PHOTO BY KEVIN A. ROBERTS
L-R: JOSH VAN HOOREBEKE, GARY MCCLURE, BRIDGETTE IMPERIAL, IAN REITZ.
Today, on Tuesday, April 17, 2018, the band American Wrestlers will debut a new song called “Ignoramus,” which will be given a world premiere on the website Stereogum.
Gary McClure, the group’s songwriter and mainstay, says that the process of debuting the track with the website was a straightforward one.
“I just emailed them,” he says. “They’ve run some stuff before, and I figured that I’d just email them, see if they liked it and it went as simple as that, really. I’d been working on stuff for a year and quit hundreds of times. Every week, I’d think ‘I’m not doing this anymore.’ Then, the next day, I’d think ‘this is really good.’ I think I got fed up waiting around, so I thought we’d release this, see if someone wants to put it out.”
The move comes after two releases on Fat Possum Records, a self-titled album in 2014 and Goodbye Terrible Youth in 2016. The band toured on that album, gigging through March of 2017, at which point it was time for new songs and a period of live dormancy.
As for Fat Possum, the American Wrestlers are neither on the label, nor off. The door remains open, so “maybe they’ll hear this song and want to put it out.” If so, another album of material’s basically ready.
McClure, a press-averse type on the best of days, is caught in that unusual moment of time in a new bit of work’s going out to an audience and this time, it’s about “the whole process. When you have to take photographs, come up with artwork, email a thousand people to hear it. Then you have to worry about touring, while keeping yourself afloat. When you’d rather just be watching Netflix, really.” (Incidentally, he recommends the series The Terror.)
The American Wrestlers story was always a bit unique, as we caught up with McClure back in 2015, when the group went from zero St. Louis shows to a LouFest date, in part due to the mystery. There was the fact that McClure had released a half-dozen records under other names previously; that he was kin to Scottish songwriter Roddy Frame; that the band was getting dates purely on the strength of the work that McClure was demoing for the AW debut.
Since then, there’s been another album, some touring, lots of local airplay and blog love. But a standing band and a set path… well, things are fluid right now. And as McClure talks, quietly and accented, he rips off a host of funny rants, one as insightful as the next. But at the end of the talk, he doubles back and asks that he not sound “miserable and angry,” so imagine that this was a much longer, funnier piece. Maybe next time.
Asked to say something positive at the end, then, he offers, he suggests that the album’s “using the notes as the last records, but in a different order.” He laughs, I laugh, we all laugh.
But he did hint at sincerity about his latest track(s), saying, “I really do believe is the best stuff I’ve ever rewritten.”
And of the latest single, we’ll quote his email (assuming that he didn’t send it to 999 other people: “It was going to be called ‘The Lonesome Death of the Alt-Right,’ but I figured I was being childish, so decided just to call it ‘Ignoramus.’ It has seagulls in it.”
And with that, we kinda/sorta help debut this thing.
