choncy on cincinnati cuisine, brainrot, and kitchen sink punk

Small acts of kindness from strangers on tour tend to stick with you. The awkward feeling of showing up to a new city right as everything is closing but right before loading in? That’s universal among all punk touring acts. This is the situation Big Clown found ourselves in the first time we visited beautiful Cincinnati, Ohio, home to one of America’s most robust punk scenes.

We arrived around 4:30 p.m., which is the worst time to try to enjoy a new-to-you city full of strangers. Luckily, Choncy—one of the local acts on the bill that night—invited us to a spontaneous cookout at their shared apartment. We’d never met in person before, but they proceeded to grill up burgers and introduce us to Grippos, the Queen City’s finest regional and overly seasoned potato chip.

The members of Choncy were in college at the time, but I couldn’t really tell from the worldly cynicism of their debut record Community Chest. These were the songs of a beaten man; vocalist Liam Shaw seems to have been chewed up and spit out by our stupid world, coming out the other side feeling like the only normal person in the room. Little did I know that these were dispatches from a man seeing his own corporate future and thinking “oh god, this is going to suck.”

The band matched the tone, mixing post-punk, hardcore, and a heavy dose of jittery energy into a zesty blend akin to the Grippos’ dense zing. We hung around their house for probably a little too long, but they were warm and accommodating, shooting the shit with us about collegiate life and what they wanted to do after they graduated. I felt a bit like a unk Grandpa, but these unexpected moments of connection are what makes touring fun.

Choncy grew up, graduated, and drifted apart, but only physically. Guitarist Simon Schadler moved to New York City, but that didn’t stop them from sending tracks back and forth and assembling their best album yet. Trademark, their third album on Feel It Records, transforms their self-described “kitchen sink” approach into a no-pun-intended trademark sound while still letting Shaw yell about modern contrivances like scrolling on his phone, dressing for job interviews, and taking out too many loans.

Even though he records long distance, Schlader’s nervy lead guitar lines feel integral to tracks like “A Dogs Best Man.” Drummer Joe Carpenter and bassist Nathan McVeigh sound more confident and buoyant than ever. Their everything-in-a-blender approach feels more refined, with their influences working together in tandem instead of in isolation. It’s hard not to feel like the main character of 20X Multiplier's “Jacked”—juiced to the gills and running through walls like the Kool-Aid Man—when listening to this record.

I caught up with Choncy in Jackson, Mississippi before our bands played together at CS’s. The interview was partially conducted in Big Clown singer Lucy Isadora’s home (interrupted by the need to pack our shit up and get to the venue) and partially after our soundcheck. The conversation gets a little off rails and a lot off topic, but that’s kind of what listening to their records feels like. 

I feel like so many Choncy songs, especially on Trademark, are about jobs.

Liam: We love talking about jobs. 

A lot of them are about the absurdity of specifically corporate jobs. Have any of you ever had a corporate job?

Simon: I interned for a while for a big international engineering firm. Liam writes all the songs, he should pick my brain about what it’s really like working for the man. I work in lighting design now. 

Liam: I’ve had a Microsoft Teams kind of corporate job for about a year now. A lot of the older songs—and some of the newer ones—came out of applying for jobs after college. I was so angry about not getting a job. I did digital media, so I worked at a news station for a bit. Some of the songs came out of that, but I kinda liked that job.

Joe: It paid like shit.

Liam: I got screamed at a lot. I like high stress jobs…

Simon: Which is why you worked as a librarian before that.

Liam: I was a shelver.

Joe: You should’ve stayed at that job.

Liam: I would’ve had to get a degree.

Joe: I do blue collar work now, but I was at Kroger for a while. 

Liam, how many jobs did you apply to before you got one?

Liam: Probably somewhere in the two hundreds over a couple of years. I tried to do freelance work while searching, and I was serving too. I had a few internships and some jobs here and there, but I never got the job. Even the job I have now, it’s just okay, but I think everyone says that. I see other bands that tour for a month and think, “so you don’t have a job? Are you taking unpaid time?” I guess for some people they just do temp jobs or they’re a teacher.

Nathan: One of the guys in Cruelster has the most fucked up jobs I’ve ever heard in my life. Connor has this job where he goes to powerplants and makes and repairs controller boards. He was telling us that for the Poison Ruin tour they had to stop on a day and he had to drive separately to another city to work at a plant. 

How many of these songs were written pre-you getting a job versus post-job?

Liam: A lot of them are pre-job. We wrote a lot of this album while I was at this job.

Does the job measure up to all your expectations?

