Totally Destroyed’s debut full-length lands June 20, a noisy cut-and-paste of punk, screamo, post-hardcore, and no wave, self-recorded and self-released through Flowerpot Records.
The band was formed in late summer 2024 by Wes Meadows, who had just retired her previous decade-long project, The You Suck Flying Circus.
Looking for something new and less anchored in the past, Meadows assembled a fresh lineup that gradually came together through Facebook chats, home demos, and a couple of shared shows.
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“I knew that I wanted to make noisy cathartic rock music,” Wes says, “but I also knew that I wanted to make it with new people that weren’t part of the TYSFC touring lineup.” That meant reaching out to Natty—someone he’d known from shows but never written with—and beginning to swap early demos. By early October, the first in-person tracks were recorded with help from Sprout, who hosted and provided gear. Evan joined soon after the EP’s instruments were tracked. David, Evan’s bandmate, came on in March after a long and unsuccessful search for a permanent bassist.
Since then, they’ve been steadily recording, booking shows, and getting noisy. “We do all of our recordings, art, video, duplication, and booking ourselves,” Wes adds. “I’ve recorded/mixed for hundreds of bands over the last 15 years.” All physical releases are dubbed one at a time at her Berea-based home studio.
The record is loud, erratic, and steeped in abrasive humor and personal threads—often combining self-sabotaging riffs, caustic synth noise, and irreverent track titles with just enough song structure to not totally fall apart.
It’s not built around one big concept, but if there’s a core to the album, it’s in Wes’s tendency to recycle and reimagine material across her creative orbit. Tracks 1 and 5 came from a shelved screamo project. “Most of the songs went unfinished when the project died before it started,” Wes says. “I decided to take all of the songs that I wrote by myself and repurpose them across my other bands.” Those two tracks—featuring all instruments and lyrics by Wes—were reshaped to fit Totally Destroyed, but likely won’t make it into their live sets. “Their titles are Black Flag and Dead Kennedys puns, respectively.”
The release show happens June 21 at Matinee in Akron, Ohio, with Alina Remains and Skeleton Drive. The band will also appear at Flowerpot Records Fest in Berea on July 12 and Midwest Psych Fest in Galena on October 3. September shows will support Natty’s band Ope and Evan and David’s band Debris—both set to drop new releases through Flowerpot.
Check out the full track-by-track commentary from Wes below.
Tracks 1 and 5 were both supposed to be a part of another project I was doing. I wanted to make a screamo record with a few friends, and most of the songs went unfinished when the project died before it started. I decided to take all of the songs that I wrote by myself for the project and repurpose them across my other bands. My studio project, Major Depression, ended up with a few of them, and another few ended up Scorpio Death Club songs, which is a band I drum for. I played all of the instruments on these tracks, and wrote all the lyrics, even though there’s a myriad of singers on track one. We also released one of them as part of a compilation on Middle-Man Records this week. I had a lot of fun putting these together, but the project will likely not be doing too many more songs like this, and I’m not sure if any of them will make it to live performances. Their titles are Black Flag and Dead Kennedys puns, respectively.
Suwucidal Tendies was one of a few songs that I demoed on sprouts 4-track by my lonesome and brought to the band later. Natty provided the name, I wrote the lyrics to match. The album version is pretty different in form from the original demo, and that demo was only available on a tape given out to people who bought merch on May’s bandcamp friday. It’ll come out on a rarities comp someday.
Highest Bitters is a combination of two sets of riffs. One was written by me in an attempt to write a Linkin Park song, and one was written by Natty on the spot on our first demo day to add a bit of math rock to some classic thrash feel. The two parts don’t fit too well together, but I enjoy it anyway. Maybe more bands should combine nu metal and 80s thrash. Who’s to say?
The first song about Captain Krangles was named by Pat Chase from Gelatinus Cube, one of our longtime favorite local bands. We decided to include a song about Captain Krangles on subsequent releases, and this one has a ridiculous name based off of a Captain Underpants novel and some free word association by Pat. It’s quickly become a favorite for the live band to play, and we’ll likely be playing it at all of our upcoming dates.
Otter Poppers is a song we’ve been playing live for a while, but the lyrics kept changing. We’re happy with it now. The outro of the song is super fun to me. Having a little chiptune/electronica moment on a primarily guitar-led record just felt right.
Their Life Of Academic Freedom is a play on names from a few songs from Swirlies, a 90s shoegaze band. It felt right to end the first side of the album with some heinous noise. We try to keep our noise tracks from going too long, I hate when an album is bogged down with too many non-songs. Despite being pretty weird and gross, we do still care very much about our audience not getting bored.
Dorf is a song about an imaginary drug dealer that calls himself Dorf, as a reference to the 90s sports comedian, because he’s “in love with the game”. It’s another song I demoed on Sprout’s 4-track tape recorder by myself over the winter. We’ve played it live for a while and have a lot of fun dramatically slowing down the breakdown at the end. It’s infinitely longer and slower when we play it live and I find it hilarious.
Charcoal and Mud was the song that we settled on for a single. We also thought a bit about Dorf and Captain Krangles 2, because Dorf is really poppy and Captain Krangles has a pretty conventional structure, despite being pretty dissonant. A lot of our songs are pretty weird, but I wanted to pick the one that would best represent our sound. I had a lot of fun filming and editing the music video with my friends. I want to make more music videos for our stuff in the future, for sure.
Slippery Slope is another great example of collaboration on this album. I wrote the music, Natty wrote the lyrics and sang the vocals. It was written before we even released our first EP, but we knew that we wanted to save it for something cooler later on. It’s one of our collective favorites to play live. It came out first, in demo form, on Even Then My Lights Do Not Fade, a compilation put together by our favorite overseas emo label BSDJ.
Steady Diet Of Tucking was originally improvised by my old punk band Route Cannal, and I’ve since improved on the composition and lyrics and turned it into our favorite song to play live. I’d expect a lot of songs on our future albums to sound more like this. Its title is a Fugazi reference, to further the pun names that seem to be ever-present with this band.
Crueler Feds Derail is supposed to be a shock to the system. Steady Diet was over-indulgent noise, but at least it had a rhythm. This song is absolutely slamming on disgusting synths and terrifying drums. I hope it makes people really wonder what they’re gonna hear next from us. It was fun to make, certainly, but I also think our next release will be more song-based and contain less chunks of noise like this. I guess we’ll both find out soon.
