You will find few bigger champions of the DIY emo scene and all of its artists out there than Full Blown Meltdown. The explosive punk band moniker of songwriter Will Green blew up in the most secret corners of the Internet deservedly so last year through a grass roots campaign of label-and-publicist-free self-promotion and a heaping pile of positivity lifting up fellow smaller, wholly independent artists just the same. It led up to the release of his listmaking debut, Mollify. 2024 hasn’t seen Green slow down his golden retriever momentum on working toward bigger things while continuing to advocate for the underdog (as well as past influencers who didn’t get the shine they deserved during their time) through his socials. His latest project, however, switches up the method slightly with the newly released For Once In My Life, a split 7″ alongside scene peers the Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach and Cyborg9K, pushing his sound — and theirs — into exciting new directions.

+rcmndedlisten caught up with an equally hyped Green à la slipping into his DMs to ask him about how the journey has been since Mollify‘s release, his return to performing live, the origin story behind the new split, and what you can look forward to from Full Blown Meltdown in the coming year.

+rl: A year ago, you were hitting the ground hard as that person in everybody’s mentions and readying the world for the arrival of the first Full Blown Meltdown, Mollify, following a long season of creative sewing. A lot has happened since on the strength of the DIY community you’ve fostered a connection with. What have been some of your favorite highlights over the past year?

Will Green: It’s been a whirlwind! I’ve had such a blast and made so many incredible friends since Mollify’s release, and even better I got to meet a lot of them in real life when we played our first two shows as a band! Speaking of which, putting together the band in general was even a blast in itself. I got to play live music again with five of the coolest dudes I’ve ever met, and it was a wild experience I’ll never forget.

+rl: Mollify took some time to gestate before being brought into this world, but you’ve already released For Once in My Life, a new three-way split alongside two other cross-country DIY emo-adjacent solo rock outlets in the Illinois-based the Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach and Nashville’s Cyborg9K. It’s not your typical split where each band contributes their own song and calls it a day — you, Lonny Starsky, and Sky Willis all collaboratively appear on one another’s tracks. How’d that idea come about and how’d you pull it off with the distance involved?

WG: So last year, immediately after Mollify released, Lonny reached out in a Twitter message about how much she loved the album! We’ve been friends for a while on here but this was the first time she recommended doing something together. That was when I brought up the topic of bringing Sky into the equation! They had written one of my favorite albums of 2023 (and now one of my albums of the year of 2024 as well) and I really wanted to collaborate with them as well! Once the three of us were locked in, we started sending each other ideas on tracks through google drive and SoundCloud and continued until we had about 10 songs or so in the mix! Once we chose the base tracks we were most interested in, we all went into recording mode and sent each other ideas, adding things we thought would work best in each song and each performing vocally on each track. It was tough cutting it down to just the best three tracks, but that’s all we could fit on the 7” unfortunately.

+rl: It sounds like a DIY scene crossover event where playable characters from one series enter the others’ domain in hopes that it pulls in new interest from audiences unfamiliar with others’ work. If that’s the case, I’ve already found myself giving listen to Cyborg9K’s recent album, Days Become Years, and the latest Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach singles. “World Wide Magazine” and “Let’s Live on a Transmission Tower”. You all have a distinct identity in your styles of boundless emo. How did you arrive at finding common ground in recording the three new songs?

WG: One of the best parts of the entire project was that we all felt we could benefit from one another’s fanbase, even though we all sound slightly different! That meant we just needed to find a common thread in our writing, which was exactly what sparked the three songs we chose. All of us have been going through the exact same mental anguishes of growing older in a young person’s world and trying to stay relevant/not regret past decisions. Working together we were able to write out three full tracks of lyrics all about the pains of growing older, pushing our old lives into the past, and for once in our lives being the people/artists we always hoped we could be.

+rl: How is 2025 looking for the next Full Blown Meltdown album or potentially, booking another rare live show?

WG: FBM will be playing one show a year for as long as this project goes, or until one of my few dream bands to tour with asks me to go out with them. I never planned on even taking this thing live, but now that I have all the members I need, it’s something I don’t take for granted! We already booked our show for 2025 but can’t announce it yet unfortunately. I’ll just say that’s it’s even crazier and somehow even larger than booking Fauxchella on our first run was! As for album #2, we’ve been recording it over the last 18 months and it’s probably about a year away from finished in my opinion! We have 12 songs recorded but I’m weird and cut about half the songs normally to use as singles or throw aways, meaning we probably have 8-10 more to record before I’m completely satisfied. All I can promise is that it is a much , much different record than Mollify, and I don’t think anyone will be ready for it.

Full Blown Meltdown, the Acid Flashback at Nightmare Beach & Cyborg9K’s For Once in My Life is available now.