The Scabby Knees’ story starts in familiar territory for anyone who grew up inside the late-nineties and early-noughties punk orbit. The band’s members talk about discovering North American and Scandinavian punk — “we all started out by listening to those foreign bands like No Use for a Name, Lagwagon, NOFX, Bad Religion, Rise Against, Satanic Surfers” — and then realizing that their own Belgian backyard held a scene that was just as formative.
They point to Five Days Off, Cornflames, Circle, Skin of Tears, Homer, and Sixtoys as the local spark, the moment they understood that maybe they could do this too. Each of the five came up in different projects, but they shared stages, supported each other’s bands, and built the kind of communal momentum that tends to follow you for decades.
That shared history is the backdrop for how The Scabby Knees formed in 2020. Vocalist Teun Van Aerschot describes it as an unglamorous reset — locking himself in a rehearsal room, writing “a bunch of pop punk demos,” and wanting something “more straightforward, poppy and melodic” after years fronting the more technical, melodic-hardcore-leaning Break of Day and Generation 84. He openly cites the influence of The Priceduifkes on the early sketches, not as imitation but as a kind of north star.
He brought in players he trusted: Joren Mesens on drums, Tim Dries and Jeff Van Asten from earlier bands, and later producer-turned-co-architect Stijn Debontridder. Stijn understood the material immediately — “he grasped what we were trying to do, maybe even better than us at the time” — and pushed the songwriting into something more melodic and defined. Without a lead guitarist in the early phase, they called in longtime friend Robin Leys, whose lines and melodic sensibility shaped what became their debut “Fragments”.
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“Things just clicked,” Teun says about those sessions. The band played shows, swapped roles to adapt after Robin shifted to his own projects, and moved directly into another writing cycle once the record was out.
The writing for “Rosy Hues” (out now on Bearded Punk Records) worked differently. This time Teun and bassist Jeff split the initial pool — “we ended up with some twenty songs” — and again teamed up with Stijn for pre-production. Doubt crept in early, the usual sophomore-album anxiety, but Stijn dismantled and rebuilt the material in a way that clarified what belonged on the record. “He helped to elevate the songs to a whole new level,” Teun adds, describing how melodies, structures, and even single words were reshaped.
The visual identity fell into place almost accidentally. Teun asked his uncle, painter and musician Michel Janssens, if he had another work they could use.
Michel had already provided the artwork for “Fragments”, and when Teun saw the new painting, everything aligned with a demo he had just recorded. “I had only just written the title track, without intending it to be the title track, but when I heard the studio demo and saw the painting, it was a match made in heaven,” he says, fully aware of the cliché but sticking with it because it fits the moment.
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The making of the album wasn’t without fractures. The pressure inside the studio exposed mismatched expectations and a communication gap. “It became obvious that we had all lived up to the recording process in a different way,” Teun explains, pointing to personal stress and a too-loose approach to the workflow. Creative differences escalated.
Their lead guitarist — someone Teun had played with for seventeen years — left mid-session. He calls those weeks “a bad romantic break-up,” marked by respect and disappointment sitting side by side. The timing was brutal: “by then we were in the process of actually recording the album.”
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Stijn stepped in again, not just as producer but as stabilizer, developing new lead parts and keeping momentum when the band could have easily stalled. The band credits him as an “unofficial band member,” a presence who held the record together when it was most fragile.
Musically, “Rosy Hues” leans into the band’s maturing sensibilities. They acknowledge that “coming from a grassroots punk background going poppy is selling out,” and the caution that comes with that, but they’re also approaching forty and comfortable widening their palette. They reference The Menzingers and The Story So Far as touchpoints, particularly for the emotional density beneath melodic arrangements. Teun frames the whole album as “one big love letter filled with emotion,” not in a grandiose sense but as a collection of lived relationships — “to my present and former band mates… to friends, past and present, who struggle emotionally… and most of all to my wife, who’s been with me for 20 years.”
The band sees this second album as more professional, more refined — “a bit more slick than with ‘Fragments’” — but still rooted in the same local punk current that got them started. In the middle of the lineup shifts and personal strain, the record still carries that through-line of sticking around, showing up, and trying to enjoy the process even when it gets complicated.
As Teun puts it, being in a band “is like being married to a bunch of other people, with all the problems, memories and fun that comes with it.” “Rosy Hues”, in that sense, isn’t a reinvention. It’s a snapshot of where those relationships landed after a few decades of shared rooms, shared stages, and shared losses — a straightforward pop-punk and alt-rock album shaped by the people who built it, and the history they keep hauling forward.
