Brand New

Wed 24th Mar, 2010 in Features

When the Long Island five-piece Brand New released their fourth album Daisy in September 2009, it had sasquatch-sized shoes to fill. It was hard imagine that the band could top its stellar releases The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me, Deja Entendu and Your Favourite Weapon, but Daisy managed to live up to, and perhaps surpass, expectations.

Even the band’s drummer, Brian Lane, finds it difficult to explain, “I don’t know how we do it, it’s kind of a magical thing at this point that we don’t really understand… Two of the songs we wrote and liked early on were Vices and Gasoline, they were the first ones that really stuck so we kind of built the record around them, it’s been the same thing for any record we have done.”

In a time where writing and recording records are done hastily, and every second wasted is a dollar a record company loses, Brand New take pride in their own lengthy recording process, “we never write and then go into the studio, we always write in the studio, we end up going into the studio and redoing songs for a long time, the overall process for Daisy took just over a year,” Lane explains. “It was also great because we were recording just around the corner from my house, no one is pressuring you because you only have a month in the studio, man, we definitely take our time with every record, but this is definitely one that we didn’t feel any pressure.”

When it came to album art for Daisy, Brand New chose a beautiful image of a lone fox in grass, “It’s very calming and I think that was one of the main reasons we picked that picture, which is kind of the opposite of the record, the record makes you feel kinda crazy.” Brain goes onto explain, that album art really is key to the experience of a record and it’s something to cherish, “I think in this day and age, having album art in general is a luxury, it’s something that we hope will stay the way it is, but I’m sure in the future it’s not going to be like that.”

Brian was quick to quash the whispers of a break-up and the possibility of Daisy being their final album. “We will definitely be recording, everything is a big questions mark right now, we want to record and we want to put out records, but we don’t know where we are going to do that, or how. There’s a lot of internal stuff that we’ve got to figure out before we end up doing stuff again. But I can assure you that we will be making new music. We’re going to take off after April and just record music and hang out and see what we come up with.”

The band has been absent from Australian shores since Big Day Out in January 2008, but one of the bands favourite gigs ever was a breathtaking two and a half hour set in Sydney back in 2007. “We played at The Roundhouse,” Lane reminisces, “that show was badass. I remember that one so well; it was a lot of fun. That show really sticks out a lot for us.”

Fans have waited with bated breath to watch another Brand New show for the past two years and the wait is almost over, “We are a band where we go up there, and we play whatever we feel like, there’s no specific setlist, we kind of go by the hair of our chin with everything.”

Catch Brand New on tour:
Thursday 25th March – Enmore Theatre, Sydney [lic a/a]
Saturday 27th March – The Tivoli, Brisbane [18+]
Sunday 28th March – Palace Theatre, Melbourne [18+] Sold out
Tuesday 30th March – HQ Complex, Adelaide [lic a/a]
Wednesday 31st March – Metropolis, Fremantle [18+]