By the time John Backer lights up, you already know the vibe. The Los Angeles native behind the band We Knew Nothing speaks fast, laughs easily, and treats creative choices like sacred oaths. He rolls blunts in the studio because it settles the mind, then chases songs that feel true in his bones. If he sounds like a lifer, it is because he is.
“I smoke all the time,” he says. “I have this thing called cyclical vomiting syndrome. They say 50 percent of the people who have it are caused by weed, and the other half, weed helps them. It kind of just makes my stomach feel better if I’m feeling like ass. But then I also use it. It helps me be creative.”
Backer’s cannabis story started early. He was 11 when his cousin handed him both a bong and a copy of High Times under a storm drain near Tom’s Farms off the 15. “He had like a shanty town under there,” Backer laughs. “He had High Times all over. That was how I met High Times for the first time.”
From Hardcore Halls to 3D Movie Labs to We Knew Nothing
The path from Corona punk shows to a sharpened post-hardcore project took some left turns. Backer grew up in a deeply musical household. His father wanted to be an author and ended up writing ESL grants, but he also built a massive educational record for his kids. “People can play two seconds of a song and 90 percent of the time I’m going to get the song right,” Backer says. “My music knowledge is so crazy because of how my dad is.”
He cut his teeth in high school hardcore bands, found a tribe in those sweaty rooms, and spent time around the Showcase scene and the late Mitch Lucker of Suicide Silence. As tastes widened, he bounced from pop-punk staples like Blink-182, Green Day, The Offspring, and New Found Glory to the French touch of Justice and Daft Punk. There was also a detour into film. “I did special effects,” he says. “I worked on Avatar, Transformers, and Shrek. I make the movie stereoscopic. When you see it in 3D in the theater.” The work paid, but the music called louder.
Today, We Knew Nothing is his vehicle for a thicker, more emotionally cut sound. “I just write the music I want to write and then I’m going to make the art around it,” he says. Rick Rubin lives rent-free in his head for a reason. “The last people that should come into your mind while making art are the audience,” Backer says, paraphrasing Rubin. “They don’t matter, because then you’re not making something true to yourself.”
A Musical Soulmate and an Album on Deck
Part of that truth has been finding the right collaborator. A visual artist friend known as Jit On The Track made the crucial intro to producer Cody Benjamin. Chemistry did the rest.
“We set up a day to work and I think we said like four words together and made like five songs in like three hours,” Backer says. “Cody and I are almost telepathically talking to each other and making exactly what the other one wants. I was joking the other day and called him my musical soulmate.”
The result is a surge of new music. An initial EP is almost mastered and set to roll out soon, with a second project already roaring forward. “I haven’t even put out this first EP,” he admits, “and we’re already almost done with the second album. It’s going to be really heavy. A lot of breakdowns. More post-hardcore that fits now.”
One of the new flag-bearers is a political burner called “CIA,” which doubles as an acronym. “It’s called CIA. Can’t Imagine Alternatives,” he says. The cut lists countries “America has imperialistically dominated for decades” and questions why taxpayer dollars continue to fuel that harm. The track features Gavin Profit, an artist whose catalog leans political by design.
Politics, Protection, and the Scene He Wants to See
Backer’s vision of punk and hardcore is musical, but it is also moral. “Punk is anti-establishment, pro-worker rights, pro-union, pro-equality,” he says. “You can’t really be alt and be a bigot. That doesn’t make sense. You’re supposed to protect the weakest people in your scene. Especially if you’re one of the toughest people and have the most backing. You should be defending all of those people and putting yourself in front of them.”
He is tired of the tolerance paradox showing up at shows. He is even more tired of fans who beg their favorite bands to avoid politics while standing on decades of political art. “People will listen to these bands and they’ll be right-leaning and then they’ll get mad and tell Rage Against the Machine to keep politics out of their music,” he says. “Bro, who do you think the machine was? They were raging against the toaster?”
