(Editor’s Note — Buffalo punk band Muddle has a new lineup and is working on a new album. Recently, 1120 Press writer Benjamin Joe caught up with the band, which was kind enough to talk with us about all that’s happening. We thank them for their time. Please read our story below. — Photos: current band lineup **absent Alex Novakovic; longtime Muddle members Adria Wieszala and Maggie DeWitt: credit Raimund S-F.)
Ask Maggie DeWitt, the notable front woman of the Buffalo “gunk” band Muddle, about the group’s latest lineup and she doesn’t hesitate to say how her new bandmates have made the songwriting process enjoyable again.
There “seems to be a very different attitude. I feel iterations of Muddle have been sort of toxic when it came to writing songs, but this one, it’s been very open. It’s fun,” said DeWitt. “It’s easy to be vulnerable and admit ‘I’m having trouble with this part of a song,’ or ‘I’m having trouble with the melody, can you help me?’ This is a lineup that I feel it’s easy for me to be vulnerable and it hasn’t always been that way.”
Formed originally in 2016, Muddle is now recording its first album with the band’s new
lineup. While the group still consists of DeWitt and longtime drummer Adria Wieszala, the two have been joined by familiar Buffalo hardcore/punk mainstays Lucas Kaleta on guitar, Aidan Howard on bass and Alex Novakovic on guitar.
Howard noted she tried out for Muddle before but wasn’t “cool enough,” a comment which elicited from the band a good laugh. But the truth of the matter is that once the rest of the band knew Howard was interested, it was only a matter of time.
While the band’s progression from playing covers in its practice room to kicking out originals and becoming known and well-received on the scene has been largely positive, Muddle has encountered along the way its fair share of challenges, namely people leaving the group.
“People would leave, and we’d be like ‘fuck, we need to find new people if we want to keep going,’” DeWitt said. “And it was mostly people we already knew. It’s like, if you’re a friend, you’ll probably be absorbed in.”
Kaleta is a case in point. He and DeWitt go back several years together and, in fact, Kaleta was with Muddle when it formed. But he ended up leaving the band and did not play on its first two albums, “Crackhead Behaviors” (2019) and “Seethe” (2023). (Kaleta and Wieszala, incidentally, are also the masterminds — with assistance from local punk legend Eric Bifaro — behind this past summer's series of 'Guerilla Showfare' generator shows, the name of which was thought up by DeWitt.)
The pre-existing relationships between Muddle's current members appear to be paying off as they work on the new album. Specifically, DeWitt said, there seems to a heightened spirit of collaboration as well as a degree of intuitiveness which now exists in the writing process.
“Everything we’ve written so far, musically, has been by different people in the band and it’s just been super cool. It’s just really fun to hear everyone’s different ‘baby,’ you know what I mean? And everyone just picks it up so easily and it just goes on from there,” she said.
The band acknowledged that, at the moment, the new LP is tough to describe.
“I feel like the album is three genres in-and-of-itself,” said Howard.
“(But) they all fit together,” added Kaleta.
“Sometimes it feels like, ‘was this to our detriment?’” DeWitt said of the band’s hard-to-categorize music. “I really don’t care. I like it. If you want your cookie-cutter stuff, you can go out there and get it somewhere else.”
People will hear the new album and still be able to say, ‘Oh yeah, I can tell that’s Muddle,’” said DeWitt.
But, she added, “I do believe it will be different. We’re playing around with the same genre. But we have a song that’s very much based on 2000s emo music. It’s different people now, so we’re able to play around with everybody’s interests when it comes to sound.
“I know a lot of people are genre snobs. They’ll say, ‘actually, that’s death core, di-di-di-di.’ But if I like it, I like it. There are some people in the band who’d say, ‘Oh no, it’s this specific genre, based on this thing.’ But I don’t really have the ability to clock it like that. To me, it’s always punk.”