Brand New Is The Best Band In The World
What do you love so much that you turn into an asshole when you talk about it?
Brand New is the best band in the world. Their music is imbued with raw emotion and lyrical deftness. They are capable of inescapable hook and delicate melody, but also of brute force and screaming rage. They make elemental rock and roll — guitars, bass, drums, vocals — but layered with texture. They are, categorically speaking, an alternative rock band of predictable sonic range, but their best work, like all good work, is not restricted by genre.
You, of course, do not believe that Brand New is the best band in the world, and you are wrong. This is okay. The exercise of identifying a best band in the world is not about objectively describing the world as it is. It is solely about describing yourself as you are. Your taste will change and your appetite will waver but you will always have an answer to the question of which band is the best in the world. It is a band you will come back to — a band you will defend at length, to significant self-embarrassment, because to hold your band as the best in the world is to fashion yourself as something distinct against the multitude.
Many of the bands that we now associate with the peak of certain genre signifiers — emo, post-hardcore, pop-punk — began in the New York metropolitan area in the late nineties and early aughts. Thursday and My Chemical Romance emerged from northern New Jersey. Coheed and Cambria played early gigs under the name Shabutie in Rockland County, New York. Taking Back Sunday, Glassjaw, and Brand New were all forged in the Platonic American suburbs of Long Island.
Brand New has had four core members since its founding. Jesse Lacey on guitar and lead vocals, Vincent Accardi on guitar, Garrett Tierney on bass, and Brian Lane on the drums. Lacey is handsome, in a bland and unobtrusive way, and plays his role as frontman well — he’s distant and enigmatic onstage, yet eloquent and forthcoming in interviews. During the band’s early years he wore his black hair in a faux-hawk, with the bangs swept up dramatically and a single wave of hair erect in the middle.
Nothing about this is unique. Brand New is, for better and for worse, an archetypal American band: four youngish white guys wearing jeans and making punk-inflected music with their friends in a cul-de-sac. But they’re the best band in the world, even though they’re just like any other band.
The band played with its contemporaries in Long Island and released its first album, Your Favorite Weapon, in 2001. Guitars crunched and stuttered, and Lacey produced whiny hooks about the grievances of being a jilted lover. It is catchy but not saccharine. The band toured incessantly, on a growing circuit of festivals and multi-headliner cross-country treks while writing the songs that would appear on their sophomore album, Deja Entendu, released in 2003.
“What happened to Brand New?” asked Kelefa Sanneh, reviewing their second album favorably in the New York Times when it was released. “In 2001 the band…released…a sharp but straightforward collection of breakup songs. Now the group has returned with…an extraordinary album full of riddles and rallying cries and contagious choruses,” Sanneh continued, noting not only the sense of musical tension and mood, but also the growing complexity of Lacey’s songwriting. The album has power-chord ear-worms, familiar from the band’s first effort, and it’s also layered with undulating guitar-play, noisy digressions, and even hints of rhythmic funk. To call it emo would unfairly compare it to other, less adventurous, music from the same time period, but it does pierce with that tell-tale angst.
The success of Deja put Brand New in a precarious position. The lead single, “The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows” received airplay on commercial rock radio, and an accompanying video aired on MTV2 and the Fuse Network. They flirted with mainstream popularity and were courted by major record labels, eventually signing with DreamWorks, which shortly thereafter became Interscope. After another punishing schedule of touring, they quietly recorded their third album, beset with incredibly high expectations.
In early 2006, a series of demos for the new album leaked onto Kazaa, Gnutella, and the torrent sites of the era, exposing the band’s creative process in naked incompletion. Lacey recoiled, the band went silent, and their website was cleaned of all hints at what might come next. By the summer of 2006, they had teased a new album, which they were ostensibly calling Fight Off Your Demons. They played a handful of shows; I attended one at Webster Hall, and watched the band perform a mix of old and new songs to a tangibly ravenous crowd.
Late in the set, during a sort of pre-encore segue, Lacey emerged alone, with an acoustic guitar, to placate the audience with a selection of deep cuts. Hordes of beefy bros overwhelmed the stage with distracting chants for their early favorites, especially “Soco Amaretto Lime,” the closing track off Your Favorite Weapon, a quiet but anthemic exclamation of teenage revelry with an unfortunate chorus that begins “We’re gonna stay eighteen forever / So we can stay like this forever.” Lacey, unprotected on stage, was noticeably uncomfortable, but the bros didn’t seem to care. They continued to holler. Lacey demurred, refusing to play the song, as well as another debut-album standout, “Jude Law And The Semester Abroad.”
In the face of these bros I began to question my own fandom. They were like eighties-movie caricatures of dimwitted jocks, adorned with backwards baseball caps. They broke with the rest of the crowd, who wore the tight jeans and thick-rimmed glasses. The songs they clamored for were, and are, favorites of mine too. I had chosen Brand New to remove myself from the very Abercrombie and Fitch-ness that the bros embodied. Brand New couldn’t be the best band in the world to bros like these, too, or else they couldn’t be the best band in the world for me.
So I rationalized: Lacey had grown up, and was signaling that it was time to put the childish emo away. Deja was a challenging album, capable of a foreboding heaviness, and the demos indicated that the new album would be the same if not more so. The bros weren’t ready for this. They wanted the warm embrace of the old Brand New, the familiar, less distinguished Brand New, while being wary of the new, less forgiving Brand New. They couldn’t think that Brand New was the best band in the world, I consoled myself, because their Brand New was not my Brand New, or even Jesse Lacey’s Brand New, but a Brand New that no longer existed, save for on recordings. I truly believed this distinction set me apart from the bros.
