Portland, Oregon based Noise-Garage Punk band Stunt Drummer will be releasing their second album, Warm Up, Tiger, on April 17, 2026 via Cavity Search Records. This follows their self-titled 2023 debut album, built by a band where each member has a decade or more experience in various genres of music, and in particularly in live performance. For Stunt Drummer, live performance is a big focus of their existence, and a natural extension of their rehearsal sessions where they also write music, live, together. The new album was recorded live in a small studio with minimal overdubs, and the record aims to capture the energy of their live performances, as well as their naturally collaborative spirit.
Made up of Marty Buckenmeyer (guitar/vocals), Erik Becker (guitar/vocals), Ethan Schee (bass), and J Leaver (drums), the band’s chemistry is based on shared interests but also in welcoming differences in ideas. That leads to songwriting that is fresh and sonically interesting, rarely predictable, and quite diverse from song to song. For a group of people whose goal is to get a reaction out of each other, first, that only makes the audiences more aware of a certain audacity that keeps your interest in the same way that dramatic storytelling does, punctuated by surprises and twists. I spoke with Marty Buckenmeyer, Erik Becker, and Ethan Schee about the band’s ecosystem, their musical pasts, and recording Warm Up, Tiger.
Hannah Means-Shannon: Since live performance is a big part of what you do, geography must be important, with all you near each other.
Marty Buckenmeyer: Erik and I have played in multiple bands together over the past ten or twelve years, or so.
Erik Becker: Longer than that! It’s all about the shows.
HMS: Have there been different genres that you’ve worked with before being in this band that have impacted what you do now?
Erik: I’ve been in a number of different bands. I would say that the stuff that we do in Stunt Drummer is all over the place, but some of the more aggressive stuff is similar to a few of the bands I’ve been in in the past.
But when I first started playing music, I was playing a lot of old Country at the time. The more aggressive stuff that we do is not for everybody, but back in the era of 2009 or 2010, when I didn’t have a job, and a bunch of people I knew didn’t have a job, we started a band and it was “the fun unemployment band”. But it was much more Rock ‘n Roll, user friendly, and for the masses. We just wanted to make some fun songs that people listened to. That was a little more tame. But with the other bands, I’ve gravitated towards more aggressive stuff. I grew up in Cleveland, skateboarding, going to shows, so that’s a big part of my influences.
Marty: I play in three different groups, currently. I play in an acoustic duo, that does what we call “acoustic Dad Folk”, where we play in farmer’s markets. And then I play in a cover band, that’s a step up. We make a little more noise, and we do some original things, but it’s still pretty family friendly. So this band scratches another itch! It’s like our basement therapy sessions to let it all out.
Ethan Schee: It’s pretty free-for-all. I played in a lot of fast Punk and Metal bands when I lived in California, and when I lived in Seattle. That was pretty standard for me. Most of them were never really my own project, that I got to put my own input into. Really getting together with these guys has done that, and we all lean towards similar North Stars in terms of bands that we like, like Fugazi, The Jesus Lizard, Mclusky, and things like that. We’re good enough friends, though, that we’re allowed to throw anything we want at it, and that’s when the most interesting stuff happens, I think.
HMS: I often ask bands about their musical back-story because it’s amazing the range of genres that people come from, have come through, or still work in. One thing that’s often in common for heavier music bands is that it’s a really fun, necessary thing, for those who do it, even if they have multiple projects. As you say, it becomes the therapy session.
Marty: Absolutely. I was thinking, when Erik was talking about making music that people would like to listen to, I don’t even think we’ve thought about it like that, as a band. It’s more the question: What do we, all four, want to play? And what do we have fun doing in the moment? Then, somehow, it turns into the song.
Ethan: I like to bring in things that I think are going to psych out the other members of the band! Just things that are weird enough to make people laugh, who I’m playing music with. That’s a little more important to me.
HMS: You are your own audience.
Ethan: Oh, yes, we did this through Covid, so we were truly our own audience.
HMS: For some people who haven’t worked in a group, who have worked more solo, they find it very vulnerable to throw things out as ideas during writing sessions. Do you ever criticize each other, or do you try to be encouraging?
Erik: I’d like to say that we’re pretty encouraging. Everybody has opinions, but that’s normal. Essentially, it’s four of us coming from four different directions, but we end up working really well together in terms of listening to each other as we play. I play guitar and sing, but I’m more interested in the sum of what we do, or what Marty does, or what Ethan does. I’m interested in the sum. We have songs that I maybe one or two notes on, but I don’t care! The rest of the song sounds awesome. Even now, we’re knee-deep in working on the next batch of songs that we’re super excited about.
Marty: I think what usually happens is that someone brings a riff in, and nobody says, “That’s dumb.” But we might work it out, and we might play on something for a week or two, or it doesn’t come back up. If something comes back up, and has legs, then it becomes a song.
Ethan: Marty is really good at documenting everything, so his audio files on his phone are chock-full of discarded things, a riff-pile. As for myself, I had known Erik for a while when he asked me to come over and play, and he and Marty had known each other for a long time, too. So when I initially came in, I thought I’d just drop what I do into what they had going on. The language-side of things was really good from the get-go, and we were cracking each other up with it. That really pretty quickly changed into me thinking, “There are things that I really want to do for this band.” And it melded together. We’d be texting each other after practice sessions.
