Reckling

The audience was bathed in a bloody red light as a woman, transfigured into the shape of a big-eyed house fly, gripped the microphone ahead of a moshing crowd. “Not worried about what the other people are gonna say. We got ourselves, we're gonna make it anyways,” she bellowed as the musicians behind her kept up with the pace of the frenzied limbs on the floor. It was Halloween 2019 — just weeks after their first live show — and those lyrics perfectly fit the formation of Reckling.

The group just released their EP, Human Nature, last week via Wink and Spit Records. Fronted by Kelsey Reckling, the four-piece band is completed by heavyweights alongside the relative newcomer. On guitar is Erik Jimenez from Together Pangea, Joey Mullen who performs with HalfNoise and Paramore, and Max Kuehn of FIDLAR fame.

“We've had a little bit of a rotating cast of characters, but at the heart of it is me and then my friend Erik,” Kelsey explains as we chat on the phone during a hot summer day. A few singles and a self-titled album precede the namesake’s latest offering. “Since the pandemic, it's been the core four of us.” Jimenez typically plays drums, as does Mullen who learned to play bass just to play in the band. “It's kind of funny because I feel like everyone's always looking for a drummer for their band and I'm hoarding all the best drummers,” the frontwoman mused.

Like many, she picked up a guitar in her early teens and taught herself how to play. Kelsey and a friend got together to form a band, where the duo wrote a solitary song and would play it in her bedroom but never performed in front of an audience. Eager to find a way to get a foot into the industry, she turned to the internet and started reaching out to bands that she’d find out about online or from magazines. “I’d be like, I wanna write a review of this album that just came out, very one-off random stuff of me trying to dip my toes in. I was a 13 year old kid in Houston. I felt very disconnected to the scene that I wanted to be a part of.” A majority of the artists and labels she looked up to were based in Southern California, half the country over.

She’d sometimes find herself on stage playing guitar for friends’ bands in high school and, after her best friend began studying at Cal Arts upon graduation, started regularly visiting the west coast and getting involved in the local scene. When she moved to Austin, Kelsey offered an open door for those traveling during SXSW or on tours until, during one of her trips, decided it was finally time to make the move. She did music photography and founded her own record label yet struggled to find the confidence to make music herself.

Photo (and image at top of the post) by James Duran.

Photo by William Keegan.

“My whole life, I always imagined myself playing songs live and being able to do that, but then I was so fearful of actually doing it that I never did,” she explained. “I had so many friends who played music. I watched all my friends do it and in my head I'm like, ‘I can do that too. I don't know what I'm so caught up about it for.’ But I was just too scared to do it, I guess, because it's vulnerable. Standing up on a stage and lights are shined on you and everyone's looking at you, that sounds miserable to me. But I think I kind of had a turning point. I got sober in 2016 and that's when I started going deeper in the music.”

The first song she wrote was 2017’s “Wanted.” She showed it to a friend who then encouraged her to come use the studio that both her friend and friend’s boyfriend had at their home to make a recording of the track. “I was used to recording everything myself in my bedroom, like on garage band on my laptop,” Kelsey disclosed in an all-too-familiar tale. “She was like, ‘You should come over and we can record it. He can play drums. Just come over and we'll do something.’ So I was like, ‘Alright.’ And so I went over and we, us three, recorded the song. Like, actually recorded it. And I was like, ‘Oh, that was super fun! Maybe we can do another one.’” They never did do another one together, but the experience brought forth the perfect catalyst to elevate her music from bedroom recordings to more fleshed out work.

Photo by Alice Baxley,

That tipping point culminated into self-titled debut Reckling, a 9-track album released in February 2018. Following the release, she’d constantly get hit up by friends asking her to play shows that she’d decline. For over a year, she wasn’t ready until eventually that strength manifested. Kelsey recruited bandmates to practice together and said yes to an invitation to perform at The Regent Theatre in Downtown LA with Vivian Girls… a venue with a max capacity of 1100 people. “I was like, fuck, okay. I said yes and now I have to do this! And I'm like, wait okay. Our first show is gonna be with this cool band at this big venue. This is insane. Like, why?! What did I just do?”

The band was committed and they couldn’t back out. The pressure was mounting and the clock was ticking. With 2019’s Echo Park Rising coming up, where a litany of local shows take place at venues and stages all across its section of Sunset Blvd., the group was determined to play a small, intimate show before embarking onto the Regent’s massive stage. When the opportunity to play the final slot at one of the local record shops arose, the group organized a surprise gig before their official stage debut.