On the live side, he keeps one eye on the experience itself. Warped Tour’s return felt messy to him. “It was unorganized,” he says. “Selling out an extra 20,000 tickets is cool, but if we’re not keeping the integrity of the shows and telling people what is happening, it’s frustrating.” He prefers the model at When We Were Young, where the same lineup runs on two consecutive days. “If you can’t make it to the first one, you can maybe make it to the second,” he says. “You don’t miss those cultural moments.”
Tattoos as Rebellion, Not Rulebook
If you have seen Backer, you have seen the ink. The throat owl. Russian prison star on his knees. Yakuza panels were applied across his back and down to his legs. There is a story behind some of it, but not in the way Instagram captions crave.
“Most of my tattoos, I’m just like, that looks sick, let’s do that,” he says. An old man in Vegas once stopped him to ask if he knew what the knee stars meant. Backer answered honestly. “They mean not to kneel to any authority or another man.” The stranger quietly raised his shirt to reveal stars on his shoulders. It was all the validation he needed.
For Backer, tattoos mark a refusal. “We were always told growing up by parents and people in positions of power, you can’t have tattoos,” he says. “Why do you get to decide what’s going to be on my body. I refuse to do that. I think it’s a staple in the culture because it is a part of rebellion.”
Flower First, Rosin for the Road
Backer is a flower guy through and through. He loves small-batch, soil-grown, long-flowered cultivars with no chemicals or pesticides. Friends at G3 Collective help keep the stash curated and protect his voice. “I can’t just smoke anything,” he says. “It’ll mess my voice up.”
He is not big on vapes, but he gives flowers to Blinkers for their two-gram live rosin and liquid diamond disposables. “Those are super gas,” he says. “They’re like 30 or 35 bucks. Some people are selling one-gram carts for that.” He uses them sparingly when a venue or setting demands it. Otherwise, you will find him with a blunt and a lighter.
Psychedelic Pages in the Playbook
Backer speaks about plant medicine with the same mix of curiosity and caution that defines a lot of modern artists. He has experimented and set boundaries. “I really liked acid for a long time, but that can get to a point where you shouldn’t be doing it anymore,” he says. His DMT sessions were unforgettable. “I fell through the Pixelverse,” he says, grinning. “It looked like I was in a Minecraft server.”
He would like to grow that work in a ceremony. Ayahuasca in Mexico with a shaman. A teepee peyote sit led by respected elders. He microdoses mushrooms once in a while, and he talks about psychedelics as tools that can broaden perspective, not shortcuts. “We’re all one thing,” he says. “Not just humans. Animals. Nature. Because of how consciousness perceives it, you seem like an individual thing, but really you’re part of this giant thing, and you need to do your part for that thing to continue working correctly.”
Where to Find Him
Backer is aiming for performances at Rolling Loud, a return to Warped next year, and a slot at When We Were Young. He is set to hit the Troubadour with Luke Raven to perform a couple of collaborative songs.
He is also ready to bring cannabis brands deeper into these rooms. “If we make it so people can get weed or even bring some weed in, we can make the events more weed-friendly,” he says. “I don’t think people should be drinking at shows like that because then so many fights happen.”
He wants flowers over shots, and education over stigma. Especially for fans who moved to Los Angeles, heavy-drinking regions. “The more it becomes legal around the country, the more people see they were crazy for thinking anything else,” he says.
You can follow him everywhere as We Knew Nothing. That is the handle across platforms and the mantra on stage. He works with a tight inner circle and gives real credit when it is due. “My manager, Henry, is awesome,” he says. “My big picture manager, Raj, is a legend.” And he appreciates the friends who keep the music moving and the visuals vivid.
Backer wants to headline with a full production show that unites the 3D eye with the pit-born ear. He is already building projections and set pieces with his music director. He writes first, then designs the world around the songs. The politics will be louder this time. The guitars will be nastier. The swing between heartbreak and battle cry will be sharper. He expects accountability from scenes that claim rebellion, and he wants more artists to plant a flag.
“If you’re a punk artist and you don’t have at least two or three political songs talking about major issues you disagree with, then you’re not really a punk or hardcore artist,” he says. “Every band I ever listened to has at least two or three really solid songs that are talking about standing up and fighting back against the system.”
That is the We Knew Nothing mission in a sentence. Blunt, honest, and built to hit.
