Frank Bruno Talks Trash Fiasco’s New Single, Upcoming LP and Bela Legosi
Courtesy of Trash Fiasco
Chicago-based punk group Trash Fiasco has released a new single ahead of their upcoming studio album. Consisting of Frank Bruno (vocals/guitar), Lucas Fuechsl (drums) and Tyler Sanders (bass), Trash Fiasco is a chaotic and unhinged Midwest outfit — in the best way possible. Combining fuzzy, garage punk with a variety of other genres, Trash Fiasco is a punk band that isn’t afraid to lean heavily into the experimental.
Their latest single, “One Bird” (released December 12), is written from the perspective of a man who is extremely pretentious and shamelessly obnoxious. Serving as the debut single ahead of their upcoming album, Exist As Instructed, the narrator of the song is ignorantly blaming the world for his problems, too entitled to see the true nature of their behavior.
Born during the pandemic, Trash Fiasco is the child of artistic ambition and COVID-induced lockdown. With nothing to do and nowhere to go, Bruno says the only choice the band had was to stay together, write songs and practice endlessly. “Not being able to go many places or do many things sort of locked you in this creative prison where you were forced to take what was in your head and get it out on the paper or out via sound, and the only social activity we had for months was practice,” Bruno says. “We ended up getting tight that way, which produced a better debut record and got us to a place where our first shows were a lot better than they would have been in a normal world.”
While labeled as a garage punk band, Trash Fiasco has experimented with various genres in their work. Each member brings in their own influences, and thus the band tackles punk with blues, soul and heavy metal in their arsenal.
“You're forced to describe yourself because people ask you, and you don't want to take an hour every time someone asks that question,” Bruno says. “But [the music is] a bit wider than that, punk is about refusing to be labeled, and that gives me a lot of confidence using the term, because we always have energy, no matter what the sound is — especially live. We leave it all out there. We give it everything we have, and so that paired with just refusing to acknowledge categories leads me to say punk.”
With labels come restrictions, even with music genres. This is very common in the rock scene, and when artists stray away from what they are labeled as, they’re often met with criticism. Thankfully, Bruno says Trash Fiasco doesn’t get too much flak as a punk band that likes to experiment — aside from confused looks from audience members.
“I enjoy that personally because it tells me it's unique, which is what you want,” Bruno says. “As an artist, you don't want to sound like everything else that people are listening to. You want it to stand out, and we stand out in a way that leaves people scratching their heads, which I don't mind.”
Bruno says each member of the band is influenced by different genres. He brings the blues, jazz and his love of Jack White and Muddy Waters to his vocals while Fuechsl brings old-school punk and heavy metal passion into his drumming, for instance. However, these differing tastes don’t clash with one another. The members have a lot of trust for one another when it comes to knowing what is best for a song, Bruno says, and encouraging members to play what they feel is right connects back to the authenticity that punk encourages.
Courtesy of Trash Fiasco
“One Bird”, Trash Fiasco’s fun, rambunctious and raging new single is only a little over one minute long. Extremely catchy and relevant, Trash Fiasco manages to capture Midwest underground rage in just over 60 seconds. Telling the story of a man who takes ignorance and entitlement to the extreme, “One Bird” is a continuation of how Trash Fiasco explores the minds of fictional characters and very real scenarios.
“Everything's going wrong, but to be so insulated that you still think you're hot shit, is really the theme of the whole thing,” Bruno says. “I can't say that relates to one specific person, but I think everybody knows at least a person — probably several — that are kind of like that.”
The promo for “One Bird” is a roughly 30-second clip showing scenes from the 1931 film Dracula, starring Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi as the title character. The promo video shows clips of Trash Fiasco performing on stage under red lights, and it also shows historical footage of Bela Lugosi leaving the Metropolitan State Hospital in Los Angeles in 1955. After years of drug addiction due to mental struggles and a dwindling film career, Lugosi checked himself into a psychiatric ward in LA to overcome his addiction.
Bruno says the song is not about Lugosi, and using him in the promo for “One Bird” was not an attack on the actor. He was unfamiliar with the actor’s story before looking for promo content, but he thought using Lugosi was fitting for the song.
“It's a 32-second social clip, so it's hard to convey everything you want to convey, but it's taken from two different shots,” Bruno says. “The first shot is him exiting the sanitarium after he was institutionalized for mental health reasons. The other shot is him in his most iconic movie and maybe the most iconic scene. So you have the absolute top simultaneous with the absolute bottom. Maybe [it] isn't an exact parallel to the track, but a good one. The character [in “One Bird”] sees himself at that tippy top spot, but in reality, it's closer to that bottom scene.”
Similar to the struggles that come with conveying a message in only 30 seconds, a 60-second punk song like “One Bird” must be able to say what a band wants to say in a very short time.
“That's a challenge for sure, but similar to the pandemic … the restriction is sometimes what breeds the most creativity,” Bruno says. “When you have confined space to work in, sometimes that yields the best results. Not everything we write is that short. Some of the longer narrative stories are longer tracks, but I do think you can still get a message across in such a short time frame. You just have to be very deliberate about what you say and how you say it. Each word carries significance.”
Trash Fiasco is one of the many groups active in Chicago’s renowned underground punk scene. While the city is known for its pivotal role in the blues and jazz genres, Chicago has also been a significant player in alternative genres. With punk in particular, the city is home to many bands that keep the genre alive and full of rage.
Bruno says the Chicago punk scene has greatly affected Trash Fiasco, and being a part of the scene leads one to gain a lot of respect for the other active bands in the community. He says that when you write in a vacuum, it’s easy to get a little high on your own work. You only need to go to a couple of Chicago punk shows to get yourself grounded again.
“It's been such a treat to be a part of the scene for no other reason — one, I've learned a lot from people that are my age,” Bruno says. “It's like they have 20 to 30 years of experience on me. They just come from a different perspective, so I've learned a lot, and two — it makes awesome bills when you're playing live … The scene is amazing and I'm really proud to be a part of it.”
Exist As Instructed, Trash Fiasco’s sophomore album, comes out on March 20. The band will drop a couple of singles before the album comes out and do a short, Midwest tour around the time of the album’s release. Bruno hopes the band can continue to get people scratching their heads, and says the eight tracks on the album truly represent what Trash Fiasco is all about.
“We led with ‘One Bird’ because it's the starting point for the entirety of the album's sound. It is 71 seconds of straightforward, in-your-face, punk. To take that from there, there are a thousand different roads you can travel down, and we tried traveling down all of them … each track is so different and it sounds like they're written by different bands, but somehow you can hear it and identify it's us … I'm excited to share that and gauge feedback and see if it worked … or if it'll just seem insane.”
Check out Trash Fiaco’s new single, “Ma.lin.ger”, HERE. ♦