Eric Hernandez spends his days packing auto parts in a Miami warehouse, but since the summer of 2014, his nights and weekends have been spent singing and playing guitar for noise-rock quartet Wrong. "I was in another band, Capsule, with [guitarist] Ryan Haft. That fell apart, but we still felt it necessary to make music," Hernandez says after a day's work in the warehouse. "We saw all our friends in Miami making music, and we wanted to play some shows. We said, let's make a local band that sounds like Helmet. I got my brother [Brian Hernandez] to play drums and Andres Ascanio to play bass."
"If you like what you're doing, you can never be wrong."
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So Hernandez had another musical project to pour some noise into. He and his colleagues named their band and their debut album after one of their songs, "Wrong."
"We wanted a bleak name," Hernandez says. "We were thinking about 'Over' and 'Zero,' but we thought 'Wrong' was all-out what we wanted."
Though Wrong's touring lineup is almost a carbon copy of the roster that made up Capsule, he says he is very conscious of the fact that Wrong needs to do things differently if the group wants to thrive. "When a band starts out, you start emulating your influences, which, for us, is Helmet," he says. "In Capsule, we wanted to do something more shocking, with no boundaries, no choruses. With Wrong, we wanted the music to be fast and scary-sounding but stripped down so that people can groove to it. It's fun going in a new direction."
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All of this touring will come on the heels of the April 29 release of Wrong's self-titled LP. It's the only thing local fans will have to keep them company until the band's return.
The album hits on a few different themes. Opening track "Turn In," one of Hernandez's favorites, is about defeat, throwing in the towel when all hope seems lost. "It's about wasted potential," Hernandez says, "when there's nothing you can do about a person or a thing. You give up like when you turn in to go to sleep." It sets a chaotic pace for the album, which bleeds into fellow fast-paced, thick, and thundering tracks such as "Mucilage" and "Boil."
"Mucilage," he explains, "is another name for adhesive, something that holds things together. It's a metaphor for friends and family."
But right when the vibe begins to soften, "Boil" takes the taste of that sweet sentiment away from the listener. "This is an anti-religion,
Wrong's sound is a stew of all the best qualities that Miami noise, rock, and sludge offer. And the band's new album follows the same philosophy that helped the group choose its name. "If you like what you're doing, you can never be wrong."