Wheelchair Sports Camp goes punk on scintillating new album

Kalyn Heffernan is embracing imperfection.

The activist, rapper and musician, who founded and fronts Wheelchair Sports Camp alongside Gregg Ziemba, just released oh imperfecta, which will be celebrated with an album-release show at Meow Wolf on Saturday, May 23, along with Dressy Bessy, Brūha and RAYANN! as well as special guests. A searing release, oh imperfecta sees the hip-hop duo charging in a punk direction on such songs as “MAKE it MAKE SENSE,” which opens the album and features Radio Pete and Jello Biafra, the former Dead Kennedys frontman who signed the duo to his label, Alternative Tentacles.

A methodical rapper who fastidiously crafts each lyric, who reworks and retouches until beats hit just right, Heffernan had to loosen the reins to ultimately unleash oh imperfecta.

“The concept of the album is about undoing perfectionism and exploring that,” Heffernan says. And listeners are resonating.

A video for the song “EAT MEAT!,” which she calls “the fastest, simplest song we ever wrote,” has already racked up half a million views. “It’s brought so many new people to us,” Heffernan says, “and, like, influential people. I woke up with a follow from Peaches the other day. I went and hung out with this guy who’s been sending it to all his friends from Nine Inch Nails. It’s pretty cool. I’m trying not to get too big-headed. But it really did everything you would want a song to do: Our Bandcamp has been popping, I’m sending out merch orders, people are digging into our really old stuff. It’s wild.”

The video shows Ziemba pushing Heffernan around in a grocery cart in a meat section, with Heffernan banging her drumsticks and Ziemba frantically strumming his guitar as they slap each other with meat. As one YouTube commenter wrote: “Punk is not dead.”

“The video is really an affirmation of [how] the stripping back and the simplifying is really helping,” she says. “I think you’re able to hear my lyrics a lot better the more simple we’ve been. And because I’m playing drums at the same time, and because it’s punk, which is so much faster, I can’t be super wordy. For me, it was just so freeing and fun.”

Heffernan says Ziemba encouraged the punk move, especially under the purview of such a legend as Biafra, who’s also on the song “DEAD” and will be at the release show, despite recently suffering a serious stroke. Then again, Heffernan is a Denver legend herself, having become a prominent advocate for those with disabilities and even running for mayor. While she grew up listening to hip-hop, she’s no stranger to the punk ethos; in many ways, she lives it.

“As a rapper, as tiny, as queer, as white,” she continues, “I’m so othered in so many ways. I’m realizing I’ve always been overcompensating with my humor and my fashion and my bars, I’ve always gotta be the best. And that’s part of the genre of rap — you can’t be a good rapper unless you think you’re the best rapper. But that’s a lot of pressure. It’s really a testament to, okay, lean into the imperfecta, and have fun, which is something I have a hard time doing when I’m thinking about so many different aspects.”

Another standout song on the album is “DEAD,” which is visceral, pointed and relentless in its fast-paced rhythm juxtaposed to Heffernan’s building vocals and Biafra’s bars. “Survival of the fittest / Survival of what we think fits / Breed perfect children / Were gas chambers really that bad?” Biafra intones in a spooky foray. “Think of all the money we’ll save / When we don’t have to pay for them anymore / Or worse, yet / Look at them / We’ll get rid of you / We will find a way / Just think of how superior your children will be / But by then, you’ll be dead.”

“What a sicko, right?” Heffernan laughs. “He just started freestyling and got darker and darker. Thank God we captured it.”

The song practically wrote itself on her end. Heffernan had gotten kidney stones a couple of years ago, and “it was the first time I was hospitalized for anything outside of my bones,” she says. “It’s like, a regular body problem.”

At the hospital, “I was not treated very good, the way they talked about my body,” she continues. “The older I get, I’m realizing my body has always been talked about in such dehumanizing ways. I notice it affects me more as an adult. The doctor was calling my body ‘torturous.’ … There’s this sense of diminishment. My disability is osteogenesis imperfecta, so they’re saying I’m genetically imperfect. No wonder I’m a perfectionist.”

