Studio B at Electrical Audio has a two-story concrete live room with natural reverb the engineers build half the record around. Drums come back wider than they went in. Vocals catch the room’s tail. Or Does It Explode spent a week chasing it on Realities Disguised as Symbols, their fourth full-length and first for Middle-Man Records.
The Madison, Wisconsin band wrote Realities at the same time as last year’s Tales to Needed Outcomes. The two were always conceived as a pair. Tales was the quieter melodic one, recorded at Pachyderm in rural Minnesota, polish baked into the studio’s nature. Realities was meant to be its heavier, darker companion, and Chicago was the right place for it.
“The ethos of Steve Albini and the studio in general is to try and capture the band in their true element, as close as possible to how you would hear them live,” guitarist and vocalist Shawn Bass says. “That felt like the right approach for these songs.”
Jon San Paolo recorded and mixed. Dave Eck mastered. The vocals went through an AKG c12, which Bass calls the greatest sounding vocal mic the band has ever recorded with, including the one they used at Pachyderm.
Between takes, San Paolo shared stories: Neurosis recording in Studio A and the thunder of their drum tone, Sunn O))) shaking the building, Kim and Kelly Deal being genuinely wonderful humans down the hall. Dave Grohl came up. So did Foo Fighters and Russian Circles.
The walls are covered in notes to Steve and the hijinx of other bands. The halls are lined with art by Jay Ryan, who recorded there with his band Dianogah. The same general space had previously held Don Caballero, Neurosis, and The Saddest Landscape, among hundreds of others. “It was totally a humbling and inspiring space,” Bass says.
The shape of the record sits in a vein anyone who came up on Dischord catalogues will recognize on first listen. Angular rhythms that lock tight and then break open, vocals that move between sung and screamed without warning, dark undertones threaded under even the lighter stretches.
The Midwest emo twinkle from Tales hasn’t disappeared, it’s just underneath. Hook-based songs sit beside heavier ones. The Italian zine Rockambula called The Medium is the Message something that “could easily be a Dischord classic.”
Tone Madison ranked Tales to Needed Outcomes as one of the top 20 Madison releases of 2025, writing that Or Does It Explode “explore compositional subversion with confidence (and highly-technical instrumental ability), leading to a memorable listening experience that points to an enticing future.” Realities works the same vein from a heavier angle.
The record was not designed as a concept album, but the throughline was hard to miss once the pieces sat next to each other. The recurring themes track the encroaching authoritarianism and oligarchy taking hold in the USA, set against the backdrop of wars and humanitarian crises elsewhere. Social and political commentary through a humanistic lens, as has always been the case with this band.
“More so than perhaps since our civil war,” Bass says, “there is a sense that our democratic experiment is on the brink of failing.”
The songs map where the panic lives. “Do You Feel It Too?” sits with the discomfort that what’s happening now has happened many times before, in other places, to other people, but the closeness of it changes everything.
“Noise in the Quiet” grapples with how to find a path forward against people actively trying to destroy your existence.
“Lucky Even Dead” reads as a guidepost from those who came before.
“A Good Thing” offers a way out through relationships you can trust.
“Shelter” is the most directly personal song on the record. It’s about war and survivors’ guilt.
Vocalist Katya Pierce spent time in Ukraine and Russia and still has friends there. Pierce has since left the band, but their voice runs the length of Realities.
Recording was cathartic, Bass says, in part because the album sat them down inside everything they’d been watching from the outside.
Artwork and layout were done by Shawn Bass and Katya Pierce together. Photos by Landau Creative and Chris and Ali Wade.
Realities Disguised as Symbols is out June 18th on Middle-Man Records, on vinyl, CD, Bandcamp, and streaming.
“We are grateful to Edie Quinn and Middle Man Records for putting this out,” Bass says. The band played with Quinn’s Coma Regalia last fall, and Bass has been a fan of Coma Regalia for years. Middle Man’s catalogue runs through Snag, Closer, Overo, Hundreds of AU, Senza, Respire, and Coma Regalia themselves, among others. “We’re humbled to be in that company.”
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A four-day release mini-tour follows the drop:
June 18, Milwaukee, Cactus Club
June 19, Madison, Gamma Ray
June 20, Minneapolis, Zhora Darling
June 21, Chicago, Burlington Bar
“It’s a dangerous time in the USA,” Bass says. “One of the things that we can do is work to create a community of understanding and shared experience.”
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