Artschool, led by RVA Mag contributor Griffin Smalley, released their debut album Nuclear Sons this week, with a release show set for Friday at The Camel. It’s a record shaped as much by trial and error as it is by intention.
“I asked my friend Erin Dakota, who had already lived here, and we were friends growing up, if she wanted to learn bass. I gave her one lesson, she said she liked it, and I told her we had a gig in three weeks,” he said.
Artschool formed in late summer 2023, not long after Smalley moved to Richmond. The early version of the band played fast, loose, and often to empty rooms. “You play a lot of shows to nobody,” Smalley said. “A lot of empty Tuesday nights.”
What started as a loose idea, teaching a bandmate how to play bass and booking a show within weeks, gradually tightened into something more focused once drummer Noah Brown joined. From there, the band started taking itself seriously: fewer shows, more intention, better songs.
The turning point came from outside music entirely.
“I’d written this short story called Nuclear Suns, and then I thought I could turn it into a song, take some of the general ideas and build from that. That became the title track. I got really obsessed with it, and it pushed things in a new direction, a little more post-punk. From there I was like, alright, let me use this as a jumping off point. I wanted to write a companion song, and then I just kept going,” he said.
From there, it snowballed. One song led to another, and eventually the band found itself building something cohesive, a record tied together by tone and idea rather than just a collection of tracks.
“And after a while, it was all themed around those ideas from the story. We paired it with some of our older songs, wrote a bunch of new ones, and then around March or April last year I mentioned it to Evan Solomon from Day Fiction, and he said he wanted to record it. We started a couple months later, recorded over the summer and winter, and that’s how the album came together.”
Sonically, the influence is clear without feeling stuck in the past. There’s a throughline from Joy Division’s weight to The Clash’s urgency, but it doesn’t land as imitation. It feels more like a framework. Smalley sees those influences less as nostalgia and more as something functional.
“I think it’s because when you reach that point where you’re on your own and making your own decisions, you can feel this overwhelming hopelessness,” he said. “And those two bands work with that in different ways. Joy Division just embraces it. It goes straight to your core, you feel it in your soul. And then The Clash takes that feeling and rejects it. It says, I’m gonna punch back. I’m gonna take all this despair and shove it in someone’s face and make myself better.”
“I feel like I had to have both,” he continued. “You can’t deny those feelings, but bands like The Clash give you the momentum to push back.”
That balance carries into Nuclear Sons, especially as the band started refining its sound. “As I was writing the album, and with Noah joining, I started modernizing what I was listening to,” he said. “A lot of bands now are doing both, feeling all these heavy emotions and then turning them into something responsive.”
He points to bands like The Murder Capital as a more current influence, artists who sit in that same tension between despair and something like hope. “The Murder Capital, fantastic Irish group, I’m really hoping they tour here soon,” he said. “They really influenced the album because they understand that balance. Their last album deals with a lot, like the genocide in Palestine and Gaza, and you feel the hopelessness, but you also feel some sense that good will prevail. And that had a massive impact on how I was looking at writing these songs.”
One embraces the darkness. The other pushes back against it. And somewhere in between is where this record lives. That tension sits at the core of the record. “I’ve always said the band is a rejection of nihilism. I hate nihilism more than anything,” he said.
For Smalley, that belief isn’t abstract. It’s necessary. “I think you have to believe there’s some force of good that’s bound to come. Sometimes you have to fake that belief, I’m not gonna lie,” he said. “But without that, what’s the point? If you don’t think there’s going to be any good, or you’re not going to make any impact, what are you doing?”
That idea carries through Nuclear Sons. It’s not trying to ignore the heaviness of the world. If anything, it leans into it, but it also refuses to stop there. The goal, as Smalley puts it, is simple: don’t roll over, don’t get defeated.
That mindset feels tied to a larger shift happening in Richmond right now. There’s a younger wave of bands, many of them coming out of DIY spaces and house shows, that are less interested in recreating a scene and more focused on pushing against it. Smalley sees it firsthand, both as a musician and as someone who’s been covering the scene weekly.
“I definitely can be critical, looking at myself. But I think that’s a good thing. There’s so many good bands here that it makes me strive to be better,” he said. “We have some of the most fantastic music in the country coming out of here right now, in my opinion.”
“You’re finding a lot of really hungry bands, which is something that’s not always the case. It’s bands that have vision, and they’re eager to execute that vision,” he continued. “Specifically, I mean I’m biased, but the punk and post-punk scene is really interesting, because you’re starting to see bands that aren’t just repeating the same cycle. And if they are, they break out of it much quicker. You’re getting some really interesting acts, influenced by stuff from Australia or England, but you’re getting the Richmond version of that, which I think is really special.”
That overlap, writing about music while making it, could easily turn into a conflict. Instead, it seems to sharpen the edges. And the scene itself is feeding that pressure in a productive way. A lot of these bands didn’t come up through formal training. They started by jumping straight into it, learning instruments while already in bands, playing basements, and figuring it out in real time.
“A pretty decent amount of people, their jumping off point wasn’t learning an instrument, it was joining a band,” he said. “If you ask most of them, they’ll tell you they started playing when they joined, or they were messing around in their bedroom, met some people, and then started a band a few months later. That’s a really amazing thing, and that’s exactly how my band started.”
The release show at The Camel brings together a lineup that reflects that same energy, with Ratfight, Tentative Decisions, and Shagwüf. All bands that, in one way or another, are pushing the same conversation forward.
For Artschool, this feels less like an endpoint and more like a starting line, with plans to tour, keep building, maybe find a label down the road, but for now the focus is simple: put the record out, play the show, and see what happens.
And if people walk away with anything, Smalley hopes it’s this: “Believe in something. Don’t ever get defeated.”
Photo by Grace Schwartz
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