Although it will inevitably frustrate non-fans of Brand New, especially in the midst of incessant discussion surrounding the group’s finale Science Fiction, there is no better time to reflect back upon one of the most important indie-rock bands of the new millennium. I say it not as a hyperbolic exaggeration designed to garner interest, but just for what it is at this point – a pretty indisputable fact. If Science Fiction reaching Billboard’s #1 chart spot isn’t an indicator of the cult following that Brand New has accumulated, then I’m not quite sure what would serve as evidence of their far-reaching influence. This pair of articles will likely end up reading as a eulogy, although that isn’t really my intention. I’d prefer that it be taken as a retrospective – a look back at the band’s noteworthy accomplishments, defining moments, and an overall distillation of what it all meant. The band has made it clear that 2018 marks the resolution of this almost two-decade long run, and as dramatic as it sounds, it’s a void that a lot of listeners won’t know how to fill.
As far as I’m concerned, Brand New’s existence can be separated into two distinct eras. Certainly, their progression was more intricate and fluid than that, but in terms of splitting up their anthology, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me was the clear divider. I’m not going to talk much about that record here though, because it resides on the other side of the line. Before Brand New got all dark and twisted, they were a fairly upbeat – if overtly angry and maladjusted – group of pop-punkers. Your Favorite Weapon is now often viewed as the black sheep of their discography, mostly because of its relative immaturity both musically and lyrically. In 2017 it is easy to forget the debut’s context, though. At the time, the emotional bassist of Taking Back Sunday, Jesse Lacey, was publicly feuding with frontman Adam Lazzara because he hooked up with Jesse’s girlfriend (do bassists ever get respect?). The result of the betrayal, besides endless insults spewed, was Lacey leaving the band and starting Brand New. On their respective debuts, the bands exchanged musical jabs with “Seventy Times Seven” and “There’s No ‘I’ In Team”, and the words got pretty bitter. The fact that both bands had sizable footprints in the emo/pop-punk scene of the early 2000’s only intensified the feud, because fans likely had the opportunity to hear both songs back-to-back. If there’s anything that heats up a fight, it’s having an audience to fuel the fire. While these pop-punkers would go on to lead totally different-sounding projects, the 2001-2003 stretch felt like brothers disowning each other, and it’s a chasm that to this day hasn’t fully healed.
So Your Favorite Weapon felt more like an outlet for that anger than it did any sort of artistic statement or bid for direction. For pop-punk, a genre renowned for idolizing summer and wavy-haired girlfriends, the record was jarringly bitter. Even the poppiest, happiest sounding moments were underscored with cynicism. Jesse could be heard wishing death upon multiple people in his life, and criticizing just about everyone including himself. Below are but a couple appropriate excerpts:
Have another drink and drive yourself home
I hope there’s ice on all the roads
And you can think of me when you forget your seat belt
And again when your head goes through the windshield
-Seventy Times Seven
And even if her plane crashes tonight
She’ll find some way to disappoint me
By not burning in the wreckage
Or drowning at the bottom of the sea
-Jude Law and a Semester Abroad
Yikes. In reading lyrics like this from a young Lacey, it’s no wonder we ended up with an album like Daisy eight years later. Musically, Your Favorite Weapon was mostly kept afloat by the same set of vigorous pop-punk chords, the likes of which you’d hear from just about any band in that scene at the time. Brand New has never been all that innovative from an instrumental perspective, with most crediting their reputation as innovators to Lacey’s lyrical prowess and a songwriting sophistication that didn’t develop until the band’s latter days. Despite this, however, their debut still feels like an outlier – forgetting to explore its creative reaches while dwelling within its own drama. At the time, of course, nobody knew the difference because Brand New was nothing more than an exceptionally fun, bittersweet band hell-bent on defining the social struggles of high school and college.
Underneath the youthful pop-punks chords and death wishes, however, a storm was brewing. Regardless of what 80% of Your Favorite Weapon would lead you to believe, Brand New was actually an exceptionally mature band for their age. You could hear it in the quieter moments, when Lacey and company would essentially say “time-out” and catch their collective breaths with an acoustic number. It was gems like “The No Seatbelt Song” and “Soco Amaretto Lime” that saw Brand New’s future formula subtly coming into fruition, straying from the mindless three-chord progressions and placing Lacey’s vocals front-and-center. This approach forced Brand New to pay close attention to their lyrics, which had no place to hide in the center stage. It also caused them to re-emphasize their songwriting, because it’s much harder to craft a gripping, memorable acoustic ballad than it is to slightly alter a few pop-punk riffs and adjust the pace for a new song. Closing the curtains on Your Favorite Weapon, “Soco Amaretto Lime” still stands as one of Brand New’s best acoustic songs. The nostalgia is palpable, and for many fans it serves as an anthem of youth, reciting chants like ‘I’m gonna stay 18 forever’ and ‘You’re just jealous ’cause we’re young and in love.’
All of this foreshadowed an acoustically based, more mature future centered around clever songwriting…only nobody knew just how soon the future would come.
To say that Deja Entendu caught listeners off guard would be a vast understatement, as Brand New shed its juvenile identity seemingly overnight to become far more wise and sophisticated, commenting on life and love while making metaphors out of both. Gone were the dime-in-a-dozen pop-punk chord progressions with token interspersed ballads, replaced with an entire array of songwriting approaches that ranged from the muted “Tautou” to the rhythmic, bass-driven “Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t.” There was no rhyme or reason to Deja Entendu, but that was part of its beauty. It was made up of so many different raw directions that somehow worked together, as Lacey found himself screaming and shouting the choruses to the singles (“The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows”, “Sic Transit Gloria…Glory Fades”), crafting beautifully stripped down acoustic numbers (“The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot”, “Play Crack The Sky”), and finding an undeniable groove that just sort of wrote itself (“Jaws Theme Swimming”, “I Will Play My Game Beneath The Spin Light”). Lacey has openly admitted that unlike Your Favorite Weapon, “a lot of time and concentration went into making the album.”
