It’s Halloween 2006, and I’m standing in the middle of the Val Air Ballroom in Des Moines, Iowa. My bangs are side-swept and greasy, and I’m holding a newly purchased T-shirt that reads “FIGHT OFF YOUR DEMONS.” I’ve gone into the bathroom to check if my raccoon-style eyeliner looks intentionally smudged or just messy (the latter), but despite that, I’m feeling smug.
No one in this historic venue knows this band like I do. Of this, I am sure—even to this day. At that point, Brand New was still three weeks away from releasing their third full album, The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. For nearly a year, I’d been listening to a set of six leaked demos that I had downloaded and burned onto a cheap CD.
These six tracks, which Brand New later officially released, are where we see the band at their rawest: on the production side, but also in the lyrical development of these songs, many of which would wind up on Devil and God. Unlike many of my fellow concert-goers, I already know these songs. I’m 16 years old and I already know everything.
Of course, when lead vocalist Jesse Lacey years later issued a general apology for being “selfish, narcissistic, and insensitive in my past” after being publicly accused of preying on and grooming teenage girls, I realized that knowing someone through their lyrics does not tell you the full story.
But 2006 was an easy time to be a passionate fan of Brand New. Those songs on Devil and God marked the pivot point for a band that was growing up, which made me feel like I was growing up too. They were taking a giant step to leave their pop-punk contemporaries behind as their music became more complex and exploratory. Lacey, the band’s architect, frontman, and future pariah, began to reference poetry and scripture more than teenage crushes.
Devil and God was sonically a departure from Brand New’s earlier work, but thematically a natural evolution from their first two albums, Your Favorite Weapon and Deja Entendu. On Your Favorite Weapon, the emotions explored are childish, baldly misogynistic, and stated without tact. The strongest song on that album, “Seventy Times 7,” is about falling out with a childhood friend and former bandmate over a girl they each wanted to date.
In this song, Lacey says he hopes his former friend drives home drunk and thinks of him as the friend’s head “goes through the windshield.” In the early days, Lacey would sing this song through a megaphone.
In Deja Entendu, Lacey started to grapple with the vulnerability of interpersonal relationships. Multiple tracks in Brand New’s sophomore album explore the concept of sexual consent. On “Sic Transit Gloria … Glory Fades,” Lacey writes about a man being coerced into sex with a woman older than him. “He's holding back from telling her exactly what it really feels like,” Lacey says. “He is the lamb, she is the slaughter.” Later in the album, on “Me vs. Maradona vs. Elvis”—referencing two men who were known for their talent and not their morals—Lacey talks about taking advantage of a drunk woman.
“I got desperate desires and unadmirable plans,” he sings. “My tongue will taste of gin and malicious intent.”
By the time the band began work on the demos that would lead to Devil and God, Lacey was writing lyrics about wrestling with his own morality, or lack of it. The skeevy themes he presented on his first two albums turned into the basis of what seemed to be the start of a deeper reckoning for him. He used this record to explore his inadequacies and reflect on the way his depressive tendencies and selfishness had already destroyed his relationships. Fitting with the religious theme of the record, Devil and God is an act of confession. On “Jesus Christ,” a track released as a single, Lacey says his “bright is too slight to hold back all my dark.” On “Sowing Season,” he screams, “I am not your friend/I am just a man who knows how to feel.”
At the time of the album’s release, I was a depressed child who already had her own habit of volatile interpersonal relationships. On Devil and God, I heard a man discussing the consequences he had suffered due to his emotional dysfunction, and that made me feel less alone in my own tumult. I was sure, back then, that he was courageously excavating his own shortcomings. What I am able to see now is how he was centering himself in the pain he caused others.
Lacey’s work from 2006 on presents as relentlessly introspective, but is a false flag of emotional maturity and self-awareness. He passed off navel-gazing as soul-searching, disguised narcissism as growth. Constant self-inquiry seems like a noble pursuit, until the protagonist has burrowed so far into his own mind that he can’t see the real-life impact of his actions. Eventually, the people he’d harmed put those actions in front of his face. When Lacey admitted to taking advantage of his female fans, he said he had a sex addiction. His predatory behavior had remained beneath the public consciousness for roughly 15 years by that point.
