During the summer of 2020, musicians Matt Zutell and Dylan Swinson met at a bonfire hosted by Chris Huber, the founder of the Charleston music journal Extra Chill, and immediately connected over their shared love of pop-punk and emo music.
Jerkweed, “South Carolina’s premiere mediocre pop punk/emo band,” was formed officially in September 2023, joined by Ryan Hanifin and drummer Marc Voyer.
The group covers the kind of music you could’ve caught in Warped Tour circa 2003, like blink-182, My Chemical Romance, Jimmy Eat World and Sum 41.
Zutell, (who is also the owner of Coast records, the downtown recording studio that is a six time Best of Charleston winner) said Jerkweed is about bringing new life to the music that he, Swinson and their friends grew up with.
“It’s pop punk, emo music, the music that shaped our teen years and continues to shape what we really like,” he said. “It was a huge part of our musical upbringing.”
During the pandemic, Zutell was revisiting those classics, and “falling back in love with it,” he said. “Something just clicked in me again, I went deep into the rabbit hole of all that type of music again, really hard. It was right around then that I bumped into Dylan at Chris’s house — we were blasting Taking Back Sunday on the sound system in the living room — and I told Dylan how I was toying around making a cover of the song “Memory” by Sugar Coat and I hadn’t finished it.
“That night, I was like, why don’t you come over to the studio and let’s mess around on it.”
The seed was planted for what would grow into a passion project, Jerkweed, a band that taps into the energy of “playing in the garage for the first time,” as Swinson put it.
Since that fateful formation, the group has performed shows curated around specific bands or themes, starting with a show at Tin Roof last September for which they hung posters up all over town — including at the Hot Topic in the Citadel Mall — a marketing tactic they’ve repeated since. The two musicians reported an awesome turnout from the start.
“We ended up packing out the Tin Roof so much that they had to turn people down at the door,” Swinson said. “It was insane.”
Zutell thinks part of the reason for the turnout is the curated and original approach Jerkweed uses to select their material.
“It’s always going to be a specifically crafted, niche show where people are coming to have this particular experience, versus like, oh, like we play every week at wherever. For each show, we record our version of a cover, make a video for it, make content about it, and it all leads up to a show.
“Even though we are doing all covers at this point, we’re trying to show an original take on it.”
LO-Fi hosts blink-182 tribute
Jerkweed is excited to present on Sept. 6 a blink-182 tribute, performing hits like “Dammit,” “What’s My Age Again?” and “All the Small Things.”
Swinson and Zutell sing and play guitar, with Hanifin on vocals and bass. Swinson said the blink-182 theme is a particularly good fit for the group’s drummer, Marc Voyer, who has been referred to as the “Travis Barker of South Carolina.”
And opening up the night is the local group called In the Garage, which will also offer high-energy covers of songs by Weezer.
“For me, what draws me to this genre … emo music literally means emotional music,” Swinson said. “As an angsty teenage kid, finding this music fueled with passion and anger … I think every every scene kid to a degree felt like he was a little bit of a misfit. It was like finding this music that was for those of us who didn’t feel like they fit in.”
With Jerkweed, Zutell and Swinson said, the band is wanting to share that space of belonging, and have concert-goers get a bit (or a lot) nostalgic, too.
“I kind of discovered this stuff around the time when I was going into high school, and then my parents got divorced, and my world was just suddenly changing,” Zutell said. “I felt like this music conveyed how I was feeling. It was this source of connection.”
And the name “Jerkweed” totally matches the groups’ ethos, upon explanation.
“When I was growing up in the 90s, there was this show on Nickelodeon called The Adventures of Pete and Pete,” Swinson said. “There was this one episode where Little Pete had a radio station built in his garage, and he was causing the electric bill to increase. Every time somebody called into his radio show with a request, he would tell them, ‘Get a life, jerk weed!’”
“When I heard it, it just made me laugh,” Zutell added. “It kind of leads to the vibe of the band — it’s just this stupid humor and poking fun at yourself. This isn’t like, we gotta take everything crazy seriously. We’re playing fun music that we grew up with and having a good time doing it.”
Find tickets for the Sept. 6 Jerkweed blink-182 tribute for $10 at lofibrewing.com. Learn more on Instagram @jerkweedband.
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