummer’s studio is probably a lot cheaper than going to a professional studio.
TAY: Yes, recording with our drummer was free! And New York was not free. But that was also part of why we did it. Not to talk about budgets, but I will. Our budget for the last one was about half of what we got this time. So, then, it was like, “You’ve got $10, what can you do?” And now it’s like, “We got $20, we can do a little more.”
How did you pick Aron to produce? Were you a fan of Momma?
TAY: Aron was our first choice for a producer. We do love Momma a lot, and we like the things that he’d been producing. A big pull, at least I remember me and Andie talking a lot about this, was that he’s really good at vocal production for women, which you’d think is not something specific that you have to worry about. But we’ve played enough shows with enough sound guys that get really confused about mixing a woman’s vocals for some reason. So we were like, “Who do we know who records a lot of women and makes them sound really good and powerful?” And Aron’s great at that. That was one of many elements that we liked about him and his style of recording, but we were very happy because he was our very first choice. We were stunned and excited that he agreed to produce us and really liked the music.
It’s interesting you talk about how many sound guys are confused about mixing women’s vocals. I was thinking about how I describe Smut to others, and I have a hard time not leading with, “They are a female-fronted band.” I never describe a band as “male-fronted band.” How do you feel about that? Are you okay with the “female fronted” description?
TAY: I used to be a little up in arms about it where I wanted to be like, “We’re just a band.” But I feel like I’ve come to a personal realization that being a woman is part of the identity of me as a singer and a performer. It’s pretty impossible to remove my gender from the subjects of my songs. And in a way, it’s of note enough to mention because in my mind, I’m like, “Okay, yeah, you can say I’m in a female-fronted band. Maybe some more girls will be inclined to listen because they want to hear, they want to listen to other girls, and then maybe they’ll start rock bands.” There’s a lot more women in rock now, I think, than ever before, but it’s still not equal.There’s like one girl per band sometimes. Which is fine. But I don’t think it’s offensive or anything to say that we are in a female-fronted band just because we are. It’s just the truth. It doesn’t have to be an identifier. But that is part of the music’s identity, and if the person is cool with it, then I think that’s totally fine.
Do you think when you go back and listen to this album in 10 years, it’ll feel like a snapshot of a few years of your life? Are there specific lyrics and/or songs that will bring back memories or do you think it’ll feel more timeless?
TAY: That’s a good question. I feel like for us, it’ll be a snapshot. We will remember having written it. But I feel like these are pretty universal themes. The themes of this record are basically just emotions, which are universal, and everyone feels everything at different points in their life. It’s not like we’re writing songs that are like, “I get on Twitter and look at my Uber Eats order.” It’s not stuff that’s specific to 2025. So hopefully it stands the test of time. It might sound like the year 2025. You never know what the sound of the time is until you’re looking back. But hopefully, it’s pretty classic content and is on everyone’s best records of all time list.
Your last album was more personal and a snapshot of your life as you had just lost your sister. When you were writing the lyrics for this album, did you intentionally stay away from getting personal?
TAY: It’s tragic to lose somebody instantly. It’s very scary and weird and permanent. My little sister passed away, I think eight years ago. She had just turned 18. So that’s pretty much the same time as the last album. With that album, it was incredibly personal and vulnerable in a way where it felt amazing to write and get it all out. But once it came to performing it, I realized that it was very painful, too. It felt like reopening a wound somewhat over and over again when you perform them because you want to perform them as emotionally as they’re written.
This time around, I honestly felt enough time had passed where I wanted to make an album that wouldn’t hurt to play live. I felt like I could change directions. I wrote about emotions that weren’t grief-based but still feel big and cathartic and some ugly kinds of feelings, too, just nothing that would feel that raw on stage this time around. I wanted to be able to go on stage and have fun with my boys.
I don’t like to say a band’s sound has evolved, because it makes it sound like your earlier work wasn’t as good. That’s not the case here, but your sound has changed a bit over time. To you, what song on the new album feels the most “un-Smut” sounding, something that you wouldn’t have believed you’d make 10 years ago?
TAY: I feel like “Waste Me” probably is the answer. I feel like it sounds very much like a Smut song, but at the same time, the part of your question of, “Do you think you would have made this 10 years ago?” Absolutely not. I feel like, one, Aidan was kind of spearheading that one, and I feel like lyrically and vocally, doing basically one really long run-on sentence, I would have been really scared to even attempt doing that for a song in the past. I felt like I really needed to stick to a pretty standard structure. So yeah, I think that one’s a bit different. But I think the beauty of the band, and something we talk about a lot, is we don’t wanna sort of pigeonhole ourselves. And we have this sort of idea that whatever we want to try, whatever experiment you want to take, whatever new things you want to attempt, it’s going to sound like Smut, because we are Smut.
