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Founded by two punk vets who crossed paths in the Northwest after running in the same SoCal scene as youths, River City Ruin is a knuckles-out power trio making raw, vulnerable and very loud music. Luckily, that describes a lot of music in Portland, and drummer Scott Meisse and singer-guitarist Mike Christie (aided by a succession of bassists) have found themselves right at home in the scene.
“The amount of bands and the amount of places that hosted bands, whether they’re real clubs or not, kind of blew me away,” Meisse says of landing in town a few years ago. “The opportunity to play came up really quickly, which I was not expecting.”
At first glance, it might seem rock ’n’ roll doesn’t get much more meat and potatoes than River City Ruin, but the band is more experimental than they appear. While their self-titled 2023 debut was salvaged from Christie’s uncompleted solo project, their second album, My Ruin, out July 1 from Arson City Records, is a more collaborative effort. Meisse wrote “Whole,” a song about his family’s struggles with depression during the pandemic, which features his daughter on viola. And the band’s sound, while still bruising, has grown slower and more nuanced—the product of two musicians feeling each other out in real time, sharing ideas and references while pushing past the punk-rock box.
One major influence is Mark Lanegan, the late Seattle singer-songwriter known both as the frontman of grunge band Screaming Trees and for a string of solo albums that pivoted toward dark, whiskey-soaked blues rock. While Christie was content mostly to scream on the first record, his voice drips with gothic, Lanegan-style grandeur this time around, adding a pleasing new sonic wrinkle.
“Scott was good about really pushing to try and be vulnerable on this record,” Christie says, “which was a new concept.”
Given that Christie and Meisse cut their teeth in the SoCal hardcore scene, it’s hard to hear the title My Ruin and not think of My War, Black Flag’s divisive sophomore effort from 1984. That album slowed their once-blistering tempos to a crawl, pissing off many of their punk peers while influencing countless Northwest grunge and doom metal bands.
The band denies any immediate inspiration from My War, but doom metal, so beloved in the mossy and magisterial Northwest, is certainly part of the new album’s DNA. “Left On Your Own” and closer “I Hear the Sound of Your Ocean at Last” carry a Melvins-like menace but also incantatory vocals and drums that tumble rather than groove.
Given the thickness of the bass tones throughout, which have much more room to breathe here than on the scrappier and more punkish early songs, it’s no surprise to learn bassist Matt Howl was once a member of the doom band Mammoth Salmon. While it’s Howl’s bass you hear on the record, he has since left the group. River City Ruin will play their first show with new bassist Margeaux Rosendale at the Summer Shred festival Aug. 15, which will serve as the record release show.
Christie and Meisse met while putting together the band that became River City Ruin, but they ran in the same circles decades ago, playing punk shows in L.A. and Orange County in the ’80s and early ’90s—what Meisse describes as the “tail end” of its hardcore explosion. Eventually, they realized they played on some of the same bills back in the day.
When the SoCal punk scene started to die down, Meisse took a break from music to start a family before getting “priced out” of Los Angeles and moving north to Portland. Christie went to Arizona and played in the scuzzy glam-rock band White Demons, occasionally commuting back to L.A. to play in the older punk band A.D.H.D. before heading for cooler climates and taking his backlog of songs with him.
Today, any connection to the L.A. punk scene is long gone. “The landscape has changed,” Christie says. “All the bookers we used to go through are dead or have moved on.”
Though Christie says a lot of the midsized clubs they typically would think to hit up for a tour down the coast have shuttered, both band members were amazed by the vitality of the rock scene in Portland. After forming River City Ruin, they found themselves on bills almost before they knew what was happening.
“I think 500 new bands formed last week in Portland,” Meisse says. “It feels like the scene is only getting bigger. It’s hard to wrap your arms around what’s going on around here.”
HEAR IT: River City Ruin’s album My Ruin is out June 30, 2026, at rivercityruin.bandcamp.com. $9–$26.
GO: Summer Shred Music Festival, 708 SE 2nd Ave., summershredpdx.com. Noon–11 pm Saturday, Aug. 15. Free. All ages.
