A spoken word project born from open mic disruptions at Ramapo College in 2014 turned into a four-piece that took seven years to finish eight songs. Our Wits โ Dean Scordilis on vocals, Matt Billy on guitar, Nagee Diaz-Corpening on bass, and Mark Boulanger on drums โ release their second record “Let Me Join You“, and we’re thrilled to give you its first listen below.
The New Jersey group recorded the whole thing over four days in August 2025 at Permanent Hearing Damage in Clifton Heights, Pennsylvania, with Steve Roche producing, engineering, and mixing. James Plotkin mastered it. Some of these songs are older than most internet discourse cycles. The earliest riff dates back to 2017. The newest piece, “Haunt Me,” was composed in 2022. Everything in between gestated, stalled, got rewritten, and eventually became something the band could stand behind.
The project started as Our Wits That Make Us Men, Dean’s solo spoken word vehicle. The goal, in the band’s own words, was to process complex emotions and speak truth to power while disrupting the weekly Ramapo College open mic night. Those performances pulled in Matt, Nagee, and Mark, who built a framework of post-hardcore, shoegaze, and post-rock around Dean’s poetry. Early sets were mostly improvised, producing tracks like “Penance” and “Blood” that fed into their 2017 debut “The Manifesto.” Then the band went quiet between 2019 and 2024 โ a gap they attribute to expanding their sound, refining their playing, and processing what they call the horrors of late capitalist rot.
“Let Me Join You” is structured around the five stages of grief. Not as a neat conceptual arc, but as something messier and more honest โ bereavement filtered through personal loss, dark comedy, political anger, and the long process of sitting with absence. The album’s dedication reads: “To those whose passing have shaped not just this collection of songs, but us as people, may your memory be eternal. To the martyrs, both willing and unwilling, your sacrifices are not forgotten.”
We’re premiering the full album right here, alongside extensive commentary from all four members.
The songs, the years, the stories
The record opens with “A Dream, Interrupted,” and its origin story is almost absurdly specific. Matt remembers the exact date: February 18th, 2018. “Dean came over to my dorm room and we messed around with my looper pedal,” he says. “Those two ominous guitar chords were ruminating in my brain for a while but I didn’t know what to do with them. After some guitar-based looping, Dean had the brilliant idea to pull out their old violin bow, to mimic what we thought could be a cool cello layer. It sounded absolutely disgusting on guitar, but in a weird way we liked it. So much that we did our best to recreate this monstrosity on the actual studio recording.”
Matt sees the track as a tonal shift for the band โ “a motif to bridge two albums, and an example of what can happen if you just say ‘fuck it, why not?'” Mark adds that the final version stays pretty faithful to that initial dorm room recording. For the lyrics, he pulled a short poem from his vault, wanting to stay true to the time period that inspired the record. “The words set the mood for the album, even if I’m not totally sure what they mean,” Mark says, “nor am I interested in speculating.”
“See You Later” came together at the end of 2018. Structurally, Mark notes, it emerged fully formed โ though listening back to old practice recordings, the band’s ability to actually execute the song was questionable. “The drumming in those old recordings is especially bad,” he admits. The freeform ending was an homage to Lord Snow’s “Solitude.”
Dean’s commentary on this one is blunt and personal: “I’ve never had a great relationship with death or seeing dead bodies. You can chalk it up to that neolithic uncanny valley instinct, but it’s more so the emotional turmoil of seeing someone you love not being who or what you remembered.” He wrote “See You Later” and the next track on the same day, a few weeks after his uncle’s funeral. “Quite frankly, the mortician fucked his shit up, had him looking like something from The House of Wax โ the Paris Hilton one.” Then, pulling back slightly: “I think to some degree, we want our final memory of someone to be perfect, unimpeachable. But that’s not how life works. We’re messy beings and we contain contradictory multitudes.”
“Truly, A Diminishing Return” carries the oldest riff on the record โ 2017 โ though it took two solid years before the song resembled anything close to its final form. Dean says it was almost named “The Cancer Didn’t Kill You, Capitalism Did,” but adds: “I’m in a band with cowards who use subtext.” His explanation of the song’s interior logic is characteristically unsparing: “I’ve always had an acerbic, darkly sardonic wit โ I blame the years of untreated, undiagnosed mental illness and a solid half-decade of seeing repeat footage of people jumping out of the Twin Towers โ and this song was me looking inwards at it. How long can I use humor to detach from my life? Is that any more effective than working 60+ hours a week to try and pay for cancer treatments? Is Brian Thompson any less a serial killer because he used profit margins instead of a fucking hacksaw?”
Mark groups “See Youย Later,” “Truly, A Diminishing Return,” and “Why Is It That Only You Were Saved?” as a triptych โ songs that originated at roughly the same point in time and developed alongside each other. By the spring of 2019, he says, all three were basically done, though with much less sensitivity than the final recorded versions.
