Cycling back around to my favorite bands/artists is extremely easy. However, I have a vast amount of favorites; it’s almost as if they’re all battling for my precious time. Regardless, I have been listening to A LOT of Cherubs in 2026. The Texas three-piece hits the psychedelic/fun/groove/noise sweet spot. I celebrated my 41st birthday with Cherubs.
Cherubs are a good soundtrack for the "fuck the future, fuck the past" energy that Jessica Amos talks about in a recent piece. They shred relentlessly, and I am always here for it.
Does time actually exist? When Cherubs is blaring out of my speakers, absolutely not. Can’t be bothered.
Guitarist Kevin Whitley loves his bandmates, drummer Brent Prager and bassist Pete Shore. “If I got to choose who my bandmates were, I would choose them,” says the man in his early 60s; it’s absolutely wild how Cherubs have maintained their youth. “They’re unrelenting; they show up and put it all out there. They’re brutal, the way they play. Brent has this way of playing, although we are this brutal thing—bass, snare and all around—he’s jazzy. He has this sense of time that is really fucked up and cool.”
Cherubs are best when they reach total freedom. Take “Orange Julius” from Short of Popular: it’s all over the place, then lapses into 4/4, it gets in there, and gets back out.
“When we’re wafting through 5’s and 7’s, that’s when we’re best,” Whitley says. “We meet up at the 4. I love that; something about it is herchy-jerky, it feels like you’re in a washing machine, being tumbled around, and then there’s some madness; it’s not really madness, it’s…”
They might be The Loudest Pop Band in the World. Yeah, Cherubs love KISS and The Cars; they love ELO. They grew up with that shit on the radio. “You don’t get to punk rock until you go through that [rock radio] first,” adds Whitley.
When I ask Whitley what it feels like to play heavy music while getting close to senior citizenship, he says it’s stupid. He can’t hear a damn thing. Cherubs found earplugs too late; not many bands in the 90s wore earplugs. Whitley has howling tinnitus; he says it howls constantly.
“If you took a room full of crickets, all going off at the same time,” says Whitley, describing his tinnitus. “The distinctness of that is not there; I just hear this sizzle of the crickets. If you take that and speed it up about 200 percent, so the pitch gets really high, that’s what it sounds like.”
Tinnitus—hearing sounds in your ear(s) when no other outside noise is present—is almost a deadness in your head. Whitley doesn’t get the deadness; he gets the sizzle, and it doesn’t go away. It doesn’t hurt, though.
“You remember that ring that happens after practice or after a show?…it happens maybe two or three hours later,” says Whitley. “You tweak your head and think, ‘what the fuck, when will this stop?’ And it doesn’t stop.”
There’s no real cure for tinnitus, but there’s plenty of SPAM on the topic. I ask Whitley if he watched Sound of Metal, the 2019 film starring Riz Ahmed and Olivia Cooke; the two characters are in a touring metal duo, and Ahmed, playing the drummer, randomly loses his hearing. They have to stop the tour so that he can go to rehab because he’s freaking out; his hearing is completely gone. It’s good research for musicians who currently play loud music.
“Now, we always recommend earplugs because we do this onslaught, and it’s loud as fuck,” Whitley says. “It’s like scream therapy—you don’t get to do that on the day-to-day. It’s supposed to be cathartic, supposed to feel like that. If the whole crowd started screaming from the time we started playing to when we stopped, I think the world would be a better place.”
“The Big Groovy,” from Heroin Man, is the moment when Cherubs found a way to make three minutes an eternity. It’s a song that I repeat three more times whenever I hear it, and I tell Whitley that it makes me dance. Other Cherubs songs are to blame for dancing, too.
“It does that thing we were talking about before: the drums are in 4, but everything else is not,” Whitley says of “The Big Groovy.” “So, you have this thing that happens where we peel into each other, and then we peel out of each other. The bass is in 5 or 7. Brent does 4 when he thinks that it works. It’s not a preference. He will deny the 4 in practice all day long. We’ll come back in a week, and he’ll give in to the 4. We’re not bullying him into it, though; Brent and I are similar in the way we never adhere to what someone else wants us to do. His natural instinct is ‘hey, fuck it, I am not doing that.’ He may come around to it on his own time, and I didn’t say anything. He can have that; it is his. There’s no creative contribution in telling someone what to do.”
Taking a two-decade break (we’ll get to that in a bit), Cherubs reunited in 2014 (thanks to Brutal Panda Records) to record their 2015 comeback album and third overall, 2 Ynfynty, which is probably their best to date. Sure, get at me with all that Heroin Man business, and I am here to listen; it’s a close second. I’m not really a music critic anymore…there’s too much great music to talk about and enjoy.
In 2016, Cherubs played a surprise show at Beerland in Austin, TX; it was their first performance in 21 years. In 2019, the band released its fourth official album, Immaculada High, through heavy institution Relapse Records. It’s good, but the recording is noticeably more muddy and buried than previous recordings. It seems the recorded volume is a notch or two lower than previous ear-busting material.
“Gotcha, it’s a confluence of things: we had all these songs to record, we had a time period, and the pressure was on,” Whitley says. “I don’t think we knew the songs as well as we should have. We usually allow for 20-percent of what might happen in the studio. In that 20-percent, we might discover something. What I think happened…I listened to that album recently…I don’t remember why… ‘Turista’ [opening track of Immaculada] came up on my feed. I listened to that and then ‘Pacemaker’ [track 9], and it’s a killer song, but a lost opportunity because we didn’t allow it to mature.”
