Finally! Basement returned in 2024 with their first US headlining shows in five years. I went to one; it was awesome, just pure, sweaty mayhem. They played zero songs from their last record, 2018’s Beside Myself, which I thought was hilarious. Now the beloved emo band is finally announcing that album’s followup, Wired, arriving in May on their old label Run For Cover. The title track and “Broken By Design” are out now.
Wired is produced by John Congleton (St. Vincent, Mannequin Pussy). Both Beside Myself and 2016’s Promise Everything were released through the WMG-owned Fueled By Ramen. About their hiatus, frontman Andrew Fisher says, “We were all left with a really weird, sour taste in our mouth after signing to a major label and having all these people control things.”
About the songs, he explains:
“WIRED” is about how sometimes it feels that we are set up to feel and behave in certain ways beyond our control. That no matter how hard you try to hide it, eventually it will come out — either by choice or by force. This song was almost lost — a few of us were into it, but it sort of lost traction for a bit. Then one day it cropped back up and we put it at the forefront of our minds and it ended up being one of my favorite songs to perform and record.
“Broken By Design” is about giving something your absolute best and realizing it’s destined to fail. Getting to the other side of the situation, looking back and deciding to do everything differently and feeling grateful for the opportunity to grow. We’ve all done a lot of work on getting better at talking to each other as friends and as band mates. Sometimes that’s an easy distinction — or rather, not a distinction at all. Other times, the lines are blurred and we lose track of who we are and why we do this. When I’m singing, “let’s go back to the start” I mean to when we did this purely for fun. For an excuse to see each other, to travel, to be creative, to express ourselves through music. We all feel so lucky to be in a position to still get to do this and this album and this song in particular, is us trying to go back to how it should be.
The title track comes with a video directed by Ashley Rommelrath, and “Broken By Design” is accompanied by one directed by Tas Wilson. Watch both below.
TRACKLIST:
01 “Time Waster”
02 “Wired”
03 “Deadweight”
04 “Broken By Design”
05 “Pick Up The Pieces”
06 “Embrace”
07 “Sever”
08 “The Way I Feel”
09 “Satisfy”
10 “Head Alight”
11 “Longshot”
12 “Summer’s End”
Wired is out 5/8 via Run For Cover. Pre-order it here.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source stereogum.com ’