But even as a perfectionist, Heffernan has proven that she’s a natural for punk rock, too. As Patti Smith put it, the genre “is just another word for freedom.”

That’s what hip-hop presented for Heffernan as a child. Her parents were Deadheads and rockers, so “hip-hop was just mine,” she says. “It felt like something of my own. I don’t know if I’ve ever thought about this, but I think just being alone a lot, as an only child in casts a lot and not able to just go run amok in the ways I wanted to, it was my expression, it was my relief. I could put on my Walkman and read the liner notes and be anywhere. It was just my best friend, you know.”

She started performing her own raps back in middle school; her first was for a talent show in sixth grade. After forming Wheelchair Sports Camp in 2009, she’d perform at venues around Denver, booking shows and spitting bars about not just her own life, but the injustices plaguing the marginalized around the world. It made the group a standout, and Heffernan a person everyone wanted to talk to and listen to.

Heffernan met Biafra through Mark “Radio Pete” Bliesener, WSC’s one-time manager, whom she calls her “bestest bud.” She had just released her 2016 debut album, NO BIG DEAL, and gave him a copy at Wax Trax. Then, after releasing the single “YESS i’m a MESS” in 2021 (it also appears on oh imperfecta), the duo was signed to Alternative Tentacles, becoming the first hip-hop act it brought on board since the ’90s. “I think it even caught them by surprise, how well their audience has responded to us,” she says.

“Jello was like, ‘Don’t go punk! We’ve had enough of that; stay you,'” she recalls. “But we did, and it’s working.”

Aside from Biafra and Radio Pete, the album includes someone who least expected it: Heffernan’s mom. Humor is a major facet of the WSC brand, and recordings of her mother’s idiosyncratic voicemails add an irreplacable comedic timing to the record. “I thought she was going to kill me,” Heffernan says with a laugh. “She’s listened to it twice and is like, ‘Welp, I guess I’m all over the record!’ … She’s a big part of my story, and Gregg’s really good at pushing me to center my experience. I think it’s a lot easier for me to write about the world’s problems outside of myself.”

She certainly accomplishes that on tracks like “MAKE it MAKE SENSE,” which still pursues Heffernan’s hip-hop sensibilities, her vocals moving in rapid, tantalizing glissando as she lays bare the frustrations most of us feel toward the world: “All this shit I can’t ignore / And all this shit we can’t afford / We’re all in doubt, in debt, endure / But funds for tons of guns? Of course!”

“How often do we say that to ourselves, ‘Make it make sense?'” she asks. “We could find money for everything we need as humans, and we still find ways to be like, ‘Oh, we can’t afford public health, can’t afford education, can’t afford food, can’t afford housing. But oh, Israel needs $12 billion today? No problem.’ … Like, how does this make sense to anybody? It’s so infuriating.”

The corresponding music video is displayed in the aesthetic of South Park, which is “something I really like to do because I [grew up] watching South Park,” Heffernan says. It’s about “making fun of the situation, adding the humor, because this shit is so devastating, it’s important for us to be able to laugh about it, or else we just isolate and are miserable. And I also think that’s exactly what they want: to make us feel powerless.”

Consider Wheelchair Sports Camp a powerhouse, then. “I think what’s so cool about this album is it’s all over the place,” Heffernan concludes. “There’s sad-girl shit. There’s happy, cutesy. There’s disabled rage. There’s a little something for everybody, I hope. I hope people like, grab a song, grab a sound and are into it and help think about themselves or relate. And then I obviously want people to laugh. I don’t want anybody to think too much and just enjoy it.”

Wheelchair Sports Camp, 8 p.m. Saturday, May 23 (doors at 7), Meow Wolf, 1338 First St. Tickets are $26.75.