Rustbelt Pays Tribute to Milwaukee Legends The Promise Ring With Cover of Emo Classic “Nothing Feels Good” Jan 10, 2023
Today, Rustbelt pays tribute to Milwaukee heroes The Promise Ring with a cover of the band’s emo classic “Nothing Feels Good.” It takes the song into completely new sonic territory without losing any of the spiritual heft that makes it such a benchmark in the first place. Forget emo, this song is an American Confusion Anthem. Rustbelt understands this.
“I wanted to cover one of my favorite songs in a way that was honest and exciting to me, which meant going crazy with autotune and dropping a wild breakbeat,” Chiaverina says. “Growing up in the Milwaukee area, The Promise Ring meant a lot to me. I’ll never forget the time I saw them on a triple bill with Alkaline Trio and The Dismemberment Plan. Now I’m siked to be making music with Dan Dider, the band’s drummer. I hope this song helps someone get through January.”
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Rustbelt makes Underdog Pop for the confusing 20s; anthems for everyone just barely holding on. Rustbelt is John Chiaverina, formerly known as Juiceboxxx.
Rustbelt’s self-titled debut EP, released in the fall of 2022, is a direct pop statement from an artist who has spent his career on the fringes of everything at once, all the time.
Incubated in punk house basements, weird art galleries, European squats, Midwest truck stops and noise warehouses, Rustbelt finds Chiaverina bruised but intact, writing the best and most accessible songs of his life.
“Through all my failure, all my embarrassment, all my stupidity, I keep writing songs,” Chiaverina says. “I feel like I’m in some sort of an identity purgatory. I no longer feel like Juiceboxxx, but who is John Chiaverina? That sounds really dumb and overdramatic, but it’s true. I don’t know who I am. So, again, I keep writing songs.”
He continues: “As you get older and older it gets less and less easy to continue to be creative and believe in yourself. But then I’ll listen to Lou Reed on the bus and I’ll remember that I have no choice. I like to think of this EP as sitting within some vague continuum of Underdog Pop music that may or may not only exist in my head. These lyrics mean a lot to me. And I hope the choruses are catchy, too.”
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