Liam: [laughs] Honestly, yeah. I kind of knew it was going to be boring. They like me and they think I do a good job. I’ve told some people at work [about the band], and there’s some other musicians, but I told a lot more people when I was serving. 

The idea of your coworkers finding a song like “Company Man” is really funny to me.

Liam: I had a coworker, an older guy who played music. He liked it and told me it sounded like the B-52’s. 

Simon: It’s funny you mention “Company Man.” The day that song came out, it was announced in my company newsletter that I was being promoted from intern to designer. I got tagged in my work’s Instagram story and the Choncy story, so I had to share both back to back. My work liked the band, though.

You’re not the one singing the “fuck my job” songs.

Simon: The other guy’s the one with hate in his heart. I feel like a lot of times with the job songs, Liam’s writing from a fictional character’s perspective. 

Now that you’ve gotten to the corporate space, do those characters feel real to you?

Liam: Yeah, there’s a lot of people like that. It’s not a toxic work environment though—it’s pretty sterile. Most of my coworkers complain about their jobs louder than I do in my songs. They’ll be like “this is so fucking stupid” at work. Choncy probably isn’t that bad in comparison. 

For the two of you that don’t have a corporate job, do you listen to these songs and feel like “wow, that sounds like it sucks, I’m glad I’m not doing that” or is it “I wish I was doing something different.”

Nathan: Sometimes I wish I was working a corporate job. PTO is really the only thing I want. 

Simon: Me and Liam are getting paid to go on tour, technically. That’s important when you’re divvying up finances from the tour. Ideally, we can cover the days people aren’t working.

Joe: I’m more of a “fly by the seat of my pants” kinda guy. That’s how I live my life, just…

Nathan: Rugged.

Joe: Shut up. [everyone laughs] This is a sore subject right now.

Simon: Liam called Joe “rugged” in the van earlier. 

Joe: You called me something worse than rugged.

What’s worse than rugged?

Joe: “Rough around the edges.’ He said he meant it as a compliment. That’s not a compliment! 

There’s two songs on Trademark about scrolling on your phone: “Scroller” and “Bypass.” How do y’all feel about your phones?

Liam: I love my phone.

Nathan: We’re so on our phones. 

Liam: The least brainrotted person in the band is Simon.

Simon: I’m the least brainrotted but Joe is the least online.

Joe: I’m doomscrolling on Facebook Marketplace.

That is the most brainrotted place on the Internet in some ways.

Joe: I saw a coffin turned into a car, like a coffin mixed with a lawnmower engine with a seat on it. I put it on one of our posters for the last tour. 

Liam: Being a band means you’re so fully online. It’s a ginormous part of it.

Nathan: We have the worst Internet presence as a band.

Liam: I think it’s right down the middle.

Simon: It’s pretty bad. 

Nathan: We don’t really post.

Simon: That’s a stylistic choice. If you commit to it, it’s easier. 

Nathan: It’s because we don’t want to post some of the shit we have to say.

Simon: I’d rather talk to people in person and share just the necessary information online. It’s too much work to keep up with this shit.

Liam: I promoted some of this album on TikTok. I took some of our music video clips and posted them with captions, because I used to do some of that as part of my freelance work, like freelance video editing…

Nathan: [quietly] Clipfarming. 

Liam: We got a few hundred likes. I posted the tour poster and someone commented: “I’m gonna come out!” 

Nathan: We’re the next Cameron Winter.

Simon: I feel like with any social media decisions, Liam gets super worried that someone’s gonna think we’re annoying. 

Nathan: I wanted to put a picture of the release show weekend flyer over my bare foot on the gas pedal of the car to be like “Chicago, we’re on the way!” and Liam told me no. I got vetoed super fucking hard.

There’s always a tough line with how much to use social media as a band because, going back to the songs themselves, the phone is bad. Scrolling is bad. But you have to be on it so people know what you’re doing.

Liam: I heard that on Facebook, before our time, you used to be able to post shows and people would actually tell you if they’re going. It would actually give you a temp check of how things are going. Now it’s like, oh, this got 80 likes, who knows?

I’m older than y’all. I was playing music in the heyday of the Facebook event. If you got 50 people saying they were going to your event, you could reasonably assume between 40-60 people were going. 

Joe: Wow.

Nathan: That’s nice. We weren’t on our phones on Thursday from 2 o’clock until we got to Louisville, and then the first thing somebody said to us when we got to the venue was, “Hey, did you hear Kyle Busch died? We’re putting this whole tribute out to Kyle Busch tonight.” I thought, surely, he’s joking. Liam heard it and he goes, “Dude, Kyle Busch died.” We, in the middle of the set, had to look up if Kyle Busch died. You keep up to date by scrolling.

