On Sale February 19, 2026
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In the upper Midwest, a group of dropouts and hedonists form the band Some Assault. Flailing at first from gig to gig, their volatile drummer, Liddy, soon orchestrates an elaborate sonic empire. She recruits new members with zeal, including Oliv, an heiress to a fortune in condiment packaging. Deploying Oliv’s funds to buy a shuttered women’s prison, Some Assault converts the acreage into a farm collective and massive recording studio dubbed The Hive.
Misfits, lured by promises of shelter and celebrity, swell the band roster and The Hive: Andy Warhol’s Factory in an Instagram Age. Once Some Assault’s fifteen minutes of fame threaten to expire, territorial violence takes hold. Chronicled by a member who managed to flee, Tear Here charts this creative collective, and the dark desire to command the public eye at all costs.
Praise for Tear Here
“In this ecstatic and burning novel, Matthew Pitt guides us into the serrated world of a Milwaukee cult band where a charismatic drummer holds her musicians in lethal thrall. A master of shattering detail, plying sentences sharp as concertina wire, Pitt plumbs familial yearnings and the creative urge—and delivers up explosive truths.”
—Dylan Landis, author of Rainey Royal & Normal People Don’t Live Like This
“A gorgeously grim chronicle of misfits and mayhem in a post-post-punk era. Hearts in the right place? Reader, you decide. ‘There’s only so much time the living allow the dead to litter their minds,’ the novel tells us, and all I can say is that these characters have yet to unlitter my mind. They’re still there, singing their songs, and I don’t anticipate their leaving anytime soon. So what are you waiting for, dear reader? Open the book. Read here!”
—David James Poissant, author of Lake Life & The Heaven of Animals