Upchuck

As KT puts it, there’s never been a moment when she didn’t have rage. As the singer of Upchuck, the Georgia punk band whose music is as sharp as a scythe, KT has felt fierce energy inside her well before she had the band as an outlet through which to channel it. As a Black woman in America, rage has been the tint on the window through which she’s had to view the world. The experience of listening to Upchuck is to feel a distillation of that existence, all of its pain, sorrow, anger, and fear translated through raw punk music.

Perhaps, after so many years of wading in the muck, KT is over it. Upchuck’s Domino debut is I’m Nice Now. But don’t mistake newfound niceness for weakness. It’s self-preservation. “In this world of constant distractions and stressors it’s important to keep your mind, body, and spirit sane and sound enough to continue through this seemingly never-ending fight,” she says. “Being a POC, by default, you’re gonna have that rage." But she hits a note of optimism, too, if a wry one. “You're gonna have that desire for change, and that desire for the fuckery to end.”

In a sense, Upchuck was born of fuckery, the nadir of American life known as the first Trump administration. KT gathered with drummer Chris Salgado, guitarists Mikey Durham and Hoff, and bassist Ausar Ward to form the band. It was KT’s first time as a vocalist, her first time exercising the power of her bluesy wail. In 2022, the band released their debut album, Sense Yourself, a collection of scalding punk tracks. Mikey and Hoff’s guitars wail, while Chris’ drums lay out a bold backbone. The album includes “Facecard,” where KT dismisses any desire to be used as a pawn based on her identity. “I see you waitin’ for it/My fucking face card,” she scowls. As further rejection of any unwanted gaze, the album features a surprising fuck-you photo of KT’s face on the cover: one where she’s screaming into the mic and covered in blood.

“I remember that set,” she says of the source of the image. Someone brought a shopping cart into the mosh pit and it struck her. “One of the wheels nicked my face, and I just started bleeding. But the show kept going. We didn't stop.” They still haven’t.

Sense Yourself gained Upchuck a cult following in their Atlanta hometown, and in 2023 they released their sophomore album, Bite the Hand That Feeds. The record dialed up the crunch and fuzz, melding the band’s punk origins with a primitive garage rock feel. The album, produced by guitar wizard Ty Segall, helped the band land spots opening for Faye Webster and Amyl and the Sniffers, where they mesmerized crowds with their energetic and angry live sets.

But are they still mad? With I’m Nice Now, Upchuck channels their feverishness into an album that, yes, is filled with rage. But in addition to being a continuation of their musical exorcism, the album delivers a sharp critique of the powers that be, lamenting why they still have to be those in power. “How many generations of punk are gonna live through this?” KT says. “I don't want to come off as nihilistic, but I'm tired.”

In addition to wading through the overarching garbage of society at large, KT’s sister died during the writing of I’m Nice Now. The song “Forgotten Token” addresses her loss and the way in which she was undervalued in her life and, in her death, by some, she became commodified. The song is a perfect expression of the mixture of anger and exasperation meticulously transformed into a taut punk song. “I just feel/Cuz I’m Black/It gets stacked/In a lost closet/Forgotten token,” sings KT as the scuzzy bass whips across the song and guitars careen like out of control cars. She doesn’t sound exactly nice, but she’s not screaming here, her delivery a singsong howl except for one wordless growl that sets up the song’s ultimate slo-mo breakdown. It’s a weirdly beautiful song, ugly and bruised and harmonic and defiant.

The same groove-heavy KT cadence is found on “New Case,” which, with its walking bass line feels like a punk cousin of something funky Quincy Jones once cooked up. That the song is both blazingly melodic while sounding authentically fuzzy is credit to Segall, who produced I’m Nice Now as well. The album was recorded at Sonic Ranch Studio, a residential studio in the desert in Texas, right on the border of the Rio Grande in Mexico. That middle of nowhere setting is like “a fucked up summer camp kind of vibe where you’re on the edge of your seat,” says Hoff. The band was influenced heavily by the Stooges and, after becoming so tight from the road, recorded live to tape. (Iggy approves — he played an Upchuck track on his radio show.) There are minimal overdubs. They kept it going until they got it as right as it needed to be. “We had an emphasis on exhausting everybody with the performance until it was correct,” says Hoff. To keep the mood light, Segall brought balloons to the studio. The effect of weightless, weird happiness is tangible. It inspired Ausar to break out of his comfort zone. “I wanted to give every bit of everything that I could do,” he says. “I had one goal of maybe screaming on a song. But Ty definitely pushed me way more than that and I ended up doing backing vocals on six songs.”

Also adding vocals on the spot was the band’s drummer Chris, who the band encouraged to write lyrics in his native Spanish and duet with KT on a couple songs, something he’d not done before on an album. On the album’s lead single, “Plastic,” he blazes through a bridge in Spanish, spitting out a fried performance. “No me digas nada!” he repeats. “Don’t tell me nothing.” Chris shows up again as a vocalist later on the album, on the rollicking, inspiring “Un Momento.” “Dame un memento,” he sings. “Para vivir,” and “Para pensar,” and, “Para volar.” To live, to think, to fly.

“I sing in Spanish because I want my Hispanic people to be comfortable,” he says. “Un Momento” also starts with a thunderous drum roll, one that comes from Chris’ experience growing up performing cumbia music. He aims to blend that sound with Upchuck’s traditional punk to fuse something unique. “There's a lot of Latino punks too. You know what I mean? Yes, we're all united through this music. And I'm here to represent, right?”

To upchuck is a violent act, but it’s one of rejection of a foreign body. It’s about autonomy. It’s about negation, about a refusal to be subjugated. Upchuck is the right name for this band, all of whose members have freedom on their minds in the nascent days of the second Trump administration. “We can't just keep letting these people control us,” Chris says. “We need freedom.” So, of course the music has rage in it. But that rage was given to them, a side effect of racism, sexism, classism baked into the American way. Rage is an unwanted birthright. They don’t want that rage. So they are getting it out in the songs. “Now, I feel like I can take a breath in a way, but it's the same dirty air,” KT says. “But at least I can breathe.” They’re nice now. Nice because they were able to do this band, to make this album. The songs are working. Yeah, without that outlet, they weren’t nice before. But who can blame them?