listening to: deja entendu & the devil and god are raging inside me

[sword_logic]

here's a fact about me that, if you didn't already know it, i think really draws a complete picture of me: i joined tumblr in early 2010 and stayed very firmly on the Hipster Side for quite a while. my stray to the Fandom Side was honestly very gradual; i still follow aesthetic photography blogs, and i lost touch with the last of the old guard of fandom friends that overlapped with hipster friends only in the great purge of 2018.

here's another fact: i just listened to brand new for the very first time today.

yet another fact: i tip into oversaturation really easily when it comes to seeing fandoms, etc. that i'm not into all over the place, where i go from neutral to "if i see [thing] again i'm going to open my window and scream" in the span of one post (thank you, blacklist; sorry, FFXIV friends). which is all to say, i didn't bother listening to brand new when they were all hip and happening because i was so fucking annoyed at seeing them absolutely fucking EVERYWHERE, ALL THE TIME, and i swear to god, i would've told you that i hate brand new if someone had asked me in 2011 or 2012.

lately i've been thinking a lot about nostalgia and about the things i feel nostalgic about. especially right now, it's hard not to feel nostalgic about the 2012-2014 era, even though there's plenty about it that was really shitty; it's just easy right now to think back on anything that was any different in any way and remember it as better. i think a lot of different corners of the online world are feeling this; there's been a number of articles about the return of indie sleaze, the resurgence of twilight fandom but in kind of a rose-tinted glasses "this thing sucked but i loved it" way, and more that i know i'm forgetting. for me, personally, i've been thinking a lot about tattoos—present, upcoming, future—and that's very tied to the 2012ish era for me in a lot of ways. tattoos, nostalgia, emo kids, hipsters, indie sleaze, whatever, it all came together with me giving brand new a listen while at work today.

and you know what? they're good! imagine that.

deja entendu: this was a NOSTALGIA BOMB. i completely understand why and how this hit the way it did in the early and mid 00s, and kept its momentum through the 2010s. it's a very solid album with a sound that makes it clear the band knew what they were going for, and hit the target. that being said, i was very unimpressed lyrically (edgy songs about sex and cheating... not very groundbreaking in 2025) and the lead singer leaned too hard into the whiny emo croon at too many points. great, but in the way that many classics are great: you can see what people took from this and improved.

the devil and god are raging within me: and speaking of improvement! the opening song is, i think, my favorite—the mood is immediately different and more polished. now i could hear the band coming into itself, which is a really cool thing to hear (i actually thought deja entendu was released after TDAGARIM, and wow, seeing that acronym brings me right back to my dashboard in 2012). i also really liked limousine and welcome to bangkok; i love a good instrumental, but i wish i'd heard more of the latter's (heavier) sound in other songs. i got so fucking sick of seeing this album cover everywhere all the time, but on a revisit, it is really incredibly cool, and it's definitely really iconic.

it was really funny to listen to both of these albums and be like, oh, that's the lyric that i saw on EVERY single fucking aesthetic post from 2010 to 2014. brand new really just kind of passed me by when i was listening to the broader emo music umbrella; in high school and early college, i mostly ran in circles that listened to the decidedly more post-hardcore/screamo end of things and brand new, now that i've listened to two albums, would not have been heavy enough to pass the pretentiousness litmus test. however, right now, i really liked devil and god—i actually started listening to it over again after i finished, but didn't make it more than a minute in because i got pulled into a conversation and then had other stuff to do. i definitely want to listen to their last two albums, but i'm not terribly interested in their first studio release.

in sum: i apologize, hipster tumblr. i was not familiar with brand new's game.

Comments

[larissa]

as someone who's known you as long as i have, this is a very funny post.

i am not familiar with this band at all! never heard of them. i'll have to give them a try once i escape the playlist i've been slowly whittling down for the past two weeks.

[sword_logic]

LMAO..... yeah when i wrote this up, i was like, well, there's at least one person out there to whom that "if" might not apply to.

you might like the second album! it's very much 00s rock-y rock, so if you have that particular itch, this might scratch it. i ended up listening to it twice over again yesterday at work, i'm really enjoying it.