The Moms
The Moms - Songs from the Road EP is available on digital where you consume your music! Click above for the iTunes download.
Biography
In a world gone mad, The Moms are here to mother us all, offering sweet punk rock relief through the chaos of today. For The Moms, punk is almost a religious thing; where the DIY basements are the church, where bands are born in a baptismal of sweat and beer, where people go for some spiritual communion. But it’s more than the music and the mosh pit. It’s a connection made between outsiders and misfits that’s driven by community, passion, and a sincere desire to bring the fun and the fury. It’s what the Mom’s do, and ‘Doing Asbestos We Can,’ the New Jersey trio’s first full-length with Bar/None Records, delivers the goods.
After years of touring, The Moms spent a moment catching their breath as they settled into a house together and spent time back at work and relationships. ‘Doing Asbestos We Can’ chronicles it all in song, speaking to the trouble of balancing jobs and romance while still chasing the dream. It’s an album that captures the push and pull between tour life and real life—one fist firmly in the air, the other closely clutching a drink. With the instability and unpredictability of the world’s current affairs, The Moms offer a much needed chance for release.
Spending much of their existence running around the country in an old RV, The Moms have built a canon of gruff-voiced DIY punk that’s both raw and youthful. In 2011, the band—now comprised of Joey Nester, Jon Stolpe, and Matt Stolpe, (none of which are moms)—began rehearsing in a small closet before expanding to the party scenes of Jersey basements. There The Moms found a like-minded sense of restless energy and unheeded ambition. That led to hundreds of tour dates in the aforementioned RV to underground scenes around the country where the group met contemporaries with matching appreciation for the spiritual nature of punk music. At the heart of the band is a decades old punk dream to play music regardless of the costs—a dream of sleeping on floors, crowds of sweaty kids, and did we mention beer? Yes, we did.
Following a lineage of working class rock bands with rugged vocals and driving instrumentals, The Moms’ music is full of honesty and wit with a beat that can be felt deep within. Nester’s lyrical approach tackles the uncertainty of the modern era with a dark sense of humor that seems like a joke at first but ends with a dead serious punchline. After a couple early EP’s, The Mom’s released their debut full-length, ‘Buy American’ with Paper + Plastick Records in 2014. That album showcased a band that was at once relatable and intense. With an unhinged vocal delivery and thumping rhythms, ‘Buy American’ set the band up as a promising voice in punk music.
Playing bigger shows—including tours in Japan and Canada—and signing on with seasoned indie label Bar/None Records, The Moms have remained true to their punk perspective throughout. 2016’s ‘The Snowbird EP’ brought Nester’s voice to even more biting territory with choruses that practically begged to be screamed back. ‘Songs From The Road’ followed paying direct tribute to the punk communities the band thrives in. ‘Songs From The Road’ features four covers of band’s The Moms fell in love with while touring. Spanning bands from Arkansas to Maryland, the EP features a beer-toting pub singalong by Trashkanistan, an almost-emo lost hit from Half Raptors, glazed over rock from Cheapshow, and an early demo by The Front Bottoms. With the 2017 release of ‘Doing Asbestos We Can’ The Moms are still growling with sincerity and distorted guitars, but there’s a more personal perspective to the lyrics and a pulse between the loudest moments and their softer, brooding counterparts. ‘Doing Asbestos We Can’ expands frontman Joey Nester’s songwriting to include more personal and intimate moments with a sound to match. The too short opener “Good Job” details the struggle between job security and jobless freedom before “Push Shove” ponders relationship freedom, declaring “if I regain my old devices and I get my Saturday nights back but still I feel as lost as I do now I’ll know there’s something wrong.” This is The Moms at their most dynamic yet, even bringing in Ciaran O’Donnell of The Front Bottoms for horns and keys, most notably on the horn-filled “Fortunate Former.” The New Jersey trio’s range shows best on “Soup Song,” which boils the greater meaning of life down to a bowl of soup, pulling back in the verses before charging forward in the choruses in an almost Pixies-style loud-soft dynamic. The relentless punk energy still pulses throughout, though. Tracks like “Rock The Boat” and “New Frontier” offer a full-speed release commenting on the current political turmoil. Most importantly, The Moms are still delivering honest and impassioned punk energy on a regular basis. If you catch them live, you’ll know that The Moms are the kind of band that will always love ya.