There’s a lyric in “Scroller” about watching a man die on your phone. What’s the worst thing all of you have seen on the Internet?

Liam: I really like that lyric because it was pre-Charlie Kirk. That line is so perfect. But, really? It was probably Charlie Kirk. That was so bad. Someone sent a closeup to our group chat of his neck exploding.

Nathan: I was unfortunately that guy in the group chat.

Simon: That means Nate has seen far worse.

Nathan: I don’t even know what the worst thing I’ve seen is.

Simon: I can answer this easily: I was friends with really edgy kids when I was 11 and BME Pain Olympics was around. My friend made me watch a video of someone cutting his own member off. One of my old coworkers would show me videos of people dying all the time, like people getting beat to death with a baseball bat. He wouldn’t be laughing, he’d be like, “Check this shit out, man!” I’d have to watch it and go back to chopping cheese. 

Joe: I think I’d agree with the Charlie Kirk shooting. I did have a few 4chan friends, but I never watched the Isis beheading videos. I knew people that did, but I was never a part of that.

Simon: Now I feel like I’m cooked. I remember watching the Charlie Kirk video and feeling nothing. 

Liam: Did you see the close up one? 

Joe: I almost fainted when I saw it, it was fucked. 

Nathan: I get a lot of war footage in my feed from the Ukraine/Russia war. For some reason, my algorithm thinks I want to see people dying in trenches. 

It’s so crazy that scrolling has become very violence-heavy.

Simon: I feel like scrolling is less appetizing than it used to be. That’s because there’s no credibility online anymore. AI has ruined enjoyment of the videos. When you see something that looks real but it’s like, “Oh, this is AI,” you feel like you’ve been tricked. Now my brain gets overloaded when I watch fruit cheat on each other. 

Joe: I have a way better experience on Facebook Marketplace, where I can text some guy and get a Drake cutout for $35 that’s six feet tall.

Simon, you moved to New York before recording Trademark. How did the band manage that? 

Simon: There were a few bumps in the road, but we’re lucky because I’m not the base of the band. Being the lead guitarist, they can write songs without me and I can just put the cherry on top. I’ll give my iteration of the songs and sometimes it’ll change things, but it’s lead guitar. It doesn’t have to change the song structure. 

Liam: We did some of that on Community Chest as well. 

Nathan: We recorded Community Chest in Nashville with just Joe, Liam, and myself. Simon had left the band to go to New York for a bit–he was the original drummer. Joe swapped out with Simon, and then Simon came back to Cincinnati for a semester or two, so we brought him back in. It was right before we were going to put the album out and we had him write parts for it all.

Simon: The goal wasn’t originally to write parts. I was planning on playing the same power chords that Liam did, but I think we were all getting ideas for new layers to add. Coincidentally, they had breaks in the songs where there were openings for solos.

Joe: You had the lead for “That Guy” and we thought “why not just do the whole thing?”

So was 20X Multiplier the only one where you recorded it all together?

Simon: Yes. That’s maybe why it’s the weirdest.

Why do you think it’s weird?

Simon: It sounds more like songs written by multiple people. It’s really noisy and a little wobbly. I feel like Trademark makes more sense because we had more time. It’s smarter—not in a bad way, just smarter.

Joe: I think we were finding our footing on 20X Multiplier. I came into Choncy from outside of punk bands. I wanted to play punk music, but I didn’t feel like we were punk rockers. The vibe wasn’t fast, heavy, and gross. It was way cleaner with some nerdy personality embellishments. I think we were trying to throw everything at the wall at once—we had a hardcore song, a Dead Kennedys song, a weird art rock song. 

Simon: I think that really comes from all of us being into a lot of shit. We’ve never sat down and talked about what band we’re trying to go after. 

I was going through your album bios and the one thing that keeps popping up is that you’re a “kitchen sink” kind of punk band: a little bit of hardcore, a little bit of egg punk, a little bit of this and that. Is not being pigeonholed in a genre important to you?

Nathan: We like to write whatever. We have a jangly, almost bluesy song that we put on the Dot Dash Comp [“Tie”].

Joe: It’s almost twee.

Nathan: We’ve never written a song like that, but if we can piece it together and it sounds good, we’ll do it. 

Joe: Me and Liam wrote “Tie” together. I like how that worked. Sometimes fewer cooks in the kitchen, or when you have people chefing stuff up by themselves, works better.

Is it hard to find the motivation to do things when you’re at a distance?

Simon: At first. I think me actually moving [permanently] to New York was a weird shift. It was right off the release of 20X Multiplier, so we deserved a bit of a break anyway. I’m glad we took extra time to work shit out. The process of recording Trademark wasn’t too crazy. I never felt unincluded on anything. I was more than happy to play this role in the band.

