• Dale Reince
  • Braid

On Saturday Chicago-via-Champaign outfit Braid coheadline a show at Double Door with Smoking Popes; the influential second-wave emo band is preparing to release its first full-length in 16 years, No Coast, and Saturday’s set is the only show Braid has booked in the area before the album comes out. No Coast is a high-energy, matured take on emo, and its sleekly produced tunes are ready-made for summer evenings spent staring at the setting sun. It’s a great pop-rock album in the broadest sense of the word, and you can easily slip songs such as “No Coast” and “Bang” into a playlist full of indie powerhouses without throwing off any emo-averse listeners.

Here it says, “When asked if playing shows and recording records means Braid might officially be reforming, he’s firm: ‘The band’s not really back together.’”

Gotcha. I was reading the Entertainment Weekly story yesterday, and it said that you came up with the album title first.

It’s sort of like that double meaning because—I don’t know, maybe we feel like, in the midwest, in Chicago and Milwaukee, that there is sort of that work ethic that has guided us through not only our music lives, but our lives in general. So there is a double meaning, and you know, when we came up with the idea, everyone was like, “Oh yeah, Midwest!” And it’s like, sort of, but what we really want it to be is this sort of like, “Let’s not take it easy. Let’s challenge ourselves, let’s work hard at this as if this is our first album and this is the first time people are going to hear us,” as opposed to being like, “Eh, it’s a new Braid record. We’ll work on some songs and throw a bunch of like, jams or fillers in there.” We weren’t interested in that.

Well, with the last EP, Chris and I basically each took a song, then we wrote a song together, and then we did a cover. So with the last EP, we were all sort of—except the song “Universe or Worse” which, for better or worse, is almost like a jam, like I was mentioning for No Coast, and I don’t mean that as in like, “Yeah, that song’s a jam!” but like “Wow, is this a jam band?” sort of thing . . .

It definitely comes together. There are certain songs where you and Chris both have different singing styles and it felt like you blend together really well, in a way that I hadn’t heard on previous releases. You mentioned wanting to use lyrics that you’ve just had on backlogs for years. What songs are basically altered ideas that you kind of reimagined for Braid?