Into The Music
Matt Krupanski, the founding drummer of Delaware post-hardcore band BoySetsFire, died on Saturday, March 29. He was 51. No cause of death has been given.
The band broke the news on their Instagram account with a message that reads more like a eulogy from brothers than a press release. They wrote about picking him up for their first tour while he was still in high school, getting parental permission slips signed, writing foundational tracks “After the Eulogy” and “Rookie” in his parents’ basement, and the absurdity of playing a Bed and Breakfast show with neither beds nor breakfast. They described him and his drummer friends as a “weird ass drummer gang” and recalled a side project called Pussy Tim and the Mother Fuckers playing an unannounced festival set to what they thought was a sparse crowd, until the lights came up and revealed 25,000 people.
Krupanski co-founded BoySetsFire in 1994 alongside vocalist Nathan Gray, guitarists Josh Latshaw and Chad Istvan, and bassist Darrell Hyde. He played with the band from their early days through their 2007 hiatus, and returned after they reformed in 2010, staying until 2012 when he stepped back to pursue architecture. He is survived by his daughter Georgie.
BoySetsFire were one of the defining bands of early 2000s post-hardcore, a time when that genre meant something different than it does now. They were politically engaged in a way that felt genuine rather than branded, emotionally raw in a way that was not performed, and they built songs that hit harder because of the restraint around the edges. Krupanski was not the face of the band, but he was the foundation of how they moved.
The band says they are planning a fundraiser for Georgie, and are working through the details with the family. In the meantime, the outpouring from the punk and hardcore communities has been immediate. Peers from Thursday, Rise Against, and other bands from that era have been posting tributes since the announcement hit.
There is something particularly gutting about losing a founding member of a band years after they have stepped away from music. Krupanski had built a whole second life as director of engineering at Hadley Exhibits, Inc., raising a daughter, moving forward. The music he helped create did not move forward the same way, it stayed fixed in time as something people still reach for when they need a record that takes them back to who they were when they needed it most.
Rest easy, Matt.
I’ll be honest , I didn’t grow up with BoySetsFire and post-hardcore isn’t my world. But I know what it means to lose a founding member, the one who was there at the beginning before there was anything to belong to. That drummer was the rhythm before there was a band. RIP.
BoySetsFire meant something very specific to a very specific kind of kid in the late nineties, and Matt Krupanski’s drumming was a big part of that. I remember seeing them in a church basement in Delaware , I am not exaggerating, it was literally a church basement , and the whole foundation of that building shook. Post-hardcore at its best was about sincerity so intense it became almost physical, and the drummer is always the heartbeat of that. Fifty-one is no age at all. Condolences to everyone who knew him and everyone who grew up on that band.
Post-hardcore at that era operated on a kind of controlled chaos , the drummer held the architecture together while everything else threatened to collapse into noise. Losing a founding member is also losing the institutional memory of how those original sounds were built. 51 is very young. Rest well.