To paraphrase the 2004 Martin Scorsese movie The Departed “Through the Principles of Detection” it looks like a long hoped-for reunion of metalcore genre-blenders iwrestledabearonce is in fact, “all happening!” During an episode of Nerding Out With Rickshaw, bassist Mike “Rickshaw” Martin confirmed that he has been discussing the idea with vocalist Krysta Cameron. The band had a meteoric rise in the 2000s and 2010s following in the footsteps of Mr. Bungle, The Dillinger Escape Plan,  and The Residents and others and paving the way for diverse but heavy bands such as The Callous Daoboys, Jinjer, Steaksauce Mustache, Animals As Leaders, Entheos, and iwabo’s later descendants – Spiritbox (featuring final iwabo vocalist, Courtney LaPlante, and countless modern bands. The trendsetting band was a musical and fashion leader (top tier t-shirt game) band was hugely popular among Metalcore and Deathcore fans, but also disliked by greybeard old-school metal heads too.

Martin said the following:

You know I’ve always thought right now with the lineup, the old school lineup with Krysta, I always thought that like Krysta and [guitarist] Steven [Bradley] are really the ones that needed to like hammer it out if it was ever going to happen. But the other day, I’m not going to be 100% and give you all of the stuff right now, but I will definitely tell you some of the details right now.

Right now I was talking to Krysta on the phone and she’s just like, you know we’re catching up about this, we’re catching up about that and then she’s just like ‘you know a lot of people always hit me up in my DMs and they’re talking about when’s the IWABO reunion. When’s Iwrestledabearonce coming back.’

And I’m like ‘yeah obviously Krysta.’ Like I do a show where we talk about music a lot and there’s people in there all the time ‘when’s IWABO coming back?.’ There’s comments, everybody hits me up. I’m like hey check out my new band and people are like ‘okay when’s IWABO coming back?.’ You know what I mean, like so you know that’s that’s what I have to deal with you know.

I’m telling this to Krysta and she’s like ‘well you know Ricky, Rickshaw, would you do it, would you ever do it if we were asked to do a reunion.’ And I was like ‘Krysta, I’m the only one playing shows for 40 people.’ You know what I mean, like I’m out here doing you know vocals in a new heavy band I said ‘yes Krysta obviously I would play with IWABO again. Let’s do it.’

I was like ‘what about you Krysta. What do you think about this?.’ She said ‘I would fucking love to do an IWABO reunion.’ So that’s where we’re at.

There’s more information, but at this point in time you know we’re just getting, we’re just slowly getting the band back together, seeing what’s going on, being friends again. And then, in the future, we are going to start talking about what it would be worth to do it right. So I’m going to need all the people that loved Iwrestledabearonce to start rallying behind that too.

You need to be talking about it. We need to be posting about it. And so the more buzz we get going, the easier it’ll be for us to decide to leave the children at home for a month or whatever. You know it’ll be easier if the buzz is happening and we don’t have to go out there and and make it hard on ourselves to get something going. You know what I’m saying. We want to lube it up.

We’ll keep following and reporting on this story as it develops.