AIDAN: The hardest thing is to start a new album. In the really early stages. I feel like we kept asking, “What is the album gonna sound like?” We didn’t know and we were getting nowhere. We had to keep vomiting stuff out. The songs will come. You may not have an idea of what it’s gonna be yet, you just have to make it happen.
What about the most Smut sounding song? Something that someone who heard you 10 years ago would instantly identify?
TAY: I would say “Dead Air.” That’s why we picked it as the lead single because it felt like a really good marriage of the things we like to do the most, which is write good pop hooks. It’s dreamy, it’s catchy, it has a little bounce, and then we scream at the end and it gets heavier. We felt like it would be a good transitional song from the sound of the last album to a slightly more aggressive or energetic sound for this one.
I’m glad you said energetic. I know you have a punk background but I hear some metal influence on some of the songs.
TAY: Sam was listening to a lot of metal, like 80s metal, during the recording of the album. I think Andie was in a similar boat of listening to a lot of Metallica at the time. When we started the band, we were definitely a bit more punk-leaning. I think almost every song was just me screaming and shrieking and getting a lot of aggression out. So, in a funny way, those heavier songs on the new album feel almost like a return to form of the earliest stuff we were doing, which was pretty punk and metal influenced at the beginning.
So, Aidan and John, for two guys who lock eyes and fall in love (laughs) over their mutual appreciation of Prefab Sprout, are you guys metal and punk fans or are you into more alternative-leaning music?
AIDAN: I think what makes Smut so cool is that we all are just music fans. We just can’t get enough. John, Sam, and I will just talk about John Martyn records, we’ll talk about singer-songwriter stuff, we’ll talk about funk. There’s just so much great music out there that got us excited to play music.
JOHN: I agree. I love everything. But I definitely grew up in a punk, DIY, garage rock kind of thing.
You mentioned “Dead Air” being the first single. My college roommate had a theory in the 90s that the third song on every album was the “hit”. Seems to be like you picked that song specifically as a single. Was putting it third on the album intentional?
TAY: I don’t know if we intended for that fun, cool coincidence to happen. I’ve never thought about that.
AIDAN: I totally know what you mean. I feel like track one’s got to be a smack in the face, but also somehow encapsulate everything, and then track two’s gotta be a driving one. Track three can be a big moment. I feel like that’s how I’ve always kind of seen it, even in set lists. When we’re playing live, you gotta warm them up, and then you can drop it.
I grew up in the CD era, where CDs were something like 74 minutes long and bands tried to fill every minute. It often led to some not-so-great songs being tacked on at the end to fill the space. You end the album with “Sunset Hymnal” and, I have to say, that might be one of the strongest tracks on the album. It doesn’t limp to an end. Did you intentionally save that one for last and, if so, what was the thought?
TAY: I feel like once that song was finished being written, all of us simultaneously were like, “That’s like a finale.” It feels endemic in a way that I think rounds everything out and closes it all nicely.
I’ve interviewed hundreds of bands and I’ve never heard anyone call the last song the finale. I love that so much. I wish more bands thought of it that way. Is album sequencing difficult or easy?
AIDAN: We really workshopped the album tracklist. I think we were really excited to sequence it. There were a lot of moments that we all thought could be interchangeable, but we did all agree that “Burn Like Violet” was such a cool, energetic side B opener. When you flip an album over, it’s gotta re-hook you.
What are the realistic hopes and expectations you have for the album and what are the fantasy expectations you have?
TAY: I think my realistic expectation is that it will be received super well, and be everyone’s favorite album of the year, and will win Grammys. And then my unrealistic expectation is that we get to go on like a year-long world tour.
I recently interviewed Elijah Johnston who said his fantasy was to play on the Jimmy Fallon show.
TAY: That’s awesome. I want that, too.
You mentioned doing a year-long tour. Would you prefer to headline or are you looking for support slots with more established artists?
TAY: I would love a mix of the two. We’re looking to hop on to something post-album coming out, just to be able to play to larger audiences. But I would also love to do a headlining tour later in the year, if possible.
With your music not fitting easily into one bucket, you’re afforded a lot of cool opening opportunities for a variety of bands that don’t all sound the same. You’ve played shows with Friko, Wishy, Been Stellar and toured with Spelling. I imagine being a band with a sound like yours can be a blessing and a curse.
TAY: It does feel good to sound so different because my hope, my dream is that when we get to be headliners someday, we’ll have a pretty wide range of bands that we can pick from for openers.
What would be your dream opening gig?
AIDAN: Oasis.
TAY: I want to open for My Chemical Romance really bad.
AIDAN: The Cure.
TAY: I’d open for just about anyone at this point.
