About Us

To Slay Zombie Newton was a nerdy pop punk band out of Eau Claire, Wisconsin. They were active between the years 2003 and 2007.

Originally, the band formed as Highwall 48 with Stephen, Kivar, and Andrea. Then, when Brian joined, they used that as an excuse to change it to the far-less-terrible name.

Wurm joined by force (in 2004?) when he showed up at a gig with his keyboard and insisted on standing with the band and fist pumping despite the fact that he was not plugged in. After this, the band let him stick around and play the didgeridoo and Transformers voice box.

In the summer of 2005, a shoulder injury prevented Andrea from playing guitar for most of the rest of the year. Biederman was brought in to fill in for live gigs. When Andrea's shoulder healed, she no longer felt motivated to continue with the band full time, and Biederman stayed on.

After most of its members graduated college in 2007 and began moving away, the band effectively broke up. They have occasionally gotten together to play single shows, but this is an infrequent occurance.

Over the years, the lineup consisted of:

  • Stephen Smith - bass, vocals,
  • Kevin "Kivar the Malificent" Renstrom - drums, vocals
  • Andrea "Wilky" Ropella (nee "Wilkins") - guitar, vocals
  • Brian Hon - lead guitar
  • Andrew Wurm - keys, miscellaneous sounds, vocals
  • Matt Biederman - guitar, vocals

The primary spiritual successors to the band is the lead singer's current nerd punk project: Regdar and the Fighters. as well as Kivar and Biederman's (now defunct) Happy Wednesday

Downloads

Song credits are as listed in liner notes and do not reflect name changes

  • Chapter 2: Captain Nate's Punk Rock Pirate Ship - Steve would eventually go on to record all his favorite TSZN leftovers for his solo act
  • Chapter the First: Wherein a Mathematician Rises From the Dead to Feast Upon the Living and Five Young Men Are Conscripted To Slay Zombie Newton - the band's debut (and only) full-length, released 2006
    1. The Song We Wrote Last Night - Renstrom/Smith/Wilkins - A song about our love of cartoons. One of the first songs the band wrote together.
    2. French Marsupials - Smith - Part 1 of the Penguin Trilogy. One of the first songs Stephen ever wrote. Lyrics and concept stolen from Charles Metcalf.
    3. Vampires - Smith - Part 2 of the Penguin Trilogy. Written third when Steve decided that these two unrelated songs about being murdered by fantastical creatures needed to be a single story.
    4. Psychotic Garden Gnomes - Smith - Part 3 of the Penguin Trilogy. Is about exactly what the lyrics say
    5. Ectasy - Smith/Wilkins - The band's first foray into writing incredibly sarcastic lyrics that people totally misunderstood. The song is about a conspiracy theory that the CIA invented ecstasy and sold it to white kids as a form of "affirmative action" to make up for selling crack to Black kids in the 90s.
    6. Jesus Was a Black Man - Smith/Wilkins - A song about jazz being better than pop.
    7. Destroying the World - Hon/Smith/Wilkins - A song about using the power of rock (and also very large amplifiers) to break up the polar ice caps, causing global flooding and destroying the world. It's a way more awesome plan than global warming at least.
    8. Davenesaur - Smith/Wilkins - Steve had a program on his phone to generate nonsense names for TTRPG characters. One day, they used it to generate lyrics for a metal song and then filled in the gaps to make it about a great monster driven to extinction by human activity. We like to think Gojira made it big because we paved the way for them.
    9. Mita Ford - Smith - Get it? Her name is "metaphor" because the song is an intentional "God or my girlfriend" song. Is she rejecting Jesus or the whiney boy? No one knows! Cheezey Petes, 19 year old Steve was pretentious.
    10. \/137 1\141v1 - Smith/Wilkins - A song about how incompetent the band would have been if drafted into a war, unless forced to fight specifically against giant, anime robots
    11. Stigmatta - Renstrom/Smith/Wilkins - A dark, brooding bout of beatnik poetry.
    12. Secret track 1 - The turbo emo remix of "The Song We Wrote Last Night".
    13. Secret track 2 - Intentionally bad remix of "Ecstasty". So back in 2005/2006, Audacity was a destructive audio editor by default. If you made a change and then quit, there was no way to recover your previous audio. Audacity crashed while Steve was mixing this album, discarding many of the original audio files so that he was completely unable to iterate on the mixes. The album version of "Ecstasy" was the first pas. This was him desperately trying to figure out what else he could do.
  • The Gelatinous Symphonium E.P. - Demos recorded by Steve and Andrea over spring break in probably 2005
    1. The Song We Wrote Last Night - Renstrom/Smith/Wilkins - Y'know... I don't remember who came up with the April O'Neil lyric, but of all our lyrics, that is probably the one that aged the worst!
    2. Stigmatta - Renstrom/Smith/Wilkins - see description above. I have no idea why the timing of the drum machine is so bad. Did we try playing it live? What a silly choice!
    3. Davnesaur - Smith/Wilkins - Story time: Kivar and Biederman's next band, Happy Wednesday, used to cover this song. They turned it into a more conventional hardcore punk song. Live, Trae would say that their version was how "it should have originally been done." They were incorrect tho. This version is how it should have originally been done!

Videos of the band