“We didn't announce it until the day of because I was scared. All my friends and all these people are gonna wanna come see us and I don't even want that. But we did it and it was totally fine,” Kelsey shared with a wave of relief carried alongside her words. “I was tripped out again. Like, oh my god, I'm gonna be so nervous. And honestly, I built this up in my head for over 10 years. I wasn't even really actually nervous. I just entered into this trance and was like, ‘Oh, that's it?’ I've been making this a huge deal for my entire life and it's not that crazy.”

The momentum built quickly and they played show after show until the pandemic hit. They cancelled their upcoming shows and put life on hold, initially playing the waiting game like everyone else did. Shows turned into live streams, they recorded the EP, and released a few singles. “There was always this feeling of like, is this happening? Are we one foot in, one foot out? Who's to say that this isn't gonna get all shut down again?” They sat on the EP for a little while longer as the mechanisms of live entertainment started picking up again. “There was this built up catalog being released. So I was just like, there's no rush. I feel like I always feel rushed or like there's this urgency to do all this stuff, but I'm like... just relax a little bit. It'll come out and it'll all be fine.”

Human Nature was worth the wait. Introduced to us through the music video for “In My Hair,” directed by music video maestro Ambar Navarro, the track and accompanying video feel like if Blink 182 and The Distillers fused into one. “The song is kind of about obsessive thinking and wishing that you could forget about something so that you weren't thinking about it all the time,” Kelsey shared on their collaboration. “So she's like, ‘Let's give you a lobotomy in the video.’ And I was like, ‘Hell yeah, I'm super down!’ We're both really into that nineties and early two thousands punk scene.” The day after our call, the pair spent two days on set recording their next video for “Spitter.”

Overall, each track on the EP touches on a different emotion or aspect of human nature and traits. “Spitter” reflects on the challenges of trying to navigate through a new city and people who went out of their way to try and drive her out of the scene. “These people were being so catty and straight up mean, but I never spoke up for myself and I never defended myself. I never did anything because I didn't want to engage whatsoever. I have a little bit of regret in there for not speaking up for myself. So the song, for me, was like, how are we gonna deal with these feelings where you have this regret for not sticking up for yourself, or like this anger that you were treated this way? You can't control how other people view you, so instead of directly engaging with this kind of negative behavior, I think a more positive way of dealing with it [is by] writing by song about it.”

An interesting addition to the EP is the inclusion of the Bad Brains cover, “How Low Can A Punk Get?” “I wanted this EP to sort of emulate more of how we sound live,” she revealed. “Cause I feel like that first release of ours is more true to how I had been recording songs alone, but live I definitely think we sound different than those recordings do. I wanted a more accurate reflection of how we really sound and so I wanted to include that.” The Bad Brains cover became a regular in their live set after that fateful night she was dressed as a fly, where each band had the opportunity to perform an entire cover set to a band of their choice. “It's such an awesome song and it's such a relief to perform it.”

Outside of music, Kelsey developed a passion for bird watching which eventually led her back to school and studying biology. “When I got sober in 2016, I kind of saw the world for the first time it felt like. It was like I walked outside my front door and I was like, ‘Holy shit. This is what it has been around me this whole time?’ And I just never noticed before. So that kind of became my daily meditation almost, where I was just like, I don't wanna be in my own head right now because everything inside of me feels crazy. So, let me get outside. Let me just go for a walk and let me notice the things that are around me. And so, in that, I got into bird watching.”

Kelsey connected with a friend in New York who already inhabited that world and was able to act as a guide while she explored the budding interest. “When I first started, I was just like, ‘What's the wildlife? What are the plants and the birds that are in my backyard? What's near my house, what's on this hiking trail?’ And then that became, ‘I wanna know more about their anatomy.’” She became involved with a wildlife rehab, began studying more about museum collections, and started working at a zoology lab at Occidental. From there, a curator at the school’s bird museum encouraged her to enroll in classes and get her degree by pointing out that she’d been doing so much of the work already. She became a student, got her degree, and will soon be starting graduate school. “In the daytime, I'm a biologist and I study birds and then at nighttime I go play music.”

Her passion for her dual pursuits hasn’t lost a single feather. With this new chapter of Reckling beginning to take flight and a second EP planned, that driving factor and the community support that has pushed her to pursue her passions will continue to soar.

Catch Reckling at The Echo with Death Lens and Jagged Baptist Club on August 25th. Tickets here.