Kill Tuco will release a new song, “Mars (Congratulations)," on Monday, Nov. 3. The band recently performed three shows with the touring Southern California-based skate-punk band, “Unwritten Law,” at Hickam Harbor on Friday, Oct. 24, and Anna O’Brien’s on Saturday, Oct. 25, and Sunday, Oct. 26.
The new song explores how it would “f– suck to go to Mars,” said Connor Purington, the band’s lead singer and guitarist.
“And that the people that do end up going there aren't going to be adventurers, so much as people with no other choice,” Purington said. “We used to think going to the moon was unreal. It was a time of great hope and inspiration. And look at us, we're faring the stars. And we made it to the moon. And now it's like, ‘Oh, we have to go to Mars because our current planet is possibly not going to be here all that much longer.’ It's funny how in a few decades, the script flipped.”
Kill Tuco is an alternative rock band, but the group throws in influences from old school country, indie rock and post punk.
“People say that we sound familiar, but they can't often put their thumb on who we remind them of,” Purington said in a follow-up email when asked to define the band’s genre. “I'd say it's almost like we're channeling a dead song writer from the '90s and early 2000's that is using us to retroactively bring their music to life from the ether.”
The release date of the new song is, of course, space related.
“November 3 is the day that the Soviets launched the space dog into orbit and then didn't tell everyone that there was no return plan for the dog,” he said. “They just launched it into orbit to see if it would live. It was kind of a big deal when everyone found out that the space dog burned up in the atmosphere.”
Kill Tuco got its start as a bar band called Government Work, which was inspired by the phrase “good enough for government work,” Purington said. They played multiple nights a week, “just kind of honing our skills,” he said. The members have changed over the years and Purington is the only one from the original band. The current group has been playing together for about four years, he said. Eventually, the band changed its name to Kill Tuco, a “Breaking Bad” reference.
“It was one of those things where when I released that album, we couldn't really decide on a band name, but we had a show coming up,” he said. “We tried everything — random band generators, stuff like that. But like 10 minutes before the deadline for a show, we got sidetracked, and time was ticking, but my old drummer said, ‘Oh yeah, I just got to the part of ‘Breaking Bad’ where they killed Tuco.’ I hadn't even seen the show at that point. I just liked how those two words sounded together, and so it just stuck.”
The band’s debut album, released in 2019, is “The Safe Word is Humuhumunukunukuapua’a.” Other singles released since then have names like “Sweet Tooth” (2019), “Donner Party” (2023) and “Apples” (2024).
And then there is the song called “So it Goes (What Vonnegut Said)” (2021), which references the writer Kurt Vonnegut’s darkly satirical anti-war novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” That song was written and recorded during Covid, he added.
“‘So it goes,’” Purington said. “That's just what they say – the aliens that punctuate that book. They see everything all happening at the same time, and so they’re like: ‘So it goes.’ No matter what happens — what good or bad thing — they just say, ‘So it goes,’ because that's just their way of dealing with it.”
This year, Kill Tuco released several singles, including “Bundy” and “Jesus Shrugged.” The band will be performing with Black Square at Proof Social Club on Saturday, Nov. 8. The show starts at 8 p.m. and Kill Tuco will go on at 9:30 p.m. Purington said.
When asked what he wants readers to know, Purington paused.
“I wish people knew that Hawai'i doesn't just do Island and reggaemusic,” he said. “That we do all kinds of stuff, and some of us do it quite well. There's a lot of talented bands out here that we'd love to give a shout out to that are in the alternative, in the independent kind of scene. Hawai'i is not just a monolith, musically speaking. I think people are figuring that out, but not fast enough.”
Follow Kill Tuco on Spotify, Instagram and Bandcamp.
Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