About “Why Is It That Only You Were Saved?” specifically, Mark offers this: “I named this song after a line of dialogue from Ring 2 โ the Japanese one from 1999, not the American one from 2005 โ a movie I still haven’t seen. For this, we can thank Wikipedia.” The song dates musically to 2018 and went through the same protracted gestation as its companions.
“Haunt Me” is the youngest song on the album โ Mark composed the basis in 2022, making it something of a whippersnapper compared to its peers. When the opportunity came to bring it to Our Wits, he jumped at it, and says his bandmates swiftly made it infinitely better than he could have on his own. Lyrically, it’s another old idea resuscitated to serve the emotional arc of the record.
Nagee calls “Haunt Me” a special track for the band. Though it’s an interlude, it signaled that bigger things were possible. “Not only was this mostly an electronic composition, it was the first time the band worked on a piece remotely and contributed individually from our own homes,” he explains. The instrumental roles shifted too โ Nagee, the bassist, was programming the drum beat, while Mark, the drummer, was programming synthesizers. “Through all of those firsts we created something that felt unique to us, but at the same time like Our Wits in another dimension.”
“Martyrs” comes from 2019. Mark says they started writing it after the first three proper songs were close to finished, and if his archives are to be believed, the song was basically completed in three months โ though they spent a much longer period refining it. “Thank goodness we were patient,” he says. “In another universe, there’s a much worse version of this album that gets released in 2019 or 2020.” He used to refer to the opening drum beat as the “1975” beat. Lyrically, it’s unique on the album in that Dean and Mark split duties โ Dean wrote the first half, Mark the second.
Matt’s connection to “Martyrs” goes deeper. Around 2019, he was experiencing severe writer’s block for a good half of the year. “I was freshly out of college, unemployed, and unmotivated to do much of anything in my life at that point. Writing with the band was frustrating. I felt because we were a ‘screamo’ band, that the riffs I wrote needed to fit some kind of mold, something that I didn’t have in me.” The only thing he wrote during that period was the intro guitar riff. “I remember bringing this to the band, saying ‘This is all I have, but it’s not really Our Wits.’ They convinced me to develop the idea with them, and that what matters most is if we like it.” He describes it as the song that taught him not to hold anything back creatively. “I had this cloud over my head that Our Wits had to sound sad, heavy, hardcore. None of that really matters, it’s just about what you want to write in that given moment, and having bandmates that support your ideas.”
The title track, “Let Me Join You,” was the last song to come together and started as pure improvisation. Back in 2018, the band jammed out a pop-punk pastiche they somewhat derisively called the “Taste of Chaos” song. Mark describes it plainly: “It was a half-assed pastiche of MCR’s ‘I’m Not Okay,’ identical chord progression and all. Against all odds, we became fond of it and wondered if it could be turned into a real song.”
Nagee fills in the rest: “Originally the chorus section was nearly a 1:1 copy of My Chemical Romance’s ‘I’m Not Okay,’ and to really make it our own, I brought in a riff that kept the spirit but shifted the feel in a way that resonated with all of us.” Mark credits Nagee directly โ “mercifully exercising judgment on our collective behalf” โ for insisting the song shouldn’t be a pastiche. “He then played us the main riff, thus turning an off-the-cuff joke into a real song.” Mark admits he had reservations about it for a long time, but came around: “It might be my favorite song on the album.” Nagee agrees โ through the transformation, it became “one of the catchiest and instrumentally upbeat songs on the record,” and it’s his favorite too.
The album closes with “…Until Everything Fades,” the oldest song on the record by a matter of months, dating to May 2017. The final version is essentially a recreation of a practice recording from February 2018. Mark explains: “We unanimously agreed that this version of the song was perfect, then struggled for ages to recreate it. Finally, after years of struggle, we spent a couple practices getting this one back into shape.” For ages, the band called it “Rohan,” named after Rohan Lilauwala of Respire, Votive, Tower of Silence, and New Friends. “Concern that people would instead think of the Kingdom of Rohan from Lord of the Rings motivated us to finally give it a proper title.”
Scene ties
The members’ histories extend across the New Jersey underground. Matt and Nagee both played in Ambary Lake. Matt was also in Circledropper.
Nagee played in Seaphoamm and spent eight months as the bassist of Massa Nera, though he never appeared on a recording.
Dean’s other project is Tedxdancesรธn. Mark is also a member of Massa Nera.
Among New Jersey bands they dig: Hundreds of Au, Burial Dance, Stress Spells, Sunrot, Scary Hours, and Kirkby Kiss.
“Let Me Join You” is out now. Artwork by Yasin Violet. Photography by Wendy De Armas Dominguez.
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