Erik: We just didn’t have a drummer! Marty is very good at documenting everything as it happens, even texting, before we get together again.
Ethan: That was even before we had a stable drummer. The Stunt Drummer name was because it was the true reality of how we were functioning as a band for a long time. We’ve all played here in Portland for double digit years and know a whole bunch of drummers, so we’d always invite another drummer in. Then, J landed in our laps, and we’d never look back.
Marty: That was great. There was a whole era where we’d have people come in to play the drums, and I’d play the drums a bit, but I’m just me. When we met J, it was serendipitous because we wanted to start playing shows.
Ethan: He was already in three bands himself! That’s typical for a drummer.
Marty: That was about two and a half years ago. We lucked out. J actually is the epitome of Stunt Drummer because the other bands he’s played in are Blues bands, and a Flamenco-esque Folk band, so his skill range is pretty broad, which is great. Whatever we throw at him, he can eat it up and make something happen.
Ethan: He’s a real working man’s drummer, and can play no matter how weird it is. He says, “Just play it, I’ll just get going.” And he makes it happen.
HMS: With the name of the group, they must expect J to be the James Bond of drummers behind the kit at shows. That’s a lot of pressure for J!
Marty: It is! We’ve talked about this, but we should really do it, put J in front. Somebody told us at one of the shows that he’s very entertaining to watch. That would help reinforce the “Stunt Drummer” aspect.
HMS: One of the reasons that I asked about songwriting is that you seem to have a lot of flow regarding songwriting, since this is your second album and you do a lot of live shows. Getting along as songwriters seems to be a major factor in bands staying together. But I can also hear a variety of musical ideas throughout the album, and I can tell there are ideas coming from different angles. It’s a big strength.
Ethan: It did blossom at some point. By a year or two in, I had brought in my ridiculous pedal board, and we were figuring out chanting noises, and things with gongs, stuff like that.
HMS: Did these songs develop live before you recorded them? Or were they first developed as demos?
Marty: There’s a couple of songs that Erik had worked on in a previous group of people, but we would often trot stuff out for a gig, before it was ready. But most of the time, we’re working on songs in the practice room. We get it about 75% there, and then we go play it out somewhere. A few of the songs, like “Switch” and “Warm Up”, we’d go out and butcher them on stage.
Ethan: With the weird timing at the end of “Warm Up”, I remember having no idea if we were going to land it!
Marty: Going through that process, I think by the time we were recording, over at Deer Lodge, we knew what we were doing with those songs.
Erik: By the time we recorded them, they were all at least a year old, to us. When we were recording with Ezra at Deer Lodge, we dragged it out for a bit because of getting our schedules to line up. But somewhere in the first quarter of that, “Chinese Windows” popped up. It wasn’t initially slated.
Marty: That’s right, that’s when we started writing that one.
Ethan: We really liked it, and we wanted to get it on there.
Erik: When it did happen, it kind of started to write itself, which is fun. That one was pretty fluid when it came up, during recording sessions.
Ethan: The urgency of trying to put that one on the record made us say, “We’ve got to put a pin in this one at some point. It needs a beginning, a middle, and an end.”
HMS: That does force decisions. The benefit of playing them out beforehand is that the identity of the song crystallizes.
Ethan: There are a few things that we do that I truly understood and knew what I wanted to do with it only after playing it out a couple of times.
HMS: But then, there’s also the very well documented phenomenon of the “album song” which comes along only once you’re in the studio, and you have to act fast. This happens to many, many artists. That’s what you just described!
Marty: Yep, that was it!
Ethan: It was a time stamp for where we were at.
HMS: You are very open about the length of your songs. The one real stand-out in terms of length is “Voodoo” which is very long. But for the most part, the songs are on the shorter side.
Erik: We have one song that’s about 90 seconds long, that we’ve never recorded. Some songs start out, and they are about eight minutes long. Then, we realize that we need to make them shorter, and it’s like chiseling away at it. I think we get to the point where we all feel like it’s the right length, but there’s no magic number that we’re trying to hit.
Ethan: We operate by the vibe a lot.
Erik: We often jam on songs and we know that we can keep going, but we then chisel out the good bits. We don’t need to play a section for a minute and a half. But “Voodoo” is six and a half minutes. I wrote it with some other friends, and never used it, but the intro section on that came from a practice session here at my house. We played the song, and we started playing something very simple, then went into “Voodoo”. We realized that sounded really cool.
Ethan: That song, more than any other song I’ve worked on, has movements. It’s like three different songs blended together, and the way we handled that was with flow and volume changes.
Marty: When we wrote “Oh My”, we didn’t have a regular drummer, but that’s over five minutes long.
Ethan: We had no drummer for it, but demanded like a Jane’s Addiction style breakdown in the middle of it!
Erik: That’s the only thing we can tell you, what we want! That song took forever, something like 12 weeks to write.