It’s for all these reasons and more that Deja Entendu became the band’s first major hit album. It was more carefully and diversely crafted, and better thought out as a whole. The quantum leap in songwriting aptitude earned them increased exposure across the predominant music media of that era: from virtually uninterrupted airtime on MTV to making their television debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! (for a major throwback to the 2003 emo/pop-punk scene, check out the below video), and even having “The Quiet Things” qualify for the soundtrack to the NHL 2004 video game. . Both singles from Deja Entendu also charted inside the Top 40 of the UK Singles Chart, which was something of an accomplishment for an emo/pop-punk band (although not as much as it would be today). In short, this was the album that made Brand New, and it’s easy to imagine that without it we may not be talking about them today. Deja opened the doors to Brand New for an entire generation of fans.
Perhaps one of the more important and under-discussed elements of Deja Entendu was how it matured and progressed with its audience. Those who latched on to the overall vibe of Your Favorite Weapon likely found its successor all too appropriate two years later, in a time of one’s life where two years could have meant an awful lot of change: the progression from high school to college for instance, or perhaps from college to adulthood. On a personal level, maybe the end of a long-term relationship. It was an album where lines like “This is the reason you’re alone, this is the rise and the fall” carried more weight; where we better understood the desperation in Jesse’s voice and the subtle undertones of sexual frustration in “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis”; where we were just beginning to see how brilliant the lyrics were to ‘Play Crack The Sky’, a song that simultaneously deals with love, death, and relationships on a singular metaphorical level (‘What they call love is a risk, cause you will always get hit out of nowhere by some wave and end up on your own.’). It was an album that transitioned into maturity at the same time that most of the band’s target audience was being forced to do the same the same thing. There’s a powerful and unspoken connection that occurs when your mind links music with major life events, and Deja Entendu was just about the perfect soundtrack for the exciting but uncertain times that constitute ages 16 to 24.
What Brand New discovered next was that being an adult is even more trying.
Facing the mounting pressure of success, and being one of the “golden boys” of major musical outlets like MTV, placed a whole new weight upon their shoulders. They found themselves in a bidding war among record labels, eventually signing with Interscope for their third LP. Lacey all but cut off contact with the outside world, becoming increasingly nervous about the upcoming record. He is cited as saying, half-jokingly ‘…I’m getting depressed with all of the anxiety about the album, and they say I write my best stuff when I’m in that state. Great, I’ll spend the next six months all depressed and the rest of band will be excited, so that some good (material) might come out. And then I have to contend with how it’s received’. Then, his mental state took another dive when funerals became a numbingly common event in each band member’s life. Jesse Lacey, Vincent Accardi, Garrett Tierney, Brian Lane and Derrick Sherman each faced death and illness within their families during the recording of the album, a sequence of tragedies that would go on to define the band’s direction over the course of its remaining tenure.
As general depression and uneasiness within the band was reaching its peak in January 2006, the demos for the untitled third studio album then leaked in their entirety. Lacey was decidedly upset, going on record to state that ‘No one likes to show their creation in mid-process, and those songs weren’t done. They were like blueprints. Just the plan, right? It put me in a state where I was under the impression that those songs had been wasted or something—that we had to go and write new things because those had been heard.’ In an event that likely pushed back the release of the actual album, a defeated and dejected Lacey went back to the drawing board for LP3. Although we now know that a handful of those songs actually ended up making the album anyway, there are still a few to this day that remain in that leaked, demo state – a prospect that Jesse now openly regrets, calling their third album The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me “incomplete.”
The collection of nine leaked tracks has taken on numerous forms, initially titled as the Fight Off Your Demons songs by fans before they were officially re-released by the band in 2016 as Leaked Demos 2006. Then, a handful of the demos’ stronger tracks were re-worked later in the same year under an EP called 3 Demos, Reworked. Thus, the compilation is anything but officially-titled, although it has still endeared itself to a large portion of the fan base. The songs that ended up making their way onto The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me, even if in a varied form of the original, were “Sowing Season”, “Luca”, and “Battalions” (which would become “Archers”). On the other hand, “Good Man”, “1996”, “Brother’s Song”, “Missing You”, “Nobody Moves”, and “Fork and Knife” never found the tracklist of an official release, making their way into Brand New lore as some of the best songs that got away.
The leaked demos serve as an interesting sample size of where Brand New resided while they were midway between Deja Entendu and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. Whereas those albums obviously had very different tones and musical mindsets, the demos seem to find common ground. “Good Man” and “Brother’s Song” sound distinctly like acoustic Deja songs, while “Nobody Moves” leans far more heavily towards the bleak nature of TDAG. The above song sample, “Missing You” (originally “Untitled 04”) sounds like a brilliant departure from both, driven by an electronic undercurrent/backbeat the likes of which we’ve still never heard from Brand New. It’s interesting to speculate where the band might have taken TDAG and other future albums if these tracks never leaked. Regardless, it’s hard to complain about the output that followed these opening three projects. As we would come to find out, their real third LP would come to obliterate expectations, while redefining the band’s role in music and changing the perception of what so-called emo-punk bands are capable of.
But more on that later.
Brand New: Anthology Volume I:
