Jonathan Fire*Eater’s Stewart Lupton Dead at 43

Indie rock band Jonathan Fire*Eater’s lead vocalist Stewart Lupton died on Sunday at the age of 43, a family member confirmed to Pitchfork. No official cause of death has yet been released; in a statement to The New York Times, his family said it stemmed from a “desperate attempt to escape the voices that so tormented him.” The band formed in 1993 and helped shape New York’s revived rock scene years before it exploded in the ’00s. They broke up in 1998. After the split, Lupton’s bandmates—Paul Maroon, Matt Barrick, Walter Martin—formed the Walkmen with Hamilton Leithauser and Peter Bauer.

Lupton met his future bandmates in the early ’90s while attending St. Albans School in Washington D.C. Initially, he, Maroon, Barrick, and Martin joined forces as the Ignobles with vocalist Ryan Cheney helming their songs. They soon relocated to New York’s Lower East Side, prompting Cheney’s departure and a new name. When they formed Jonathan Fire*Eater, Lupton took over vocals and their former classmate Tom Frank stepped in as bassist. Their self-titled debut album arrived in 1995, and helped propel them to a level of fame that included opening for Blur.

The band’s growing reputation fueled a bidding war among several labels, but they eventually signed a deal with Dreamworks SKG and their sophomore album, Wolf Songs for Lambs, followed in 1997. Despite their seemingly sure-fire success, troubles within the band eventually became too great. “There’s a prefabricated danger some bands cultivate, but ours seemed more like a sentence,” Lupton told The New York Post in 2005. “It was a double-edged sword that we wielded for a brief moment and then fell on.” Jonathan Fire*Eater disbanded in 1998.

While three of Lupton’s bandmates went in a new direction as the Walkmen, he moved back to D.C. to study poetry at George Washington University. He eventually formed a new band, Child Ballads, which toured briefly. In 2009, he released the EP, A Little Give and Take, under his new collaborative project with Carole Greenwood called the Beatin’s, but he remained largely out of the spotlight.

Jonathan Fire*Eater has been credited with paving the way for the Strokes, LCD Soundsystem, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and many other bands instrumental to fueling New York’s rock scene in the ’00s. (“Oh yeah, they had an enormous influence on me,” said Karen O in Meet Me in the Bathroom.) In the wake of Lupton’s death, Walter Martin has penned a tribute to his former bandmate—find it here. The Walkmen also shared a statement: Find it below.