Pre-order The Unnatural World here before the album hits stores on February 4, 2014.
New England’s Have A Nice Life has been a truly enigmatic band since its inception. It’s two primary members, Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, met while studying at UMass Amherst and began performing „oddly aggressive acoustic songs” at local coffee houses and open mics together. After graduating, Dan and Tim kept writing and minimally released a few demo recordings that continued to sail under the radar. Over the course of the next five years, these recordings were expanded upon and became Have A Nice Life‘s debut LP, Deathconsciousness (2008), which was initially pressed on 100 CD-R’s and expected to sell pretty casually. Over time, the album (which was accompanied by a dense, 100-page booklet) generated quite a bit of interest through online exposure and glowing fan reviews and eventually sold out its first pressing. Have A Nice Life kept printing copies, eventually on formal CD and vinyl formats on their own label, Enemies List, to keep up with the seemingly endless demand from an almost cult-like following.
Two years later, Have A Nice Life released an EP, Time Of Land, once again via Enemies List at their three only live shows in 2010. The curious were able to find a scavenger hunt link in the liner notes that led one intrepid soul to uncovering an additional „hidden track” buried deep in the woods of western Massachusetts a few months later. A digital copy of the record was (and still is) made available free online.
Since 2010, Have A Nice Life has remained relatively dormant – if you count being dormant as continuously re-pressing Deathconsciousness and penning their new full-length album, The Unnatural World. This eight-song, 35 minute LP is Have A Nice Life’s most monumental work yet; a colossally-sounding, perfectly-orchestrated example of industrial shoegaze. For the first time, the band has teamed up with San Francisco-based dark music label The Flenser to co-release the full-length alongside their own Enemies List. HANL commented, „We’re excited to be co-releasing the record with another label that shares our values and approach. Working with Flenser lets us keep things comfortable on our end, while also pressing enough copies to actually meet the need and not creating an artificially-inflated collector’s market, as happened with some of our past releases. It’s the best of both worlds.”
Have A Nice Life‘s The Unnatural World is scheduled for a February 4th, 2014 co-release via The Flenser & Enemies List. Also, be on the lookout for exclusive re-pressings of Deathconsciousness on vinyl coming in 2014 from The Flenser.