Flycatcher

Out of the New Brunswick basements

Flycatcher came out of the house-show circuit around New Brunswick, New Jersey — the basement network that produced the state's emo revival — and has been active under the name since 2018. The members are now spread between Asbury Park and Jersey City, and the line-up has turned over almost completely on the way here: Gregory Thomas Pease, who sings and plays guitar, is the only founding member still in the band, alongside guitarist Justin VanNiekerk, bassist Jack Delle Cava and drummer Matteo DeBenedetti, the most recent arrival.

There was plenty of recorded work before the album that gets called a debut. Two full-lengths, Other Things and Songs for Strangers, came first, followed by the Stunt EP, an acoustic companion to it, and a Live at Studio 4 session. All of it sat inside the idiom the band had grown up playing, and Pease has since been blunt about the grip it had on his writing: "I was holding on really tight to the emo stuff."

The rest of the education came from opening slots. Flycatcher had toured in support of The Frights and Oso Oso, and before that Say Anything and Foxing — years of short sets in other people's rooms, with no record that the band felt fully represented it.

Seven years and a finish line

Work on Wrench began in 2018 and was retooled across roughly seven years before release. What broke the stalemate was signing to Memory Music, the label run by producer Will Yip, and then recording with Yip at Studio 4. Pease has described the aim in one line: "We really set out to sound like a rock band on this record."

The age of the material turned into the central problem rather than an asset. "Some of these songs are really old," Pease said of the sessions. "As it got closer to the finish line, it was really hard to be objective about them." The opener, Fault Line, is the oldest thing on the album. At the other end, Truth was assembled only days before the band went in to record it, which gives the running order a strange internal geology — the first track older than the band's current line-up, another written almost on the studio floor.

What Wrench actually does

Wrench was released on 24 October 2025 through Memory Music: ten tracks, running Fault Line, Truth, Down, Flood, Wrench, Man on the Run, Dissolve, Watergap, Brother and Super Bowl. Down, Brother and Dissolve were pushed out ahead of it as singles. Brianna Collins of Tigers Jaw sings on Man on the Run, the closest thing on the album to a duet.

The reference points Pease has named split neatly in two. On one side are songwriters — Alex G, Adrianne Lenker, MJ Lenderman — which accounts for the twang and the acoustic-led stretches. On the other are Citizen, Title Fight and Turnover, which accounts for the weight when the guitars come in together. The band's own summary of the record is lots of big guitars and lots of lyrics about growing up and living in New Jersey, and that is roughly where it lands: rasped, lived-in vocals over arrangements that keep resolving into a chorus rather than a breakdown.

The title track is the outlier and the band knows it: Wrench counts in seven, which in a set of otherwise four-square rock songs makes it the one that announces itself.

A year on other people's bills

The first proper headline run came straight off the album — the Man on the Run tour, 8 to 23 November 2025, across the East Coast and Midwest, taking in Brooklyn on 8 November, a first-ever Baltimore date, Nashville, Chicago and Pittsburgh, and finishing in Philadelphia on 23 November. It was a short, self-contained circuit rather than an attempt at scale.

Since then the strategy has been to take support work wherever it goes. In July 2026 the band was out beneath Armor For Sleep and Spanish Love Songs, playing Music Farm in Charleston on 8 July and Metro Baltimore on 10 July. On 19 September 2026 it played Love City in Manayunk, Philadelphia, on a bill with Tigers Jaw — closing a loop with the band whose singer guests on the record.

October 2026 puts Flycatcher on selected dates of Free Throw and Microwave's North American co-headline tour: Georgia Theatre in Athens on 10 October, Louisville on 13 October, The Truman in Kansas City on 14 October, Boulder Theater on 16 October, House of Blues Las Vegas on 19 October and The Glass House in Pomona on 22 October. The year then ends on 19 December at the Russell Industrial Center in Detroit, on a bill topped by Hot Mulligan.

As of late September 2026, nearly a year on from Wrench, no follow-up record has been announced. The band's working position is still the one it took last autumn — play the new album to as many rooms as will book it.

The show now

What Flycatcher is doing live in 2026 is a support set, not a headline production, and the shape reflects that: a compressed run at the strongest material from a ten-song album, delivered by two guitars, bass and drums with nothing much between the band and the room. The autumn dates are theatre- and club-scale — Georgia Theatre, Boulder Theater, House of Blues — which is a step up in room size from the November 2025 headline circuit, and a step down in stage time.

The one thing the band flagged in advance as a live event is the title track, the song in seven, singled out as unlike anything else in the catalogue. Everything else in the set trades on the record's central move: an acoustic or single-guitar opening that turns into a full-band chorus, and Pease's rasp carrying the melody rather than a shout.