Somewhere in Portland, Oregon, Erik Becker banged on an intro chord one practice evening just to see what would happen. Ethan Schee threw in a bass line he’d been carrying around in his head for years — originally imagined as a reverbed, surf-style guitar thing, but repurposed on the spot into something stomping and single-note.
Lyrics came fast. “I knew it was a banger then and there,” says guitarist and vocalist Marty Buckenmeyer, recalling the moment Erik texted over the first lines: “look at you in the swimming pool.” That track, “Pool,” opens Stunt Drummer’s sophomore album “Warm Up, Tiger,” out April 17 on Cavity Search Records. And in a lot of ways, the story of how that song came together is the story of the whole record — stuff colliding in a room until something detonates.
Stunt Drummer are Buckenmeyer and Becker on guitars and vocals, Schee on bass, and J Leaver on drums. A four-piece noise-garage punk band from Portland whose creative method boils down to: jam, record it on a phone, listen back, keep the accidents that feel right, kill the ones that don’t.
Their self-titled debut dropped in 2023. “Warm Up, Tiger” is what happened when they had more songs than they knew what to do with. “We were bursting at the seams with songs we were happy with,” Schee says. “They were getting cohesive and sounding less like an individual member’s song and more like a delicious goulash.” Becker puts it simpler: “The songs we had been playing live for a bit and they were sounding good and deserved to get packaged into something shiny for the scrapbook.”
The album title is a mashup of song titles from the tracklist. “Our best songs are mash-ups of ideas that didn’t initially seem like they’d go together,” Schee explains. “Maybe they still don’t, but they make us laugh and we can mostly count our way through them.” Buckenmeyer’s take: “Warm Up, Tiger. You’re probably not ready for what you’re about to listen to.”
The whole thing was recorded at Deer Lodge Studios with engineer Ezra Meredith. Small room, minimal overdubs, the goal being to keep the live energy intact. “It came out better than whatever I was thinking,” Becker says. “It was awesome to have Ezra do all the recording and knob-twisting so we could just play and get it out.” Schee: “I don’t really know how to make this sound that interesting, but sitting and listening to playback really made me realize how much I like these songs.”
Here’s how each track came together, in the band’s own words and from their own weird corners.
“Pool” — Becker threw out the chord, Schee slapped on the bass line, and the thing had momentum before anyone had written a word. Schee says he gets imagery of hell opening up from underneath a small hotel swimming pool. “Erik repeats ‘everyone in this place is gonna drown.’ I feel like that’s the chant people are going to remember.” Becker sees it as dark humor with a tidal wave behind it. “Old, young, too cool hipsters, everyone is going to get it, might as well cannonball into it when it comes.”
“Chinese Windows” started with a text message. Buckenmeyer and Becker both work in architecture, so they’re constantly texting about projects. Buckenmeyer was reviewing a Powerpoint from a window rep named Peter — a very kind and patient guy from an unfamiliar Chinese company — and most of the communication was happening over WhatsApp. Something about coordinating a critical piece of a build with a stranger halfway around the world triggered every worst-case instinct. He texted Becker: “Chinese windows. They don’t fit like they used to, but Peter’s on top of his game.” Becker told him to write that down — “premium lyric potential.” A couple days later the band started jamming on a riff built around the line, and the song basically wrote itself. Schee notes it was still half-written when they got into the studio, still accelerating, and they dug hard into that momentum. “I love the tension and explosion that happens throughout.”
“Warm Up” exists because drummer J Leaver couldn’t make it to practice one night. Becker sat in on drums, and his self-described inadequate drumming created all these random stutter stops and weird spaces that Buckenmeyer and Schee played through anyway. “Luckily Marty, the smartest one in the band, does a great job of recording our practice regularly on the phone,” Becker says. When they listened back, they loved it and worked specifically to recreate what had randomly happened.
The lyrics came from an equally mundane place — Becker was doing casual squats at home one morning before work when Buckenmeyer called him about something. “Oh ya know just doing some squats warming up for the day here.” That became an abstract rant about calisthenics, getting older, keeping the knife sharp. Schee describes his role as something like an improv game. “I get to have a lot of the fun in this one, with the band breaking away and I introduce a new riff. And I know when we were writing it, at least a couple of the ones I do, someone else pointed at me and yelled ‘go!!’ There’s a lot of times that it doesn’t work but I think it did here.”
“Voodoo” is the slow one, the nearly six-minute creeper. Becker originally wrote it with some old friends — started with the notion of playing something in triplets, and the lyrics came from either watching TV shows with witches in them or, as he puts it, “subconsciously the woman I was dating was a witch and she inspired it.” The words reference old Salem Witch Trial tactics — drowning, fire, the whole proving-a-woman-was-a-witch playbook. It was originally faster, but when he brought it to the band, they slowed it down, made it spookier, more deliberate.
The intro happened during a practice in between recording sessions. Becker pulled way back on the vocals to almost a whisper just before the final session. Schee: “The more we played this the more cinematic it felt, like some lumbering mountain and desert trek. By the time we were ready to make a recording we were all about leaning into the weirdness. Shakers? Sure! Spiraling lazer noises? Yep! Are we gonna all chant? Yes of course we’re all gonna chant! We’re lucky our engineer Ezra didn’t have a gong.” Buckenmeyer: “Oh, man, I wish he had a gong.”
“Vortex” started as an instrumental jam with one of the band’s earlier drummers, Dave, who liked building big cinematic songs. Buckenmeyer had the A part, Schee had the B part, Becker supplied the C. Schee describes it simply: “Layered feedback and huge chords, what more do you want?” Buckenmeyer’s lyrics came from literally looking around the room during rehearsal — he saw a box or piece of equipment on a shelf that said “VORTEX” and started singing about that. Eventually the words tied into his own experiences with anxiety spiraling around the drain.
“Paul The Pear Farmer” is about an actual friend of Becker’s named Paul who really is a pear farmer. Becker was hanging out in Paul’s barn, listening to him talk about importing bees specifically to pollinate the trees for pear growth.
“The bees fuck the trees so we can stay alive” popped into his head on the drive home. He invented parts of the story from there — Paul’s wife Holly is, in real life, a lovely person, despite the song’s embellishments. The riff came off Becker’s couch one evening and went straight to Schee and Buckenmeyer. Schee plays the bass part, but it’s all straight from Becker’s brain. “I like that we can swap things around that way.” And when Schee mentioned wanting a circus organ sound on it, engineer Ezra pulled a blanket off an actual organ in his basement, ran a mic and headphones out to it, and said “here.”
There are also two layers of bass guitar because Schee wasn’t happy with either take individually but thought they sounded cool — “or maybe just psychotic” — played together. The breakdown near the end was instrumental for the longest time live; Buckenmeyer only started adding the shouted gibberish around the time they hit the studio.
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“Switch” was a vent for Becker. End of a relationship that carried weight, lyrics about a person who was a bit of a light switch with emotions. He’d been listening to a lot of Metz and had ideas about vocal delivery and the basic notion that the song should start with drums. Schee understood immediately and came up with the bass line. After the drum intro, all three come in at once “like runaway trains coming from three different directions.” Schee: “This song is a riff circus. I think none of us are playing close to the same thing, and possibly not even in the same key but everyone is hitched to J’s monster drums. Play it wrong until you make it right.” Buckenmeyer: “This song is one of the most fun to play in our collection. It feels like it’s always about to fly off the rails and that it shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.”
“White Tiger” is older stuff Becker brought in from jamming with previous bandmates. They had a basic chord progression, and when Becker asked his drummer buddy for random subject matter for on-the-spot lyrics, the guy pulled out a white lighter with a tiger on it. That was that. The current band re-learned it off a sludgy room recording of the old band playing it in a loud bar. Schee: “I like hitting some minimal heavy bomps and letting J’s drums take up the space between with little fills and whatnot.”
“Dress” closes the album and it’s the one that sounds like cough syrup feels. Another practice where Leaver couldn’t make it, Becker sat in on drums again, and an impromptu jam fell out of the sky with no discussion — something with a narcotic haze that the three of them rode purely on instinct, listening and reacting to each other in real time. “That very first take remains the coolest version of the song,” Becker says. Schee: “No mission, just vibes. When it’s done properly the cough syrup hits just right and we’re surfing the sine waves.” Buckenmeyer always heard a saxophone in his head for this one, so he recruited his friend Tom, a jazz saxophonist, and sent him recordings for inspiration — John Zorn, Ornette Coleman, Morphine. “He got the assignment right away, and just started coming up with some great squawky bits that he hashed out in the studio.” The song is still different every time they play it live.
One of the things that holds “Warm Up, Tiger” together across all this chaos is the push-and-pull between Buckenmeyer and Becker’s vocals. Early on, songs were divided into “Marty songs” and “Erik songs,” but this record blurs the line. Schee: “Their voices blend in a few places that are really fun and even play well in how one song leads into the next.” Becker’s delivery runs abrasive and deadpan while Buckenmeyer tends more melodic but equally forceful, and the contrast gives the record a constant tension that never settles into one mode.
The whole thing was built to translate live. “Any added layers we put on in the studio, even the organ or the saxophone, we’d like to think could be busted out or recreated live,” Schee says. Buckenmeyer adds that recording these songs made them tighter as a band. “Since we started recording, our live shows have gotten way better.”
When asked about their place in the Portland scene, the band names Merwulf, Sharp Kicks, and The Exploding Whales as local acts they admire. Influences stretch wider — Fugazi, Jesus Lizard, Drive Like Jehu. But where does Stunt Drummer actually belong? Becker has the answer: “In a medium-sized, dimly lit bar with cheap drinks and free Narcan, in front of the restroom door.”
“Warm Up, Tiger” is out April 17 on Cavity Search Records. Schee sums up the mission: “Get people pumped, make it a party, make it weird, and bob your head in 7/4 time.”
