Whatever you want to say about Wet Ones, they’ve beat you to the punch

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Yeah, I’m a shithead, and I can’t get anything I want, and I have no one, begins the transparently titled Wet Ones song “I’m a Shithead.” It’s one of nearly 20 tracks logged on the band’s SoundCloud page, among the equally volatile “Get Me Off,” “Thumbs Down Syndrome” and “I Live Life Reckless.”

“Most of our stuff is pretty autobiographical,” Kenneth Kupfer tells me between long pulls of his beer. “I can’t necessarily speak directly on that song because I didn’t write it, but I use music kind of as a way to vent frustrations and anger in a positive way. It’s just kind of what’s on our mind and what we’re thinking about. I would say that ‘I’m a Shithead’ is pretty autobiographical of Zach [Campbell, the song’s writer] and a number of us in the band, unfortunately.”

I’ll have to take Kupfer at his word. His bandmates — Campbell and Justin Baird, formerly of All Blood, and Derek Solsberg — haven’t yet made it to the interview and therefore can’t further illuminate their worldviews. Campbell, I’m told, is probably still sleeping. Solsberg has a job. Baird is on his way. On the rooftop patio of the Blind Tiger (where Kupfer and Campbell will both work shifts later this evening), Kupfer lights one Pall Mall Red after another, dropping the finished cigarettes into a Miller High Life bottle he has emptied.

Shitheads or not, the members of Wet Ones have been fairly productive — especially considering that the band is less than a year old. (The songs on that SoundCloud page, Kupfer assures me, are the jagged tip of a big iceberg.) Wet Ones formed almost immediately after All Blood’s public implosion last November, when a fight among band members broke out during a show at the Union.

“The dude that caused the wild breakup is not in Wet Ones, so I guess I’m not worried about either Zach or Justin attacking me onstage,” Kupfer says. “If they did, bring it on,” he adds dryly. “I can’t say I’ve never been attacked onstage before.”

Though Kupfer had never been in the same band as Campbell and Baird, each belonged to previous bands (Campbell in Mouthbreathers and Rooftop Vigilantes, Kupfer in Fag Cop and Wayne Pain & the Shit Stains) and frequently shared local bills. And as far as Kupfer and Baird are concerned, Wet Ones formed at exactly the right moment.

“We basically wrote a record right away,” Kupfer says. “A few of the songs on that SoundCloud page are songs that we’d done in our other bands, but maybe we didn’t feel that the band pulled it off in the same way, so we kind of tweaked it or changed it with the new musicians. We had a bunch of ideas and stuff ready to go.”

In January, Wet Ones released a cassette containing a few of the songs they’d hashed out in their earliest days. Sometime after 2016 gets under way, the band plans to release its debut — a full album issued digitally as well as on CD and vinyl — on the punk label Slovenly Recordings. (At that point, Kupfer tells me, they’ll probably take down most of the songs that exist for free on the Internet.) And a follow-up to that debut is already in the works.

“We already have our next record basically completed,” Kupfer says. “But we don’t want our first release to be a box set. We want to trickle it out so people can get the most out of it, instead of boring everybody by putting out 12 records or something. We just don’t want to dump a bunch of stuff right away.”

Whatever the Wet Ones may be, the band is definitely not boring. Its songs present as enigmatic, foul-tempered outbursts less concerned with melodic precision — not to say there isn’t any — than capturing whatever particular sentiment is driving the bandmates at the moment. These are raucous, snarling punk jams, and they’re not graceful. But in the right scenario, they work like a drug. Listen to Wet Ones, and your brain’s pleasure centers will sync up. Your skin will itch, and your blood will run hot. You’ll want to scream things, too.

As you’d expect, then, a Wet Ones show is a frantic, sweaty, beer-filled experience — a place to scream, “I’m a shithead!” with a couple of dozen or so other people. It’s that live energy that keeps veterans such as Kupfer, Campbell and Baird feeling like the band life still has its shine.

“It’s our favorite activity, to get drunk and fuck around on FourTrack [an audio recording app for bands],” Kupfer tells me. “We enjoy making music together. It’s what we do to have fun.”

Baird, who has arrived with a Heineken in hand, gazes at me from behind rose-tinted sunglasses. “We want to avoid the issue of being bored as fuck.”

One way the bandmates fight tedium: trading instruments. Except for Solsberg, who holds down the bass, the members switch among keys, guitar, drums and lead vocals, depending on the song and its author. There’s no organized process for any of it; Kupfer suggests that it all comes down to elementary chemistry.

“Forming a band with someone, it’s like dating them in a way because you’re signing up for a relationship,” he says. “You’re spending a lot of time with them. You’re creating stuff — your riffs or whatever. You’re letting other people use that. You’re sharing it, and it’s kind of a personal thing. Sometimes, there’s that thing where you come together and you jam and it doesn’t work, and you go to the bar and play Hoop Fever instead. Other times, you jam and you’re like, ‘Whoa, that sounds fucking awesome, and we just brought that into the universe. Let’s do that again next week.'”