The New Pornographers to keep their name after drummer’s arrest for possession of child pornography

Vancouver indie-rock band the New Pornographers revealed they won’t be changing their name, despite drummer Joseph Seiders’s arrest for child pornography and related charges in April.

Seiders, who has been sentenced to three years in prison, was dropped from the group after his arrest. However, band leader A.C. Newman recently explained to Rolling Stone that after some back and forth, the group’s name would remain unchanged.

“The day [we found out], we were all like, ‘Obviously we can’t call ourselves the New Pornographers anymore.’ And then time passed,” Newman said.

“A few weeks later, I ran into my friend Zach Djanikian, who played on this record and Continue as a Guest, and I was talking about the band name possibly changing, and he had the first violent reaction, which was, ‘No! You can’t change your name. You worked too hard for that name,'” he explained. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’”

The band is named after The Pornographers, a Japanese film.

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“The more I thought about it, it just seemed like a bad-faith argument [for changing the name]. I named it after a Japanese movie by Shōhei Imamura [1966’s The Pornographers], so, should we go to the estate of Shōhei Imamura and say, ‘You should change the name of that movie because there was a band that named themselves after your movie, and this happened?'” Newman said.

“And from a purely pragmatic point of view, if we changed our name, people would go, ‘Who is this new band? Oh, it’s the New Pornographers, they changed their name. Why did they change their name? Because of this.’ Or, we were gonna change the spelling of the name,” he said. “‘Well, why did they change the spelling of the name? Because of this.’ It seemed to me, if you don’t want to talk about it, the best thing you could do was just continue with our name. I’m sure I’m going to be saying this 50 times in the next year.”

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When asked if the band would speak to Seiders again, Newman said he doesn’t think there’s anything he has to say to him.

“It f–king sucks that he dragged us down with him as much as he could,” he said.

The New Pornographers are gearing up to release a new album next year, and drummer Charley Drayton, who has performed with artists including Neil Young and the Rolling Stones, stepped in to record with the group.

However, Drayton will not join the group on its upcoming U.S. tour. Okkervil River’s Will Sheff will drum with the band as they perform across the states in April and May 2026.