At times, I’ve felt misled by the transparency Lacey displayed in his public work versus the real actions he did in private. I got rid of my beloved “FIGHT OFF YOUR DEMONS” shirt after realizing he wasn’t fighting that hard at all. Other times, I’ve pondered if I’d interpreted his work poorly. Weren’t his albums laying the groundwork for the letdown?
What does a woman do with her love of an artist who has admitted to harming teenage girls, ones whose interests and bad eyeliner made them just like me? Until the day that Lacey put out a meticulously worded statement about his actions toward women and many other people in his life, I was sure I would love Brand New for as long as I held the gift of hearing. Instead, I spent more than seven years trying to figure out how, if at all, that music fits into my life and what I looked past while obsessed with my own emotionality.
Now all that thinking must lead to a choice. Brand New is coming back with a national arena tour, with 24 scheduled dates across the United States. This return is bombastic and curious. Neither the band nor Lacey personally have broadly explained what changed, or why now. They’re not doing an album anniversary tour, and it’s unclear if they’ll be putting out new music. After seven years of silence, they’re just back, and it’s left to the fans to decide what to do about it.
It’s understood, though, that this is a controversial move. Multiple venues that are hosting Brand New turned off comments on their social media posts. Brand New will be on their stage, and feedback is not welcome.
Shortly after tickets went on sale for the reunion tour, another woman who knew Lacey when she was a teenager wrote on Medium about her own history with him. Her story lays out the way Lacey developed a close relationship with her when she was a teenager. She makes no allegations of him initiating a sexual relationship with her, but describes the way Lacey and his tour manager allowed many teenage girls to be around them in the mid-aughts. Her account is supported by specific recollections and photos with Lacey that spanned multiple years. The band's representatives didn't respond to a request for comment.
Nearly a week after tickets went on sale, Brand New’s upcoming shows have not sold out.
Brand New’s return to the stage comes at a time when many of the people who derided the Me Too movement as it happened are now eager to declare that we’re past all that now. Being disgraced doesn’t mean what it used to. Andrew Cuomo is running for mayor of New York City; Arcade Fire sells out arenas. Few people seem to care anymore. It’s hard not to suspect the band is counting on that.
Or maybe they’re counting on fans like me, who have felt drawn back to the albums we loved before we had to reevaluate what they meant. I’m far from a hardliner on my rejection of this band who has been a meaningful part of my life for over 20 years. Amongst my friends, I was the earliest to start listening to Brand New again. For a few months, I turned on Spotify private mode to listen to these records about a man grappling with whether or not his actions aligned with his values. I stopped toggling my decisions into secrecy and made a few friends uncomfortable by telling them that I was listening to Brand New regularly again.
It was easy, in a way, because nothing else was being asked of me. I didn’t have to think about what I would do if they played shows again, released a new album, whatever they are or may be doing now. The project was dead, I thought. Ultimately, it was just dormant.
In some ways, I felt entitled to welcome Brand New—or, more specifically, Jesse Lacey’s work—back into my life specifically because I had been a young woman in that scene. I’ve been leered at, propositioned, and treated as a decorative element in some troubled guy’s emotional landscape, so why shouldn’t I be able to listen to songs about doing just that?
The day that tickets went on sale, I thought of a verse from “Waste,” a song from Brand New’s 2017 album Science Fiction:
I'm hoping that in time, you can lay down
All this weight you've been carrying around and maybe one day
You'll find your way
To climb on up out of your grave
With the bits of you you managed to save
And for the last time
Yeah, you say good-bye
Lacey climbed out of his own grave, but in a cultural climate that would accept him back, he decided not to say goodbye. I am no longer 16 and I no longer think I know everything, but I do know I won’t be around to watch it.