In November of 2006, Brand New finally released their third album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. It was dark in both lyrical content and sound. Lacey’s vocals were strained, jittery, and several songs included stark jumps from barely audible singing to an unintelligible mess of multi-tracked screaming. It was an album about mental illness, and death, and unsparing loneliness. It threw away any remaining mantle of Next Big Band in favor of something difficult, something that required digging into. I loved it; it confirmed my stance on Brand New’s greatness, and it made me more secure in the contrarian identity I had fashioned. Surely, the show-bros would not enjoy it.
Several of the leaked demos made it onto the final product, though many did not, including some fan favorites. Lacey has expressed regret over these omissions, and it is clear that he overreacted to the leak. If you took the best songs from the finished album, and the best of the demos, and recorded them as a sonic whole, you would have a truly fantastic album, as good as if not better than Deja.
In 2009, they released Daisy, another set of heavy, aggressive songs. But the leaked demos never faded out of earshot. Over the years, they appeared often in live sets and were released in studio-recorded versions as stand-alone singles and b-sides, finally a part of the official canon. In December of 2015, the band released an official version of them, titled simply Leaked Demos 2006, in a limited batch of cassette tapes. A second batch was released in January of 2016, around the ten-year anniversary of the leak.
When the cassettes arrived I saw images of the tapes on social media, proudly displayed by their owners as kitsch. “Look,” they said, in the performative language of social media, “at this reminder of what we were like when we were less mature.” These people had given up Brand New in the intervening ten years, leaving emo to be swept up in the trajectory of American popular music. Now they had returned, too easily. Surely these people could not claim Brand New was the best band in the world. Had they even listened to Daisy?
Once again I engaged in the requisite mental gymnastics: my fandom was pure, longstanding, not dusted off for a quick dopamine hit of likes and shares. My belief was evidence of a loyalty, an intellectual purity — a belief in the primacy and longevity of art above all else. Brand New was not something I took lightly, not something I took pleasure in only when it became cool to embrace one’s adolescence in the face of one’s adulthood.
You’ve probably called bullshit on all this, and you are right. I have been using Brand New as a petty attempt to uphold my individuality against the masses, which of course never existed. Maybe you’ve gone a step further — I am in fact worse than the other fans I have belittled. This too, is right. Their fandom is freer, devoid of the identity baggage inherent in my conception of best band in the world. By placing so much importance in Brand New — by Talmudically studying their growth and development as a band, and scrutinizing the motivations of other fans — I’ve become lost in a solipsistic self-examination, instead of celebrating the music.
I’m amenable to this argument. It is fundamentally correct. But there is something to be said for this sort of dickishness. It’s a dickishness we are all guilty of. Maybe for you it is a movie, or a book, or a coffee blend, or a programming language, or an opera, or digital-media outlet, or a sports franchise. It is something you devour and live with in such an intense way that it becomes impossible to consider the thing outside of yourself. Maybe you have found yourself in arguments over the bestness of this thing, found yourself defending laughable, untenable positions. Your reasons for doing this, like mine, are bad, but fair. What is it that you love so much you turn into an asshole when talking about it? Surely something. To deny it may make you a more agreeable person, more likable at parties, but certainly less yourself. Now why would you do that?
There are those who think that Modest Mouse is the best band in the world. I know some of them personally, and maybe you do, too. They will insist that The Moon & Antarctica is better than anything released since, from Modest Mouse or any other band. They will scoff at anything released after their breakout album, Good News For People Who Like Bad News; some will even scoff at this record. They look at the “fans” who sing along to “Float On” when it comes on the sound system in a bar and rehash their own internal arguments for why they are better, why they are right, why they are the only true carriers of the best-band-in-the-world flame. This is no different than what I do when it comes to Brand New.
I saw Brand New for a second time in the summer of 2014, on the grounds of a brewery in upstate New York, at a combined show with Modest Mouse. Both bands’ popular and commercial peaks came around 2004, emerging from a genre holding-pen into the broader zeitgeist, and both remain today, stronger than ever, still touring for fans going ten years strong. And while you likely associate Modest Mouse with the mass-consumption indie-rock of that time period, instead of Brand New’s emo contemporaries, the two are more similar than they are different. They both rely on idiosyncratic guitar work, and both Jesse Lacey and Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock are engaging, if erratic, frontmen, prone to cryptic lyrics and emotive vocal fireworks.
Brand New played an excellent show that day — a thoughtful selection of old and new songs, including about four track from Deja and none from Your Favorite Weapon. I attended the show with a group of friends and acquaintances who felt the way I do about the band. When they played “The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot”, we sang along, together, without embarrassment.
Brand New and Modest Mouse toured together this past summer, and they included a stop at Madison Square Garden. The announcement of the tour dates gave way to screengrabs of tickets purchased and plans made. The band tweeted a courier-font letter to its fans announcing that a new album planned for 2016 would be delayed, but offered a consolation of sorts. To mark the ten-year anniversary of Devil and God’s release, the band would play the album in its entirety at every show on their fall tour. This caused a similar outpouring of online histrionics and proclamations of resurgent fandom, and, in turn, similar hand-wringing on my part.
Do the thousands of people who retweeted that communiqué also believe that Brand New is the best band in the world, in the same fervent way that I do? Probably not. Their expression of fandom likely comes from a different place than mine, but they are entitled to their own belief in Brand New’s bestness, or sort-of bestness, or just quite-goodness. That doesn’t mean I didn’t roll my eyes, or that I won’t contend, rather loudly, at a social gathering, that Deja Entendu is the crowning cultural artifact of Bush-era alternative music.
Brand New is the best band in the world, and this is a key part of who I am. Please let me have this, and I will let you have your own best band. Though we may be incorrigible on occasion, we will be confident in knowing that there is at least one thing that makes us special, one thing we can truly call our own.
Martin Bergman lives in New York and is at work on novel.
