What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?

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What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?
Kat Bike

Gym Class Heroes were five years ahead of their time. That’s not nostalgia talking, it’s a claim backed by Pete Wentz, the man who signed them, and by the generation of genre-fluid artists who followed in their wake. Formed by two 14-year-olds in a high school gym class in Geneva, New York, in 1997, the band fused hip-hop, punk, funk, and pop into a sound that radio programmers literally could not categorize.

They scored two #4 Billboard Hot 100 hits, won an MTV Video Music Award, and helped launch the careers of both Katy Perry and Bruno Mars, all while their frontman, Travis McCoy, was battling an opioid addiction that nearly killed him. After a decade of hiatuses, the band officially reunited in 2023 and announced their first new album in 14 years, due in 2026.

Born in gym class, built on birthday parties (What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?)

The origin story is almost too perfect to be real. Travis Lazarus McCoy and drummer Matt McGinley became friends in their ninth-grade physical education class at Geneva High School in upstate New York in 1997. Both were drummers, but when McCoy crashed a birthday party where McGinley’s instrumental group was performing and grabbed the microphone to freestyle, the dynamic shifted permanently. Within a week, guitarist Milo Bonacci and bassist Ryan Geise had joined, and Gym Class Heroes existed.

Their early years were a grind of college parties, BBQ cookouts, and opening for death metal bands, anyone who would give them a stage. McCoy, whose mother was Irish and Native American and whose father was Haitian, had grown up straddling worlds. He listened to Snapcase and Earth Crisis alongside Company Flow and the Arsonists, traveled from Geneva to Manhattan to battle rap at Fat Beats, and won MTV’s Direct Effect MC Battle around 2002. The band self-released three independent projects, Hed Candy (1999), Greasy Kid Stuff (2000), and …For the Kids (2001), before catching the attention of the Fueled by Ramen ecosystem.

The pivotal moment came when Patrick Stump of Fall Out Boy heard their song “Taxi Driver,” which referenced emo and pop-punk bands by name, and flagged it for his bandmate Pete Wentz. Wentz signed them to his new Decaydance Records imprint, making Gym Class Heroes one of its founding acts alongside Panic! at the Disco.

As Wentz later recalled: “When we signed Gym Class Heroes, it was like, ‘Where does this fit? This literally doesn’t fit anywhere.’ We would play it for alternative radio and they were like: ‘This is not alternative, this is hip-hop.’ We’d play it for pop or hip-hop radio and they were like, ‘This doesn’t fit, this is a live band.’ In some ways it felt like we were five years early.”

McCoy saw the Decaydance vision clearly through a hip-hop lens: “You got Death Row, you got G-Unit. Pete wanted the pop-punk, emo version of that. I saw the vision and I was completely with it.”

Two commercial peaks and a signature sound nobody could replicate (What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?)

Gym Class Heroes’ commercial arc came in two distinct waves. The first arrived with their major-label debut The Papercut Chronicles (February 2005, Fueled by Ramen), which peaked modestly at #128 on the Billboard 200 but built the underground following that would fuel their explosion. That explosion came with As Cruel as School Children (July 2006), produced by S*A*M and Sluggo with co-production from Patrick Stump, who also sang the hooks on its two biggest singles.

“Cupid’s Chokehold / Breakfast in America” was an accident of genius. McCoy’s friend played Supertramp’s 1979 classic “Breakfast in America” and the band jammed over it, writing the song in a single session for under $300 in three to four hours. Patrick Stump sang the interpolated chorus. The label had planned “The Queen and I” as the lead single, but Milwaukee radio station WXSS started spinning “Cupid’s Chokehold” in May 2006 and the song took on a life of its own, eventually peaking at #4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and hitting #1 on the Pop Songs chart.

It reached #3 in the UK and Canada. “Clothes Off!!,” another Stump-assisted hook reimagining Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off,” peaked at #46 on the Hot 100 but hit #5 in the UK. The album went RIAA Gold, selling over 470,000 copies, and the band won the 2007 MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist.

Their second peak was even more striking. The Papercut Chronicles II (November 2011) debuted at only #54 on the Billboard 200, but its lead single “Stereo Hearts” featuring Adam Levine became a phenomenon peaking at #4 on the Hot 100, spending 37 weeks on the chart, going #1 on Pop Songs for four consecutive weeks, and eventually earning 6x Platinum RIAA certification. The song has surpassed 1 billion views on YouTube and 1 billion streams on Spotify.

