Haters — well, one, anyway — inspired “Who Are You,” the song just released by The Reckless. It is a righteous, hard rocking middle-finger thank you for the inspiration.

The song is the title track of a five-track EP. The other four are just as hard, just as righteous, just as good. Actually, not good. Great. So.

Thank you.

“We came up with that idea mainly because a post blew up on Instagram, TikTok, I forget which one specifically, but we received our first kind of trolling hate comment,” said Fritz Fayman, the band’s founding member, lead vocalist and one of the two main lyricists.

“And we were like, ‘That’s a good sign.’ You know you’re making it when random human beings in this world are like, ‘You suck!’ You know you’re on your way.”

You put your life out on display
Turn on those lights and don’t run away
…
So don’t you hope they go away
You let them know you’re here to stay

These four guys want to rock, and they want to rock in a band. They are Fritz; Riku Myllykoski, drummer and the other main lyricist; lead guitar John Kelly; and bassist Michael Kennedy.

“What’s nice about our band is we’re very heavily about all being a part of the songwriting process. We all come together and add ideas.”

“Who Are You” is one of the first songs The Reckless put out after the band finally came together in late 2023. It was a moment almost four years in the making.

Fritz first formed the band during the time of COVID. The first album, the self-titled The Reckless, in 2021, was basically just him.

“When I say, ‘I started the band,’ the band didn’t really start then. It was just me. But I never wanted to be just Fritz Fayman. I never wanted to be a solo artist.”

After him, the first of the current members was Michael, then they found Riku, and John joined in late 2023.

They originally had another guitarist, but he moved to New York from San Diego. The band decided to be a trio for a while.

“As we started to write more, as we started to get better together, we realized that we do need another guitar player,” said Fritz. “We wanted that extra layer of complexity.”

They met John before they knew he was a guitarist.

“He saw us play a show one time, and he came up to us and said, ‘Hey. You guys were really cool! You guys were awesome.’”

The band put out an ad for a lead guitarist the next day, and John applied.

“I went to his place and almost immediately I was like, ‘Oh, yeah! He’s the guy.’”

They are intentional about music as a career and as a band.

“Ever since then, we’ve really been working on writing new music, getting our sound,” said Fritz.

If the single “Who Are You” is their anthem, Who Are You the EP is their coming-out announcement.

“This EP was the first real project where every single person here was completely in charge of their songwriting process, and we’re comfortable with that.”

The EP has one song, “Go On,” that is a re-do of a song on the first album. Fritz points to it as emblematic of the night-and-day difference between that iteration of the band and it’s music and this one.

“Our drummer, Riku, said, ‘Hey, I think we should revisit some of your old music. We’ve grown so much as a band, I think it’d be cool to revisit some of the older stuff.’”

The bank picked “Go On.” The original is excellent rock but as hard rock goes, it is a Shetland pony to the remake’s Kentucky Derby thoroughbred.

Another track is “Do It for Free,” a play on the old joke about loving something so much you would do it for free. Music, and the band, are careers for The Reckless, but for the moment it is “not a sustainable income source.”

“Obviously, that’s the goal, but we talk about it like, would you do this, even if you were doing it for free? The point is you don’t always want to do it for free, but sometimes you gotta.”

“Home” is a song about how Fritz discovered his destiny on a ride to school one day when he was 14. His father turned the radio on to Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”

“I was blown away by that guitar riff, because I couldn’t believe that could be done,” he said. That song made rock his home.

The closing song is “Remember Me,” a beautiful rock ballad about making a mark: “Remember me / And sing along / So you’ll remember me.”

Bottom line, this band is rock. Hard rock. Punk rock. Soft rock. Pop rock. Rock rock. They all live in rock country. In their hands, Justin Timberlake’s “Sexy Back,” released in 2024, is rock as hard as granite.

“Who Are You” is a song they all created together from Fritz’s raw material.

“Now it’s a really awesome hard rock song that we feel is very digestible even to people who maybe are not huge fans of super heavy hard rock, but people who really like hard rock and stuff like that will definitely appreciate it and want to check out more of what we have.”

And that is a righteous statement. Connect to The Reckless on all platforms for new music, videos, and social posts and listen for yourself.

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