Steel Beans Should Not Be Able to Do All of This at Once
Jeremy DeBardi plays guitar, drums and sings simultaneously. The strange part is how quickly that stops feeling like the most interesting thing about him.
– JAMBALOO EDITORIAL TEAM
The obvious way into Steel Beans is also slightly misleading.
Jeremy DeBardi sits behind a drum kit with an electric guitar across his body and sings while playing both of them at the same time. Not in the old one-man-band sense of attaching instruments to various limbs and hoping momentum does the rest. He plays them. Properly. A foot works the kick, one arm moves between snare and cymbal, the other handles the guitar, and somewhere in the middle he remembers there is a microphone.
A video of DeBardi performing “Molotov Cocktail Lounge” that way went viral in 2022. It eventually led to tours opening for Tenacious D and Tool, introducing Steel Beans to audiences substantially larger than the Washington rooms where DeBardi had spent years making music.
The problem with going viral for doing something technically ridiculous is that the trick can become bigger than the songs. Steel Beans has spent the years since proving there was considerably more behind it.
His 2025 self-titled album runs through fuzzy garage rock, psychedelia, blues and the kind of heavy rock that still benefits from sounding slightly dangerous around electrical equipment. “Stowaway” pushes forward on a riff that feels permanently on the edge of falling apart. “Big Dumb” is exactly as direct as its title suggests, while “Throwin’ Stones” leaves more room around DeBardi’s voice without sanding down the edges. The record has now been expanded for 2026 with five songs from the same sessions, including “Swan Dive” and “Karma Never Forgets.”
There is humor running through Steel Beans too, but it does not function as an escape hatch. DeBardi has spent years making records, visual art and films, and his performances can move between genuine musicianship and something that appears seconds away from becoming an elaborate joke. The two are rarely separated.
That should make AM/FM an unusually good place to see him. A performance that became famous because millions of people watched it compressed into a phone screen gets returned to the scale where the mechanics are impossible to ignore: a person, a guitar, a drum kit and no useful explanation for how his brain is keeping track of all three.
After a few songs, though, counting limbs becomes beside the point. You start listening to the band.
There just happens to be one person in it.
