Sheer Mag Guitarist Sheds Light on Side Project SJB Like Never Before
It could be argued—hell, let’s have it out right now; why wait for a rainy day?—that there’s actually no better time for a musician to launch a side venture when their primary project is experiencing peak success. Queens of the Stone Age’s Josh Homme pulled it off with Them Crooked Vultures and Eagles of Death Metal. Jack White kept his seat with the White Stripes warm while engaging in extracurricular activities with the Raconteurs and the Dead Weather. And Chino Moreno put them all to shame by dividing his time between Deftones, Team Sleep, Crosses, Palm s and Saudade. And you have the nerve to call yourself busy?
The latest band to experience the music equivalent of polyamory is Sheer Mag. The Philadelphia punk-rock posse quickly started gaining traction less than a year after congealing in a dilapidated house in which they creatively made room for a studio too. Slipknot started out in a similarly shared dwelling, and it took them about four years of surviving their hellhole before terrestrial radio came a knockin’. Sheer Mag managed to do it in less than half that time, finding themselves transported to Coachella and a late-night TV talk show only two years after they set sail with their band.
Unhealthily devoted fans of most of the major aforementioned bands collectively freaked out—and even lashed out—over fears that offshoot acts would toll the death knell for their favorite bands. (Do you have any idea how much it costs to get a tattoo removed from your body? More than the price of a concert ticket, that’s for sure.) But the creation of Sheer Mag’s spinoff isn’t causing as much disruption among their legions of lovers—probably because they’re well-read on the band’s biography, and the new ensemble that prompted this article makes total sense.
Called Seely Jurgens Band, or “SJB” for short, features Sheer Mag lead guitarist Kyle “Showtime” Seely and his old college pal Justin “The Voice” Jurgens, and bassist/vocalist for Ingrates and guitarist/vocalist for Dust Star (Lame-O Records). Sheer Mag obsessives can take a deep right there; in the worst-case scenario, Seely and Jurgens are having an affair, not engaging in some debaucherous orgy. Seely’s rider doesn’t include a stack of towels he always needs on hand to thoroughly dry various fluids off his body before strapping on his guitar and joining Sheer Mag onstage.
Seely and Jurgens, have the benefit of a shared music history thanks to playing together while attending SUNY Purchase in upstate New York. It’d be easy but inaccurate to refer to the group, named Sirs, merely as a “college band”; unlike just abut every music program that gets slapped with that designation, Seely and Jurgen’s crew secured a record deal with noted indie label Topshelf, put out records and even toured to boot.
(Let’s pause here for a moment to reflect on our own college bands and what could have been. Oh, what could have been.)
All that time Seely and Jurgens spent together explains why their new endeavor fits like a glove not previously owned by OJ Simpson. If we may use the term “whimsical,” and we will if and when we damn well please, SJB have seamlessly doled out a series of singles, harmlessly stringing us along like a detective novelists did a century ago.
Three weeks ago, the band dished up a pair of new tracks, “Come Out Good in the End” and “All My Heart.”
The band’s unique decision to release a litany of singles in short order begs the question: Will a SJB full-length will ever come to fruition? Will they create a subscription service whose members will get first dibs or even exclusive access to their material? (After all, Sheer Mag are signed to Jack White’s Third Man Records, which has a similar business model.) Will the sheer magnitude of songs that SJB are capable of releasing overwhelm fans who can’t afford to pay for all those releases on top of the ones that Seely’s main band puts up for sale?
Well, wouldn’t you know it, The Bad Penny recently had the opportunity to powwow with Seely and Jurgens to ask them questions that were on our mind and that we thought would be on yours too. Not necessarily the questions laid out in the paragraph above, but questions nonetheless. And, believe it or not, they gave us answers to some of them! Don’t believe it? Well, here’s the proof.
SJB is the focus of this discussion, but I have to ask for starters if you can feel Sheer Mag’s growing with each passing day. The band’s exceptionally rapid rise isn’t something most musicians ever get to experience.
