Neil Sedaka had it right. Breaking up is hard to do.
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“I think you’re supposed to have a mature conversation about your feelings and gently end the relationship with tears and well wishes,” says Nick Anderson, singer of the Los Angeles-based The Wrecks. “But the last time I tried that my girlfriend ran barefoot onto the freeway.”
The alternative, he says: stay in the relationship, passively aggressively, and wait for your significant other to f—k somebody else, and then there’s an out.
Whether that’s the proper course of action in ending one’s love affair is unclear (don’t try at home), yet The Wrecks lay it all out in their latest single “Fvck Somebody.” Raw with little filter, “Fvck Somebody” is a guttural diatribe building up to the end of a relationship. Giving off a slight Weezer whine, the track goes straight in with punching lyrics What do you want, my god… I just wanna love someone who’s not you.
“Fvck Somebody is the product of stream-of-consciousness that meets big theme,” Anderson tells American Songwriter. “The first two lines of the song spilled out immediately the moment my clumsy fingers slipped the second chord of the progression from an intended A♭m chord to a G#dim making the progression go from feeling like a funeral march to feeling like a curious musical about your significant other cheating on you.”
Uneven at first, Anderson says the track went deeper with the help of writing partner Savannah Bleu. There was a palpable energy to the song that just took off, but it was still choppy and needed some direction. He knew it was going to be about the breakup, then Bleu suggested the chorus “I wish you would f—k somebody.” It was all Anderson needed to finish the song.
“I wanted the final recording to feel as immediate and off-the-cuff as the writing process was, so I kept all of the demo vocals from the very first takes of every line,” says Anderson. “I recorded with the cheapest mic I own, but there was an undeniable energy in the air that night that no other mic would capture again.”
The track follows the June release of the band’s single “Freaking Out,” an in-your-face look at what a trip-gone-wrong (or perhaps right) is like when there’s a picture of Kanye West that won’t stop “staring” at you.
Unlike the now-defunct “Fvck Somebody” relationship, The Wrecks as as unit—Anderson, along with guitarist Nick Schmidt, bassist Aaron Kelley, and drummer Billy Nally—seem to be in this for the long haul. They’ve yet to put out a full-length album, but they’ve managed to release a second EP, Panic Vertigo, in 2018 and tour non-stop—Nothing But Thieves, New Politics, The Hunna, and Silversun Pickups.
It’s no surprise. The Wrecks are getting by just fine. After all, this is the band that watched YouTube videos as musician tutorials on how to self-produce music, then snuck into a recording studio while a friend was housesitting to record their 2015 debut We Are The Wrecks.
