Pummeled returns from five-year hiatus with new power-pop sound (and free CDs)

A five-year hiatus for the local band Pummeled ended with, as the band members describe it, a Primanti date.

After the original bassist stepped away from the band, the two remaining members, drummer Gregg Harrington and frontman Ben Dietels, needed a replacement. They met Bill Karachristos, who said he could sense some “subtle hints” that they wanted to bring him into the fold. The three decided to sit down at Primanti Bros. in Moon Township after their first choice, Pizza Hut — “an old-school date” destination, according to Dietels — fell through.

“We all hit it off,” says Karachristos, who realized that he once attended a show in the basement of Harrington’s house.

The three-piece band is back in the swing of things, now playing a mix of pop, rock, and grunge music at shows around the Pittsburgh area, including one on Sat., Oct. 7 at the Government Center. Pummeled members will also hand out free CDs of the band's latest single, “Nachos,” during a night that also includes performances by Brian Sikes Howe, Crash Nebula, and Terry Jones.

In its early days, from 2016 to 2018, when Pummeled contained bassist Christine Kinneer, the band took heavy inspiration from mid-'90s grunge artists such as Melvins and Helmet, but it now has more of a power-pop flair, according to Dietels.

“The heaviness is still there. It’s impossible for me to play very subtle on drums,” Harrington says, laughing. “I feel like it’s always going to sound heavy to a degree, but, even in the stuff that I’ve been writing, more informed by '70s power-pop stuff like Squeeze or even Elvis Costello, so kind of plugging that element in has … caused this weird amalgamation of all the stuff we like. But somehow it works.”
“Nachos,” a fun song about young love, which debuted alongside a music video, does a good job of representing the band’s newer sound. The video portrays a large group of people storming a band playing in a garage, something that Dietels says harkens back to childhood memories of wistfully wandering around suburbia. It has a riff that Dietels says he’s been developing and holding onto since his teenage years.

“I was always like, ‘Man, this is stupid,’ and never really messed with it too much,” he says. “But I’ve been leaning into that recently, where I’m, like, some things that I think might be a little too simple or too corny, maybe they’re not.”

Dietels has found himself going to Harrington and asking if something he’s come up with is “awesome” or “dumb.”

“It always turns out awesome … the dumber [Dietels] thinks it is, the more I like it,” Harrington says.

The band plans to collect recent and upcoming singles — "Nachos" will add to "Poppie" and "Bouquets," two other songs that came out this past summer — into an eventual album. Karachristos (who is also the lead vocalist and guitarist for the Pittsburgh shoegaze band Gloomer) says steadily releasing singles leading up to albums is “the way to do it” nowadays, as it’s like giving listeners Christmases multiple times a year. Dietels agrees with the new band member.

“It’s like, when your parents get divorced, you get two Christmases,” Dietels says. “For Pummeled, you got all kinds of Christmases all year round.”

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Pummeled with Brian Sikes Howe, Crash Nebula, and Terry Jones. 8 p.m. Sat., Oct. 7. The Government Center. 715 East St., North Side. $10. All ages. thegovernmentcenter.com