Humor belongs in and around music. It’s one of the things that give Hans Gruber and the Die Hards great appeal: Not only are they upbeat, rowdy, reckless and quite smart, they know how to have fun, toss a joke around and not take themselves too seriously.
File this Austin, Texas-based band under “rowdy punk” or “loud rock,” but their horns push them into ska without being a traditional ska band – they’re more like an avant-punk band with pushy horns.
Hans Gruber and the Die Hards will return to Durango on Sunday, performing at Anarchy Brewing along with Lo-Cash Ninjas, Crazy & the Brains and The Last Gang.
It was their humor and rebellion that pushed them into the ska world.
“We actually didn’t do a lot of ska when we started. We only did that because there was a club in town that told us they wouldn’t book us because we said we played some ska in an email, so we got mad at them, and someone booked us there a year later,” said band frontman Kurt Armstrong. “So we wrote a bunch of ska songs and added a saxophone player, just for the gig as a joke to tick off the venue. Ends up everyone liked it, including the venue, and we decided that actually being a ska band is a bit more fun, so we just kind of rode with it.”
Ska purists would not and should not call them a traditional ska band as they’re far from it. Left of the dial and independent, music fans of under-the-radar bands wouldn’t and shouldn’t call them a traditional anything. A listen to their latest release, “Or Hans Gruber and the Die Hards,” will reveal they’re a band that nods to crunchy metal and classic punk and hardcore, while also digging into the freakout jazz of composer John Zorn with the experimental sounds of Mr. Bungle or Uz Jsme Doma, all with a keep your eyes on the stage presence and delivery. It’s as visual as it is musical, and while musically the horns push sounds to ska, they’re all over the place.
“I’ve never listened to just one thing, and I think most people are like that. We went to the studio and said, ‘Let’s try to make this as big as possible.’ We wanted to make it theatric. And when you’re going with that theatrical mindset, it kind of opens up to ‘What can we do?’” Armstrong said. “It’s good to have a minimalist approach. It’s good to have a maximum approach. Neither one is wrong, nor incorrect. I love that there’s certain bands, and what you get on the albums is what you get live. I just prefer to just be maximalist. I prefer to be like, well, how the hell is Hans Gruber and The Die Hards going to play this live? And you know what? I don’t know. We have like 30 musicians on the album, so that’s fun.”
The band was immediately taken with Durango when they first played Anarchy Brewing in March 2024, and the rowdy music lovers of Durango were taken with them. They’re hoping for a repeat performance.
“It was like a Wednesday or Thursday, and I was like ‘We’ve never been there before, we’ll see how it goes.’ And there was like 150 people packed into Anarchy Brewing, and people crawling all over each other, tables falling over, microphones hitting my mouth. I’m pretty sure I had a bloody lip by the end of the night,” Armstrong said. “And I thought, this is awesome, this is fantastic.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at [email protected].