B-Side Guys

Wheatus had exactly one hit. “Teenage Dirtbag” turned the band into a permanent fixture of 2000s radio and left most of their catalog largely unheard, the textbook one-hit wonder. Two-Man Giant Squid built “3 Hits” around that exact history: a fictional, self-described dirtbag band gets booked to open for Wheatus on a boat, their own agent demanding three hits, triple what actually made Wheatus famous in the first place.

The joke escalates from there, but the target is real. Two-Man Giant Squid have described the song as their tongue-in-cheek response to trying to build a career in an industry where streaming barely pays, AI is flooding the space, and everyone’s chasing a shrinking piece of a pie that stopped containing actual money a while ago. There’s an entire dedicated rant about Wheatus roughly two minutes and forty-five seconds in, timestamped by the band themselves, as if the joke needed its own footnote.

None of this is coming from a band imagining industry burnout from the outside. Two-Man Giant Squid are signed to Mint 400 Records out of Brooklyn, their debut album charted at #199 on national college and indie radio, and they’ve spent the past year working the same circuit their fictional dirtbags are complaining about, Mercury Lounge, Baby’s All Right, Arlene’s Grocery, a second appearance at New Colossus Festival. The satire in “3 Hits” reads like a status update as much as a joke.

Three hits is an absurd ask by design. That’s exactly what makes the joke land.