Remaining relevant to listeners, critics and the industry is a goal for many artists who’ve been performing for decades. For Shudder to Think, the influential DC-founded post-hardcore band, staying relevant to themselves was even more crucial.
“This reunion now is ultimately really gratifying, but I don’t think it would have worked had we not decided intently to make new music to give us purpose,” says drummer Adam Wade. “I don’t think we would have been happy just playing the old songs. I mean, we love playing the old stuff and it’s been really fun, but that wouldn’t have been enough for us right now.”
Shudder formed in 1986, split in 1998 and reconvened sporadically over the years to play shows. The longest hiatus lasted 12 years and ended in 2024 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their major label debut album, “Pony Express Record.”
This September, the band released an EP, “Who Sent You,” their first multi-song project in nearly three decades. If Shudder fans weren’t expecting new songs, they were not alone.
“It was sort of a surprise,” says singer Craig Wedren. “When we got together, we weren’t sure what was going to happen. And you know, my wife is in The Cardigans, and they continue and they do stuff, and they don’t have any new material. I guess for some folks it works. It works pretty well to just sort of keep honing the old stuff and performing it, like the Texas is the Reason guys who we’ve hung a little bit with lately and who were kind enough to loan their rehearsal space to us last time. They haven’t recorded new stuff either. So I guess I can see that. But for us, we get bored quickly, and I think we want sort of newness, and I think the force with which the new material came out was very strong and again, really surprising.”
The EP is comprised of three songs: the title track, “Release the Ball” and a take on Depeche Mode’s “Something to Do” that steers the original in a direction that owes as much to Shudder’s own sound as Depeche Mode’s synth pop sonics.
The fresh songs, Wedren says, also added vitality to the group’s recent concerts, including at Bowery Ballroom, Philadelphia’s First Unitarian Church and Hollywood Forever Cemetery in September.
“I think it sort of buffers the energy around the shows that we’re doing, and we’re able to transmit that sort of joy and that feeling into this new material that we recorded kind of pretty much live,” he says. “I mean, we did a few sort of simple overdubs, but we kind of had a bit of a dogmatic thing where we wanted to keep it pretty simple in terms of overdubs and keep it pretty direct so that we can execute everything live, which is sort of an old-school thing. It feels really good.”
The band has also finished recording a full LP, which like the EP will be released on Dischord Records, the DC indie label owned by Minor Threat and Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye that put out Shudder’s music before the band signed with Epic for “Pony Express Record” and its follow-up, “50,000 B.C.”
“I think the biggest difference with ‘Pony Express’ and ’50,000 B.C.’ is I think there just was pressure to deliver something, like there’s an expectation, because it’s freaking Sony Music, and there’s a truck of money and like, ‘OK, make something amazing,’ you know?” says Wade, who cofounded the seminal DC band Jawbox before joining Shudder. “And I know we all put pressure on ourselves, an intense amount of pressure on ourselves, [producer] Ted Niceley had pressure on him, for better or worse, and in some ways it worked. It produced something amazing. In other ways, it kind of drove us crazy.”
Joining Wedren and Wade in the current lineup are fellow “Pony Express Record” era guitarist Nathan Larson as well as guitarist Clint Walsh and bassist Jherek Bischoff.
When Shudder wasn’t making new music, its members were.
Before its first hiatus, the group made the soundtrack to “First Love, Last Rites,” with guest vocalists including Jeff Buckley, Liz Phair and Bill Corgan, and contributed to the films “High Art” and “Velvet Goldmine.” After Shudder split, Wedren composed for “Yellowjackets,” “Wet Hot American Summer,” “The School of Rock” and “Lauren Canyon,” while Larson would work on “Our Idiot Brother,” “The Skeleton Twins,” “Juliet, Naked” and the “High Fidelity” TV series.
“We have all stayed kind of nimble with playing,” Wedren says. “I mean, I don’t know whether or not it’s the specific kind of like loud rock music that we’re doing, but all of us sort of kept our hands in playing music on some level or being related to sound and being aware of what’s going on in the world. We’re musicians and we kind of stayed practicing. We can play with stuff now in a more facile kind of way.
“We really went through a process. Adam will attest to this, when we recorded ‘Pony Express Record,’ which was a really brutal, very grueling kind of ‘90s play-to-the click experience, that was really hard. It was definitely a kind of soul-crushing thing that was happening with a lot of bands. So we were able to just not have to do that [for the new EP and LP. It felt good, we didn’t beat ourselves up, and we were able to do stuff without a ton of editing.”
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