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After years under the radar, Gym Class Heroes has emerged as this year’s breakout band. And McCoy, 26, the charismatic rapper-singer and goofy star of the music video of the group’s huge single “Cupid’s Chokehold,” has gotten plenty of attention. He is the Pete Wentz of the quartet, more of a camera ham than guitarist Disashi Lumumba-Kasongo, bassist Eric Roberts and drummer Matt McGinley.
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The Heroes watched their profile rise after “Chokehold” hit the radio last year. The undeniably catchy song - which samples the hook of Supertramp’s oldie “Breakfast in America” - eventually reached No. 4 on Billboard’s “Hot 100.”

It first appeared on the band’s 2005 album, “The Papercut Chronicles,” and was featured again on the follow-up disc, “As Cruel as School Children,” first released in July 2006 and reissued several months later with “Chokehold” as an additional track.

When asked for his take on the song’s popularity, McCoy shrugs and says simply: “I don’t know. You have to ask the people that.”

“We try not to analyze our music too much,” he explains, munching on potato chips in the band’s trailer before a recent Manhattan concert. “Us not doing that kinda gives us the freedom to (make) the music we want as opposed to drawing ourselves in a certain category.”

The group, which blends diverse musical styles including hip-hop and emo-rock, began in the ’90s after McCoy and McGinley bonded during gym class at their high school in Geneva, N.Y., near Rochester in upstate’s scenic Finger Lakes region. They added Lumumba-Kasongo and Roberts a few years ago, and ultimately signed to Fall Out Boy bassist Wentz’s Decaydance Records, an imprint of Fueled By Ramen, which has more than a dozen youth-friendly bands on its roster.