Do you prefer to work at a distance?

Simon: I wouldn’t say it’s the preference. I can make it work. We’ve brought positives out of it. When I moved to New York, I really wanted to cement myself in the scene. It’s a whole new thing. Choncy is still my number one project in my brain, but I have to work on being at shows and getting a band together in New York. Hence Van Goth.

How did Van Goth come together?

Simon: I was trying to book a show in New Jersey for an off day on tour and I couldn’t. I decided to book a second New York show and make it a big Palestine benefit show. We secured a big wrestling ring. Sydney Salk came out to that and we just got to talking there. I told her I was moving to New York, just trying to meet people there that were into the same music as me. It came up pretty naturally. 

I’m a huge wrestling fan and there’s always been a part of me that thinks playing in a wrestling ring would be cool. Was it actually cool?

Nathan: [sarcastically] Sure. 

Simon: Nate ate shit.

Joe: He got too far ahead of himself.

Liam: We got stagemogged by Balaclava, who went before us. We were so self-conscious.

Nathan: I was trying to keep the energy up, so I was bouncing back and forth off the ropes. I went for one—hit it. Went for another, then another one, and then on the last one I went through the ropes, flipped all around, and landed on my fucking back outside of the ring. I also ripped my finger open on the second song. 

Being bloody and falling through the ropes is very pro wrestling. You had your own match, basically.

Simon: That was a cool show, but a very weird one.

Joe: Our set was not amazing.

Simon: We raised $1,400, so I was happy.

Lucy’s running a show now, but she wanted to ask about Grippos. Y’all turned her onto them and she loves them. Are they the best Cincinnati regional snack?

Nathan: I personally hate Grippos. They’re too cheesed up.

Simon: They’re soggy.

I personally like a chip with a lot of shit on it.

Nathan: That makes sense, I’m just not a chip guy.

Simon: I give them a 7/10. I don’t think any chip is a 10/10, though.

Well, what’s the best Cincinnati regional food in general?

Nathan: Goetta. 

Joe: Skyline Chili. Everyone knows Skyline.

Simon: Everytime I come back from New York, I have to have it.

Nathan: Graeter’s Ice Cream is good. 

I feel like Cincinnati has really good regional food. 

Simon: It’s a foodie town at a good price.

I loved goetta when we had it on tour.

Simon: The important thing to mention about Cincinnati food is that none of it will leave you feeling good. Goetta’s a delicious meat, but it’s also the worst meat ever produced.

Nathan: It was made by poor people in Cincinnati who didn’t have enough meat to last the winter, but they did have a lot of oats and grains to add to it and make a sausage out of it.

Joe: In the 1850s!

There’s this line in the bio for Trademark where you ask if there’s anything left to say. Do you feel like there is anything left to say in punk?

Liam: When we make punk songs, we always think “this song sounds like this band, this song sounds like that band.” [laughs] It’s impossible to make an original riff. It’s gonna sound like nine other songs that have been made in other waves of rock and punk music. Will there be a new idea?

I went through the bios for the albums while listening to everything sequentially. The idea of what you can say in punk comes up in all of them, but it eventually gets to a point where it’s like, “I don’t know!”

Liam: [laughs] Maybe there’s something to say about making three albums, because a lot of bands don’t get to three albums. 

Nathan: They don’t make it past one.

Liam: We ran out of ideas.

Simon: We’re not really running out of ideas.

Joe: If anything, I feel like it’s getting easier to write songs. Some of the songs from Community Chest were written before I was even in the band.

Simon: It wasn’t super refined.

Joe: Yeah. It was just throwing stuff out there. With 20X Multiplier we had Simon in, so we had a core band that could find the sound. We tried a ton of different stuff. Now we’re at the point where we have something, but we’re still not there yet.

I know that Choncy is still questioning if there’s anything left to say in punk, but if you do have something you feel like you should say, what is it?

Joe: I could say all my slogans from the buttons I make for the merch table. “Citizens united.” Or, “Future Climate Refugee.” That’s the classic.

Simon: My hot statement is that I think we should be rid of groups. I want people to stop calling themselves “punks” or “mods” or “tweeheads.” My message to the world is just be yourself. Stop trying to put yourself in a group that you don’t 100% identify with. Just be like us: we’re a kitchen sink.

Nathan: We are Choncy.

Simon: We are Choncy and so can be you.

Zach Mitchell, aka @jorty_spice, is a member of the bands Big Clown and Missed Dunks at Summer League. He runs Machine Duplication Recordings and the newsletter MDR Observer.

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