You never know what might happen when you call up an old friend for the first time in 15 years — the kind-of-hard-to-watch scene in Fargo in which Marge Gunderson meets her old classmate Mike Yanagita at the hotel bar immediately comes to mind — but in the case of drummer Matt Bell and bassist Matt Kuczaj, that kind of “hey, what’s up?” call eventually led to the creation of their new band.
Fronted by friend and former bandmate Andrew Kelly, Mean People formed about three years ago, following the dissolution of Kelly’s most recent outfit, a punk band called Big Useless Brain. Over that time, the three of them got together every week to woodshed a collection of riffs into concrete material, and on Fri, Jan 23, Mean People released Take Me Home, their six-song debut EP.
Perhaps at odds with the common rock band practice of playing live shows first before dropping debut material, Mean People have yet to play a single show. But really, what’s the hurry? The last time Bell, Kelly, and Kuczaj played together was in a pop-punk band called Cityview, which had itself evolved in the early 2000s from their high school band, PVK. Cityview lasted until the early 2010s, but Bell had quit in 2006, and other than a rock band called Ransom and occasional jam sessions with friends, he hadn’t been in a cohesive project in a long time.
“I was looking for a new band,” Bell said. “Then one day, I randomly got a call from an unknown number. I checked the voicemail,” and it was Kuczaj.
Kuczaj had gotten Bell’s number from their former Cityview bandmate John Robinson, and after Bell called him back, they met up for beers. Before their second round, they cracked open the “we should start a new band” conversation. Bell had a small drum room at EMP Rehearsals, and soon he and Kuczaj were hanging out again, jamming on old favorites and new riffs.
“Once we wrote a few things, I knew,” said Bell alongside Kuczaj and Kelly. “I was like, ‘OK, we need a singer. We need a guitar player.’ Getting together, playing random stuff, that was cool a few times, but we’re like, ‘It’s funny how we’re wired, where we have to get to writing new songs as quick as we can.”
“We can’t just be like, ‘Oh, let’s just play random stuff,’ ” Kuczaj said. “It was like, ‘OK, let’s actually write a whole set of new stuff.’ ”
Kelly heard his former rhythm section was playing again, and, since Big Useless Brain had run its course, he was eager to join whatever Bell and Kuczaj were up to.
“I harassed both of them to start this band,” Kelly said, “because the best band I had ever been involved with was with both of them, and I was like, ‘Well, if I’m actually going to be in a band, I might as well do with people that, like, I really respect and have that chemistry with.’ ”
On Take Me Home, that chemistry is undeniable. Three dudes in their early 40s, having long-since mastered all the sonic tropes and velocities of War on Terror-era pop-punk, split the difference between the passage of time and the four-chord, jump-on-the-off-beat blueprints of their youth. The result is a 21-minute slice of crisply produced, anthemic, modern rock that’s heavy on guitar crunch and the soaring stacks of Kelly’s vocals that fly over the dense, precision-tooled architecture of Bell and Kuczaj’s rhythms like falcons through a city skyline. Kelly’s voice is at the front of Mean People’s sound, but his vocals are bolstered by his FX-colored guitar leads and breakdown riffage, which act as a tether for Kuczaj’s melodic bass runs that weave above and below the melody, propelled by Bell’s emotive, dynamic percussion. And while the DNA of Propagandhi and New Found Glory emerge across these songs in a chord progression here or a vocal phrasing there, the tones and fretwork often sounds a lot closer to the biggest hitmakers of the alt-rock era — both “Under the Table” and EP closer “Fires” seem to glean inspiration from both My Chemical Romance and Smashing Pumpkins. Take Me Home’s arrangements allow room for more exploratory interludes and emotional movements.
Kuczaj attributes much of Mean People’s expanded sonic palette to tempos pulled back from the breakneck, double-time norms of Cityview.
Mid-tempo songs, Kuczaj said, “have a lot more space, and I think we write everything based on that. We can do more interesting stuff at a little bit slower tempos, and I mean, some of our stuff still even has faster tempos. We’re just not at 200 bpm anymore.”
Mean People also give a lot of credit for their sound to producer Will Beasley (Turnstile, Asking Alexandria). In September 2025, after demoing material with producer Jordan Richardson (White Denim, Son of Stan) at Electric Barryland in Justin a few weeks prior, Mean People decamped to Beasley’s studio in Richmond, Virginia, for two weeks to record Take Me Home.
Beasley was “super-awesome,” Kelly said, “and we just clicked,” though he added that they were initially nervous that Beasley didn’t really listen too much to their demos.
“But we just went in and played everything live, and then went off of that,” Kelly said. Beasley “was like, ‘I just like to be there and feel it, rather than listen to the songs when you’re not here.’ I think the best way to describe it is that he puts a vibe into so many things. Like on ‘Fires,’ he didn’t change a lot, but he changed my vibe with a few little things, and the whole song flows completely different.”
Though they haven’t yet booked their first show (“We just thought it would be better if we had some music out so people could at least be somewhat familiar with the songs,” Kelly said), Mean People continue to woodshed their set for whenever that time comes while also working on writing new songs, and, in the way that Kuczaj called Bell out of the blue to start their new band, reach out to some industry contacts.
“We’re definitely gonna shop it, whatever that means these days,” Kelly said.
If nothing else, Take Me Home is proof that it’s pretty easy for old bandmates to reactivate their musical telepathy. Sometimes all it takes is picking up the phone.
