The Get Up Kids

Suptic was fourteen when a friend played him Fugazi, and the story he tells about it barely has a lag: "Fugazi is the reason I am in a band today," he told Drowned In Sound. "When I was 14 I heard Fugazi and started a band the next day." Pryor's devotion runs just as deep — he lists Fugazi's In On the Kill Taker among his five favorite albums ever and names guitarist Ian MacKaye, not any singer, as his single biggest musical hero. Years later, mid-session on There Are Rules, the band caught themselves doing nothing but listening to that same record instead of recording.

listen: upstream & heresource: Drowned In Sound — Jim Suptic interview (Fugazi/Superchunk formative testimony, band's own discomfort with its legacy) ↗share

1988

Waiting RoomFugazi

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1999

HolidayThe Get Up Kids

listen forPlay Fugazi's "Waiting Room": Ian MacKaye half-talks the verse over a loping bassline before it cracks into a shouted hook, tension held and released in one movement. "Holiday," the song that opens Something to Write Home About, works the same trick at pop scale — one critic called it "an act of violence," a quiet, coiled verse detonating into the album's angriest, biggest chorus. Same architecture, different volume.

"We wanted to be Superchunk," Pryor said flatly when asked why critics keep filing his band under emo — not influenced by, but wanted to be. It's the same devotion behind his favorite memory of the whole career: talking the older, more indie-credentialed Superchunk into taking his band on tour. Suptic named them in the same breath as Fugazi as one of the bands "we were listening to when we started," and the debt runs past admiration into imitation — a hook-first, shout-along energy borrowed wholesale and scaled up for a teenage crowd.

listen: upstream & heresource: Drowned In Sound — Jim Suptic interview (Fugazi/Superchunk formative testimony, band's own discomfort with its legacy) ↗share

1990

Slack MotherfuckerSuperchunk

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1999

Action & ActionThe Get Up Kids

listen forSuperchunk's "Slack Motherfucker" is all coiled college-rock fuzz and a title that's also its hook, shouted till it becomes a release valve. Critic Ian Cohen heard the direct line to "Action & Action": the record, he wrote, is "to Superchunk what Nevermind was to the Pixies, grafting bigger hooks and less obtuse emotions onto a college rock template." Listen for the same insistent, single-note guitar drive, just with a chorus built for a room to sing back.

Asked point-blank who the band's influences were, Pryor didn't hedge: "the stuff we all kind of agree on would be Fugazi, Super Chunk, JawBreaker." It's not a passing namecheck — Jawbreaker's 24 Hour Revenge Therapy sits on his all-time top-five albums list, one slot below Fugazi. Where Fugazi gave the band its urgency, Jawbreaker gave it permission to be plainspoken and a little bruised — Blake Schwarzenbach's diaristic, confessional bent runs straight through Pryor's own lyric sheets.

listen: upstream & heresource: The Pop Break — Matt Pryor interview (Fugazi/Superchunk/Jawbreaker named together as shared influences) ↗share

1994

BoxcarJawbreaker

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1997

Don't Hate MeThe Get Up Kids

listen forJawbreaker's "Boxcar" — from the same 24 Hour Revenge Therapy Pryor named as a favorite — snarls through a spite-punk kiss-off at a dead sprint, hooks intact under the scuzz. "Don't Hate Me," from Four Minute Mile, works the same vein: critic Ian Cohen called it "an unimpeachable spite-punk classic," a caustic, singalong kiss-off dressed in the same raw-throated urgency, just with the guitars scrubbed a shade cleaner.