Adam Levine’s involvement was serendipitous, he happened to be at the studio during rehearsal and spontaneously jumped in. The album’s other singles also performed strongly: “Ass Back Home” (featuring Neon Hitch) hit #12 on the Hot 100 and went #1 in Australia, while “The Fighter” (featuring Ryan Tedder) reached #25.

Between these peaks, The Quilt (September 2008) debuted at a career-high #14 on the Billboard 200 but produced no breakout singles comparable to their earlier hits, despite an ambitious guest roster that included Daryl Hall, Busta Rhymes, Lil Wayne, Estelle, and The-Dream. Patrick Stump produced the majority of the record, and the band co-headlined the 2008 Warped Tour with Paramore, but the album sold approximately 108,000 copies, solid but not the breakthrough the label hoped for.

What made Gym Class Heroes distinctive was irreducible. AllMusic called them a “unique alternative-funk-rap outfit” that melded rap, rock, R&B, and funk into a cohesive whole. Billboard’s Susan Visakowitz wrote that they combined “skillful rhyme slinging with sturdy pop hooks: a winning combination that ensures far-reaching accessibility.” McCoy’s own description was characteristically blunt: “We’ve been the proverbial sore thumb our entire career. Even before we got signed to Fueled by Ramen, we were playing shows with death metal and hardcore bands and whoever would let us play with them. I wouldn’t even consider us a hip-hop band.”

Their touring résumé reflected this chameleon quality. They were the only hip-hop act on Warped Tour in 2005 and 2006, opened for Gwen Stefani on The Sweet Escape Tour in 2007, co-headlined with The Roots for a month in 2008, and joined Lil Wayne’s I Am Music Tour that same year. McCoy drew on everything from Prince and Hall & Oates to the Dillinger Escape Plan and Meshuggah, a constellation of influences no other frontman could plausibly claim.

The unraveling: addiction, heartbreak, and a genre left behind (What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?)

The factors that drove Gym Class Heroes off the mainstream radar were both personal and structural, and they reinforced each other with devastating efficiency.

McCoy’s opioid addiction began when he tore his ACL and MCL and was prescribed OxyContin. As he recounted on R.A. The Rugged Man’s podcast: “They put me on OxyContin. And they sent me home with a prescription full… The first time I ran out, I got hella sick withdrawals.” The $30-per-pill cost pushed him to heroin as a cheaper alternative. He became what he called a “functioning addict,” performing onstage while high, including, by his own admission, the 2011 American Music Awards performance of “Stereo Hearts” with Adam Levine, which he doesn’t remember.

His cousin Isaiah’s suicide in November 2007 deepened the spiral. McCoy told interviewers he “dove in face-first and started snorting my brains out.” In a 2008 Blender interview, he revealed multiple suicide attempts: “Two or three years ago, I had a crazy falling-out with a girlfriend and I grabbed a cocktail of pharmaceuticals and drowned them with alcohol. I woke up in the hospital cuffed to a bed.” He was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

His high-profile relationship with Katy Perry, who appeared in the “Cupid’s Chokehold” video before she was famous and dated McCoy from roughly 2007 to 2009 collapsed under the weight of his addiction. McCoy was devastatingly candid on VH1’s Behind the Music in 2012: “She wasn’t stupid… She knew when I was f**ked up. I chose drugs over our relationship.” Perry ended it via email in 2009, and McCoy later said: “Someone that you are ready to spend the rest of your life with sends you a f**king email just sh*tting on your whole parade. It destroyed me.” Perry reportedly channeled the experience into “Circle the Drain” on Teenage Dream.

Professionally, McCoy’s solo album Lazarus (June 2010) produced one massive hit, “Billionaire” featuring Bruno Mars, which peaked at #4 on the Hot 100 and was certified 4x Platinum, but the album itself debuted at only #25 with 15,000 first-week copies, and follow-up singles flopped. The solo venture pulled McCoy’s attention from the band without establishing a sustainable alternative career.

Meanwhile, the musical landscape was shifting beneath them. By 2012-2013, EDM and pure pop/hip-hop had eclipsed the genre-blending space Gym Class Heroes occupied. Their inability to fit any single radio format, the very quality that made them special became an insurmountable commercial liability. The band entered a quiet hiatus after The Papercut Chronicles II‘s promotional cycle ended in late 2012, with no dramatic announcement. A brief 2018 reunion (opening for 311 and The Offspring) was followed by another abrupt split in 2019, when they pulled out of a planned Warped Tour 25th Anniversary appearance. McCoy told interviewers that year that the band was “still on a hiatus, with an uncertain duration.”

