An imaginary world that is constantly reconciled with reality in a new and different way: this is how Vundabar's compass of content could be described in a nutshell. The trio from Boston/Massachusetts around singer, guitarist and songwriter Brandon Hagen has relied exclusively on itself for these exciting excursions into the worlds between truthfulness and perception. All five albums that have been released since the band's founding in 2013 have been released by Vundabar on their own label Gawk Records, and with the exception of changing sound engineers, they have also always handled the production of their albums themselves. On those, you'll find a mixture of indie and art rock, post-punk and surf, always interwoven with a delicate feeling for transcendent pop moments, always flanking the respective song content. Their fifth album, "Devil for the Fire," released April 15, now offers their most open repertoire of sonic variety, showcasing both the most tender and brute songs of their career. In the wake of this album, the band is also coming to Europe in late fall of this year and will also play three Germany shows in Hamburg, Berlin and Cologne between November 1 and 3.
If you ask Brandon Hagen why he already had an exuberant talent as a teenager to oscillate between reality and fantasy in his perception of the world, he points to his ankle. Since birth, it has had a rare deformity that earned him a lot of ridicule and scorn from his peers as a child and young teenager. To live better with these reactions, he always invented new stories about how this peculiarity came about: Sometimes he described it as an injury resulting from a heroic deed in which he rescued children from a burning house, then again it was the remnant of a fight for life and death with an anaconda. All these stories proved to him one thing above all: the world is never just what you see - it can and will always be so much more.
Then, when he started to get more serious about writing songs at the age of 15 or 16, he used this experience to give his imagination free rein in exploring and describing actual events. Where his first songs - collected on the two albums "Antics" (2013) and "Gawk" (2015) - were still strongly ego-centered in content as a result of the typical self-reflection of a teenager and dealt with teenage angst, defining one's own personality and locating oneself in the (post)modern world, his lyrics became more universal from album to album. "Smell Smoke" (2018), for example, shifted the focus to a fictional story about how nearly impossible it is to have a seriously ill person recover without remarkable wealth in the U.S. healthcare system. While behind "Either Light" (2020) was a lyrical meditation on death and the psychological and social consequences of the bereaved.
The current album "Devil for the Fire" now proves to be yet another expanded look at the big picture, at the boundaries between reality and virtuality, perception and fact, the power of destruction and the power of interpersonal emotions. Analogous to the violence of these themes, the music that Hagen performs together with bassist Zack Abramo and drummer Drew McDonald also turns out to be extremely multifaceted and heterogeneous. The band's exploration of reality and virtuality recently proved to be a "self-fulfilling prophecy": the band, which until then had been known mainly in well-informed indie circles, was left speechless as "Alien Blues," a song from their second album "Gawk," magically became a viral hit of rare power. Within a few weeks, thousands of song adaptations were uploaded to TikTok; on Spotify alone, it has over 150 million streams, and across all platforms, it's now close to half a million. So virtuality is currently helping Vundabar to achieve the success in reality that this band deserves.