Man of the Flood Made the Angsty Record at Home — and It Slaps
Somewhere in Fort Wayne there is a house where five people made all their own merch, filmed their own videos, and tracked an entire album between the couch and the kitchen. That house produced Man of the Flood, and its most recent full-length, Sorry, Puppy!, is the best argument I've heard this year that the Summit City's most exciting music is being made about a hundred feet from where you're standing.
If you missed the origin story: what's now a five-piece started as a pandemic-era dorm-room collaboration between guitarist-vocalist Quinn Heiking and drummer Clayton Beehler. Keyboardist Jess Grant famously talked her way in by leaving business cards around her college dorm, an act of self-promotion so charmingly analog it belongs in a museum. Bassist Justin Vu and lead guitarist Loui Al-Ayoubi filled out the lineup. The band's self-description — "indie music you can mosh to" — is the rare genre tag that's both accurate and a dare.
Sorry, Puppy! is, in Heiking's own framing, the band's "most angsty work," and Grant pinpoints the record's throughline as "growing pains" — songs about maturing, relationships fraying, and the slow unlearning of people-pleasing that eats your early twenties. That could curdle into diary-page navel-gazing in lesser hands. It doesn't here, largely because the band refuses to let the feelings sit still. The prog-indie architecture — odd meters, interlocking guitar lines, keys that shimmer rather than pad — keeps even the mopey material physically danceable. You can be in your feelings and in the pit simultaneously. That's harder to pull off than it sounds.
The DIY ethos isn't a garnish; it's the whole flavor. "We recorded the whole most recent record at home," Heiking told WBOI, and you can hear the freedom that buys — arrangements that breathe, takes that keep a little mess in them, nothing sanded down by a studio clock. In an era when a lot of "bedroom pop" is a genre gesture, Man of the Flood are the literal version: a bedroom band who happen to be genuinely good.
What lands hardest, though, is how completely un-cynical the whole operation is. Al-Ayoubi, talking about the local scene, put it plainly: "It's beautiful to see this music community sort of thrive," contrasting Fort Wayne's collaborative streak with the elbows-out fragmentation of bigger cities. That's not just band-interview boilerplate. It's the actual competitive advantage of a mid-size Midwest scene — small enough that everyone shares a stage and a soundperson, big enough to have a real audience — and Man of the Flood are its clearest proof of concept.
Their June 26 slot in WBOI's Live and Local at The Landing series got weathered out — Indiana in summer remains undefeated — but that only delays the inevitable. This is a band you should hear in a room, ideally a small one, ideally while not standing still. As Al-Ayoubi advised prospective attendees: "Don't just stand there." Take the note. Then go buy the record from the people who made it on their own couch.
Sources: "Indie Music You Can Mosh To": Man of the Flood at Live and Local (WBOI); Man of the Flood (Bandcamp); Man of the Flood: 'Sorry, Puppy!' (Whatzup)