The comeback nobody expected (What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?)

McCoy achieved sobriety from opioids around 2013. He credits his niece Farrah’s birth as a turning point: “It took one morning waking up and just going to my medicine cabinet and throwing my pills away and saying, like, ‘I’m choosing to live.’ I never thought I’d see 30, bro. Real talk.” He married Jessica Phillips in November 2022 and released Never Slept Better on Hopeless Records in July 2022, a 17-track solo album widely praised as the most honest work of his career, though it failed to chart.

The real surprise came in October 2022, when Gym Class Heroes were announced on the lineup for the When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas. They performed in 2023, toured with All Time Low on “The Sound of Letting Go on Tour” that fall, and undertook a headline tour of Australia and New Zealand in March 2024. Activity has steadily increased: 10 shows in 2023, 9 in 2024, and a growing 2025 slate that includes Riot Fest in Chicago (September 2025) and Vans Warped Tour Orlando (November 2025).

On August 30, 2025, at a Savannah Bananas game at PNC Park in Pittsburgh, McCoy made it official: Gym Class Heroes will release their first new album in 14 years in 2026. Days later, on the CD Burners podcast, he said: “I couldn’t be more ecstatic about this new music, and I think you guys will be too.” His Instagram declared: “GYM CLASS IS OFFICIALLY BACK IN SESSION!!!!” The current lineup features McCoy, McGinley, guitarist Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo, bassist Ralfy Valencia (who replaced Eric Roberts), and keyboardist/guitarist Tyler Pursel.

In April 2025, the four original members, McCoy, McGinley, Bonacci, and Geise were inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame at Kodak Hall at the Eastman Theater. McCoy’s message was simple: “Thirty years later it is beyond amazing to be recognized. It’s a blessing and an honor.”

Five years early: a legacy that aged into relevance (What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?)

Gym Class Heroes’ cultural significance has grown substantially in retrospect. Kerrang! stated definitively in 2022 that “it’s the music he started making with Gym Class Heroes in the late-’90s that paved the way for much of what the alternative artists of today do so well,” citing Enter Shikari, Bring Me the Horizon, twenty one pilots, and Turnstile as inheritors of their genre-fluid approach. Their influence threads through the emo-rap and SoundCloud movements artists like Juice WRLD, XXXTentacion, and Post Malone operate in a space Gym Class Heroes helped create.

Joe Mulherin of nothing,nowhere., an emo rapper signed to Wentz’s DCD2 label (Decaydance’s successor), was explicit about the lineage: “I remember hearing Gym Class for the first time and being like, ‘What? This is a thing?’ I grew up making beats for my friends who rap and I was also in bands, so I was like, so there is space for this. They made me believe.“

McCoy’s own influence stretched well beyond his band. He signed a then-unknown Tyga to his BatSquad label in 2007. His collaboration with Bruno Mars on “Billionaire” in 2010 gave Mars crucial early mainstream exposure before “Just the Way You Are” made him a superstar. The “Cupid’s Chokehold” video featured Katy Perry before the world knew her name. He collaborated with Sia (“Golden,” Platinum in Australia), Brendon Urie, Jason Mraz, Olly Murs, and T-Pain across a career that kept intersecting with artists at pivotal moments.

They were the band that didn’t fit anywhere and, in not fitting, proved that the categories themselves were obsolete. As McCoy told the Chicago Tribune in 2011: “I feel Gym Class Heroes was part of the forefront of the genre.” Wentz’s assessment that they were “five years early” has been vindicated by a decade of genre-blurring that became the norm rather than the exception.

Conclusion For What Happened To Gym Class Heroes?

Gym Class Heroes’ story is one of improbable origins, spectacular commercial highs, devastating personal lows, and a slow-burning cultural vindication. Two songs that peaked at #4 on the Hot 100, a combined 6x Platinum certification on “Stereo Hearts” alone, and an MTV VMA barely scratch the surface of a band whose real legacy is structural: they demonstrated that hip-hop, punk, and pop could coexist not just in a playlist but in a single song, performed by a single band, in front of audiences who had never imagined such a thing was possible.

McCoy’s survival, through opioid addiction, suicide attempts, heartbreak, and an industry that didn’t know what to do with him, is itself a narrative worth telling. Now sober, married, inducted into a Hall of Fame, and recording new music at 43, he has outlasted the genre boundaries that once confined him. The 2026 album will test whether the world has finally caught up to where Gym Class Heroes were all along.

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George Millington
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