Kyle “Showtime” Seely: It’s been pretty good. [Sheer Mag] getting way bigger, but I feel like we’ve had a slow, steady [build]. We’ve been around for, like, 12 years, and we still do about the same, if not slightly better, at most places we go. It ebbs and flows. But we’re happy with what we’ve got.
You just did your biggest tour, right?
Seely: Yeah, we just opened for Amyl and the Sniffers, which is a band that got 10 times bigger than us 10 times faster But at the same time, we were, like, “We’ll take it.” We played 3,000 to 4,300-cap at the Vancouver hockey stadium. Sheer Mag could probably sell, like, 400 of those tickets.
Did you enjoy returning to a supporting role for one tour, so there’d be less pressure on your performance and all the attention wouldn’t be only one you, perhaps?
Seely: It was a nice change of pace. You know, who doesn’t like being the star of the show? But, at the same time, there’s something very easy and manageable to have a nice, long soundcheck, playing right at eight o’clock, and then your night’s done, and you can do whatever you want. Also, on an album cycle like this, generally what you try and do is hit it hard doing North America and Europe on your record–which we did last year–then take a few months off, try to land a nice support [spot on a] tour, and then rinse and repeat, basically.
Jurgens: It’s an integral part of the standard cycle. And it worked out, and I think it was a good match for us. We’ve done big support tours before, and you always gain something from them. But this one in particular, I felt like it was a particularly great fit, like a good, big rock show.
Your perpetually positive attitude must help too. Turning to Justin, what have you been up to when not playing music?
Justin: I’m in this band called Ingrates, and I’d say we’re pretty popular in the L.A. punk scene. We’ve only done one tour, and it was up to Portland, where we stayed for a week. We played in a backyard in Olympia [Washington] too, and then we ended up staying in Portland for like three days, and then drove home straight from Portland. We started in the desert, Joshua Tree, and we wrote a couple singles in late 2021 and put them on Bandcamp.
We had no plans for them, but they caught some attention. [Critics] started writing about them, so we wrote a couple more, and now we’ve released six songs.
Fast-forwarding to today, why are you moving to the East Coast?
Well, my wife and I are both from the East Coast, and she just got into a Master’s Program in New York City to study art curation. I’ve been in California for 10 years. She’s been here for six. It just felt like the right time to leave.
Let’s end the conversation at the beginning of the story: What was the fulcrum where you made the decision to form the band?
I remember getting a text from Kyle when I was in my living room. I was probably watching TV, and Kyle was like, “Yo, I got an idea for a band that you would sing in.” And I was like, “Alright, cool.”
I sent Jurgens a message every week. Sometimes, something along the lines of, “What if David Lee Roth was the singer of Crosby, Stills and Nash instead of Crosby, Stills and Nash” Eventually, we were like, “Well, we’ve known Justin for a super, super long time. We were in bands together in college” We moved to different parts of the country, but I always thought, ‘Oh, eventually I’m going to do something else with Justin.”
Justin: That was news to me, I was like, “Hell yeah. I would love to play with Kyle again.
Kyle: Sheer Mag is obviously a huge part of my life, and we’re super-perfectionists about it. It takes us a very long time to get things done. The whole point of SJB is to make things we like right now and not spend very long on them and record them and then put them out right now. Not wait around six months to a year for an album cycle and the pressing times. We’re specifically, deliberately not giving a shit about any of that stuff. We operate at a huge [financial] loss, but just putting things out just because we want to do it fast and kind of get the satisfaction of it while it’s fresh, it makes It worth it. We’re a band that just releases singles, in a way.
We’re putting out two or even one song at a time, and indulging in whatever stylistic impulse we have that week. I always hope it’s cohesive, but you know, our interests vary by a lot. One song sounds like a Judas Priest song, another like doo-wop. We sound like a very earthy Beatles track sometimes.
Justin: Not to sound sappy, but in no way do I feel like Kyle and I like lost touch or drifted apart. Our reason for hanging out was generally built around Sheer Mag shows. Either they would come to L.A., or I’d be visiting, and we’d all meet up. And it’s been nice, you know, what we met in 2009 and 2009 plus math equals 2025.
So it’s been a nice excuse to reconnect and develop our relationship again.
The Bad Penny (beta) 
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