Matt Krupanski, the founding drummer of Delaware post-hardcore band BoySetsFire, has died. He was a co-founder of the group from its formation in 1994 and remained a member through their 2007 hiatus, returning briefly when the band regrouped in 2010 before departing for good in 2012.
The band confirmed his passing over the weekend in a statement on social media that was, frankly, one of the more honest pieces of writing you’ll see from a band mourning one of their own. No boilerplate. No careful corporate grief. Just memory after memory tumbling out — picking him up from high school for their first tour, writing songs in his parents’ basement, cigars on a beach in North Carolina, near-violent Madden sessions, a fake side project called Pussy Tim and the Mother Fuckers that accidentally played to 25,000 people. The kind of details that only exist between people who actually lived something together.
“We are gutted,” the band wrote. “Our hearts are shredded. We lost a brother today.”
Krupanski co-founded BoySetsFire alongside vocalist Nathan Gray, guitarists Josh Latshaw and Chad Istvan, and bassist Darrell Hyde. The band signed to Initial Records in 1997 and released their debut, The Day the Sun Went Out, that same year. What followed was a run of records that cemented their place in the post-hardcore canon: After the Eulogy in 2000, Tomorrow Come Today in 2003, and The Misery Index: Notes from the Plague Years in 2006. Krupanski’s drumming is all over that catalogue — driving, precise, emotionally present in the way that the best hardcore drumming always is.
After leaving BoySetsFire in 2012, he transitioned fully out of music and into a career in architecture, eventually rising to Director of Engineering at Hadley Exhibits, Inc. He is survived by his daughter, Georgie, for whom the band has announced plans to hold a fundraiser.
Tributes have poured in from across the scene. Tucker Rule of Thursday, who was part of Krupanski’s informal drummer circle alongside members of Rise Against and the Bouncing Souls, wrote simply: “I’m so sorry, totally heartbroken.” Ingo Knollmann of the DONOTS called the news “devastating.”
He was one of the people who built something that mattered, then quietly went and built something else entirely. Both things deserve to be remembered.