In Whitley’s humble opinion, Cherubs had some nice nuggets for Immaculada, but they covered it up in too much goo. You’re going to have to turn it up an extra notch on the volume. If Whitley could fix the album mix, he would take 30-percent of the goo off. Actually, Cherubs has reissued and remixed some of their stuff already, and they have a 2021 EP of five songs where they did Skrewd Versions for Side B.
“Well, the irony is when we reissued Icing [debut from 1992], all we were trying to do was get it to participate in what we had become because it was very early in the game,” Whitley says. “We didn’t know what we were doing. We were at the mercy of Smart Studios, and Mr. Colson did a great job.”
Doug “Mr. Colson” Olson apparently played a crucial role in 1990s alternative rock engineering.
When Heroin Man came out, it rendered Icing moot. Whitley still loves it; that’s where Cherubs started. Whitley says Immaculada was slightly unprepared, saying, “we covered our shitty tracks up with…we covered our tracks…in covering our tracks, we actually covered up the songs.”
Where does Cherubs draw the line with remasters and reissues?
“We like to fuck around with our work, and the reason we do anything is that we get requests to do it,” says Whitley. “We love playing 33 records at 45 and 45 at 33. You gotta find the sweet spot of a song. It sounds good, but, man, if you slow it down 20-percent or did this to it, it would sit in this nasty pocket that turns it into a beast. We’ve always done that.”
Bob Lugowe and Mike Lara of Brutal Panda Records are responsible for Cherubs’ comeback, basically; Lugowe and Lara started Brutal Panda in 2008 after meeting while working for Relapse Records. Sadly, Lara passed away in 2022, and it was possibly a COVID casualty.
The Cherubs’ song that probably kicks the snot out of me the most is “So Jellified.” It’s a sound vehicle that cannot be stopped, and then the song eventually starts reversing on itself, if that makes any sense? The lyrics seem to involve the smoking of something, becoming jellified?
“Brent grew up in Dallas and I grew up in New Orleans and Houston, mostly,” Whitley says. “In our high schools, the groups were: The Kickers (short for Shit-Kickers), country shit; The Jocks, of course; and The Stoners, who were also called The Jells; also, the Jellies. I don’t know why, but that’s what they were called. So, when you were stoned or super chill, or goofy, you were Jellified.”
“I need to go back to that song because that one gets requested a lot,” Whitley says. “When we were with other bigger bands, the way we roll…we played with Unwound…”
WAIT. STOP. That’s my favorite band. Unwound is mentioned constantly. No coincidence; they’re the best.
Cherubs got a lot of new fans from opening for Unwound, Whitley says. They did an East Coast run of five shows in March 2024, starting in Atlanta and ending in Boston. I missed the show in Boston because I am an idiot. I felt like a bad fan.
“They’re bad ass,” says Whitley. “I would have loved to know them back in the 90s…they were…Justin [Trosper] is a nature boy, a genius, and they had all these flowers everywhere. They had this big scrim screen behind them, kind of like a weather map, some kind of geo-map. It was blown up and abstract. When they began playing, they would find a weather channel radio, a monotone person reading the weather. Monochrome, like what a farmer would listen to in rural America, the Hinterland. Whatever town we were in that day, they would play it from that area. I would bet you dollars and donuts that no one in the crowd had any idea that they were listening to the weather from their area.”
Whitley doesn’t really know Trosper, Unwound’s guitarist and vocalist, or the rest of the band (R.I.P. Vern Rumsey), but he thinks having Cherubs on tour checked off a big question mark for them. “Back in the day, all the underground bullshit, no internet—here’s my cassette tape—they had a tape of Cherubs in their van, unmarked. They said they listened to the tape all of the time, but had no idea who we were.”
Unwound tried to put the pieces together and eventually did, and that’s how Cherubs got the gig. Unwound had a similar circumstance with Steel Pole Bath Tub. Unwound reappeared for reunion shows in 2023 after two decades of vowing to never play again, and they were able to play with their favorites from their heyday.
An actual fist fight broke Cherubs up in 1994. What was the fight about?
“Ahhhh, mannnn,” Whitley exclaims. “Doing this type of thing [noise rock] as a young person, it’s destructive. You’re in bars every night, 23 years old, drinking from the time you get there to the time you leave. Free drinks are what you get in lieu of pay—there are drugs everywhere. Everything that you can conjure up in yourself is stupid and comes to the surface. When you’re in the van together, you just hate it after a while. You can’t do stuff that we did and not have it affect you.”
Cherubs was about four years into the band by the time Heroin Man was released. Enough time to start hating some shit, I fathom. All three members were involved in the fight, but it was mainly Prager and Owen McMahon, the original bassist. Whitley eventually clocked out, stopped being the middle man, and eventually someone got knocked out.
“They would go at each other hourly,” says Whitley. “They were rigged to fuck with each other. I’m trying to preserve my sanity; I’m trying to get home in one piece. I’m pissed off at both of them, but I’m getting drunk. It was a shit show. We needed to stop, or we were going to get into serious trouble.”
You can try to run away from the chaos, try to get to a better place. You might end up in a ditch. It might be over.
Whitley says that Cherubs is more-or-less on a hiatus. They have parents that need care. They have lots of material, but can’t get into the same room. Shore is in New York, Prager is in Dallas, and Whitley is in West Texas. Prager is also in Austin; he’s running the roads.
“We have material that needs to be fleshed out,” says Whitley. “With what we learned from all the goo of Immaculada, I think it’s going to be clearer, and more fangs will be exposed. I want it to be brutal and in your face. I can’t guarantee when it’s coming, but, man, we would be some assholes if we did not get it done. I hope to not be an asshole.”
