A Wilhelm Scream

Three names before the right one

The band dates to 1993 in New Bedford, the old whaling and fishing port on the southeastern Massachusetts coast, and spent a decade getting to the name people now know. They began as Adam's Crack, became Koen in the mid-1990s, settled on Smackin' Isaiah in 1997, and only adopted A Wilhelm Scream in 2003 — a reference to the stock film sound effect dropped into hundreds of Hollywood pictures.

The Smackin' Isaiah years produced two albums, The Way to a Girl's Heart Is Through Her Boyfriend's Stomach in 1999 and Benefits of Thinking Out Loud in 2001, alongside a split release, 6:6:6, in 2000 and a handful of cassettes from the Koen period. The band has pointed to Strung Out, Hot Water Music, Propagandhi and Strike Anywhere as the reference points, and the influence shows in the finished article: hardcore tempos played with the harmonic density of technical metal, with two guitars working in counterpoint rather than in unison.

Nitro, the Blasting Room and the records that fixed the reputation

The reputation rests on three albums made for Nitro Records in the mid-2000s. Mute Print arrived in 2004, Ruiner in 2005 and Career Suicide — issued on CD on 9 October 2007 — closed out the run. The early work was produced by Descendents drummer Bill Stevenson at The Blasting Room in Fort Collins, which is a large part of why those records still sound the way they do: fast, dry, every string audible. The band toured heavily on them in North America and Europe, including dates with Lagwagon and Less Than Jake.

Partycrasher followed in 2013 on No Idea Records, and then the release schedule stopped. The most consequential move of the quiet years was administrative rather than musical: in 2021 the band acquired the rights to its own Nitro catalogue, which means the three albums the band is best known for are now theirs to reissue, licence and press as they choose. Very few groups of that vintage and size managed it.

Nine years of silence, then a record made at home

The return came in 2022 with the single Be One to No One, the first new material in nine years, followed in April that year by the album Lose Your Delusion on Creator-Destructor Records. It was recorded in-house at guitarist Trevor Reilly's own studio rather than at a destination facility, and that decision has governed everything since — the band now writes, records, produces and mixes under its own roof, on its own clock.

Lose Your Delusion was the brighter of the two comeback-era records, leaning on choruses and on a lyrical register closer to self-examination than to the venom of the Nitro albums. Reilly has described the band's instinct afterwards as a swing back the other way.

Cheap Heat

Cheap Heat was announced in January 2026 with the single and video Midnight Ghost, and released on 27 February 2026 through Creator-Destructor on three vinyl variants, CD, cassette and digital. Ten tracks. Reilly produced, recorded and mixed it at Anchor End Studio in New Bedford; Joe Reilly mastered at Black & Blue Mastering. A second single and video, Fell Off, followed in the spring.

The record is the first to feature second guitarist Ben Murray, previously of Light This City and Heartsounds, and the band has credited his arrival with raising the writing standard. Vocalist Nuno Pereira framed the album in characteristically unsubtle terms, promising "vitriolic energy behind every vocal, soaring guitars relentlessly shredding" and calling it the band's best work. The stated aim was to merge the dark atmosphere of Ruiner with the technical attack of Career Suicide, and that is roughly where it lands: sociopaths, grifters and bad actors in the lyrics, no concession to tempo, hooks arriving in the gaps between the riffs.

Reviews were strong. Nine Circles, writing on release day, singled out Somebody's Gonna Die, Midnight Ghost, Fell Off, Run, Unsolving the Mystery, The Scumbag Grift, I Got Tunnel Vision and Let It Ride, and made the point that matters about this band — plenty of groups can play this fast and this intricately, but almost none of them write a chorus you can shout back. Twenty-five years in, the quintet is still doing both at once.

Where they stand in October 2026

The touring year has been the heaviest of the band's career. The release ran alongside a West Coast American run from 19 February to 1 March with Death By Stereo and labelmates Doomsday, nine venues from Phoenix down to San Diego. Australia followed from 6 to 15 March, Japan from 18 to 22 March. North American dates filled April and May, and the band crossed to Europe for July and August, closing with a short UK run alongside The Flatliners — Norwich on 17 August, Rescue Rooms in Nottingham on 18 August, Glasgow on 19 August.

The immediate schedule is dense. A pre-Fest show in Orlando on 21 October is followed by a Fest kick-off show in Gainesville on 22 October, Fest itself across 23–25 October, and Churchill's Pub in Miami on 24 October. From there the band heads south for what is its first proper sweep of Latin America: Porto Alegre on 27 October, Criciúma on the 28th, Florianópolis on the 29th, Curitiba on the 30th and São Paulo's Hangar 110 on the 31st, then Buenos Aires on 1 November, Santiago on 3 November, Lima on 4 November, Bogotá on 6 November and San José, Costa Rica, on 7 November. Club shows throughout, in rooms measured in hundreds rather than thousands.

No 2027 dates have been posted yet. Given that the band has now spent eight months taking Cheap Heat across four continents and still has a South American leg to play, a gap after early November would be the reasonable expectation rather than a sign of anything else.