Middle Class Rut

When we last saw MIDDLE CLASS RUT, the band was tearing through a North American tour in support of 2010′s No Name No Color and hit single “New Low.” The song shot to No. 5 at alternative radio, its companion video racked up more than 4 million YouTube views and Middle Class Rut was, as USA Today declared, “on the verge.” The Sacramento, CA-based duo of vocalist/guitarist Zack Lopez and vocalist/drummer Sean Stockham shared stages with the likes of Muse, Social Distortion, Them Crooked Vultures, Alice In Chains, 30 Seconds To Mars and Linkin Park and more than held their own, drawing rave reviews from NME, the BBC, Alternative Press and Kerrang!, who proclaimed, “Their sound is nothing short of colossal, and one that a mere two-piece shouldn’t be able to create, combining the boisterous swagger and pomp of Jane’s Addiction and the feral fury of Rage Against the Machine.”

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Lopez and Stockham are raising the bar with Pick Up Your Head, an album that sees the duo opening up their sound. “We realized we’d exhausted everything we could do with drums, guitar, and vocals,” Lopez explains. “Once we decided to take an ‘anything goes’ approach, the songs poured out. We were freer with layering and didn’t worry if we couldn’t reproduce it live, as long as we captured the music with the highest energy possible.” The music on Pick Up Your Head has a denser, fuller sound than before, with Lopez playing bass and rhythm guitar, sometimes laying down multi-tracked parts. “On every song, we added percussive elements that play along with the drums to get a more spontaneous bang to build off of. It’s not overkill, but it does sound more like a normal rock band. We had a budget, but we didn’t send out for any fancy equipment. I used my practice amp and the usual amps I use on stage. We didn’t use samplers. We didn’t want any sounds a thousand different people have used before.”

The band’s roots can be traced back to Sacramento in the early 2000′s. Stockham and Lopez eventually hooked up and together with a friend, formed a band that called itself Leisure. They continued playing until everyone had graduated from high school. Lopez and Stockham were the core of the group, with other singers and guitarists coming and going. Eventually, they got signed by a major label and moved to LA. Leisure made two albums; the label shelved them both. The band imploded, and Lopez and Stockham stopped playing music for two years. “After the major label deal fell apart, we had to get real jobs,” Stockham says. The pair reconnected and decided to play as a duo. They were reenergized and recaptured the excitement they felt when they first started playing together, only this time they could both wail on their instruments, with a bracing intensity and aggression to spare. “We decided to be totally independent,” Lopez says. “We booked and promoted ourselves and did a national tour before we had a label, just two of us in a van, with one buddy who did our sound.” When DJ Andy Hawk at KWOD in Sacramento played “New Low,” things opened up and the band took off. Bright Antennae signed them, their demos became their first album, No Name No Color, and they’ve never looked back (read: no more day jobs). “We’re super-excited about this record,” says Lopez. “The first album was a collection of songs that had been written and recorded over a period of years. This one is way more cohesive from start to finish. When you listen to it, you can tell that it was all written in the same headspace.”