Unmade are a new five-piece spread between New York and Virginia, playing post-hardcore with a shoegaze streak and a strong pull towards the big alternative-rock records their members grew up on. There’s plenty of D.C. hardcore history in the line-up, including connections to Walk The Plank and Collider, but the band wanted to try something different this time. They were after a large, cavernous sound that could still carry a punk edge, and they’ve made room for acoustic guitars, piano and extra percussion alongside the usual gear.
Their four-song debut deals with some difficult personal territory. Brian’s lyrics go back over years of destructive habits, distractions, fears and the slow business of getting himself into a better place. He hadn’t made or recorded music for more than a decade before Unmade came along. Some of what he’s written here had been on his mind for years.
“Colossus” grew out of his attempts to look differently at the people, habits and surroundings that had shaped him. He’d been thinking about how easily someone can spend years repeating the same behaviour, convinced that whatever they’re used to is the only way to live. The bridge connecting Brooklyn and Staten Island gave him a familiar place to attach those thoughts.
“Colossus is a critique to that thinking and an encouragement to be open to change, open to alternatives, open to growth, open to dissent, open to evolving as a human.”
He remembers the bridge overlooking the kids growing up in Brooklyn, and still sees it as a reminder that there are other places to go and different ways to live. The lyrics are concerned with leaving behind things that stop people growing, including the temptation to hold on to anger and harmful ideas long after they’ve stopped doing anybody any good.
“Shadow Tip” comes from a rougher part of Brian’s own history. For years, he’d used nightlife and the constant promise of another big night out to keep himself distracted. There were people to see, events to attend and stories to come home with. The problem was what happened when all of that stopped being enough.
“For many years I surrendered myself to distractions, using nightlife (A “big night on the town”) as a crutch to occupy my time with the perception of good times, company, events, and lore which I prioritized over my own health.”
Eventually, he couldn’t keep up with that way of living. He had to decide whether to carry on pushing himself further into it or deal with the things he’d spent so long avoiding.
That experience gave the song two lines he’s especially attached to: “luck has no compass” and “luck has no bond”. Brian had been taking chances with his health and wasn’t comfortable leaving the consequences to luck anymore. He knew how quickly dangerous habits could lead to something much worse.
One of the shortest lines carries some of the hardest subject matter.
“Selfishly, a casualty”.
Brian connects those words directly to his own selfishness, self-harm and the possibility of where his behaviour could have led. There’s no need to read anything further into it than what he’s chosen to share. He’d reached a point where carrying on as before could have ended tragically, and he was trying to change that.
The third track, “Balancing Act“, addresses some of those same problems from a different position. Brian is speaking to somebody who’s repeating a harmful pattern and pleading with them to look at the damage they’re doing. Parts of that conversation are directed at himself. Others come from watching people around him struggle with similar behaviour.
Members of New Jersey hardcore band XL Bully joined Unmade for gang vocals, giving Brian one of his favourite moments on the record.
“Members of New Jersey’s XL Bully helped out with the gang vocals, and to have their power with the line “You’ve always known, that I see through you” really packs a punch for me and makes it a highlight of this EP.”
There’s another line he singles out when the intensity eases: “you’ve finally made your peace, but not enough to stop the bleeding.”
He’s talking about the ways people convince themselves they’re doing fine when the damage is still happening. It could be addiction, mental health or an everyday coping habit that has gradually become harmful. Simply making it through another day can begin to look like proof that everything is under control.
Brian has left room for people to hear their own experiences in these songs, although he wanted his personal history to be there too. He’d spent so long away from recording that finally having somewhere to put those words meant quite a bit to him.
“Even if this EP never saw the light of day, I found it empowering to have some art I created which represents a past, current, and hopefully future version of myself.”
For a band whose first songs are so concerned with change, Unmade took a surprisingly long time to get going. Guitarist Alex Reimer and Brian had wanted to play together for years. They met through a mutual friend from New Jersey while Brian was living around Washington D.C., and later worked together at Furnace Record Pressing.
The two got on well and kept talking about starting something. Then COVID happened, Brian moved back to New York, and both had their own bands and personal lives to deal with. They made another attempt with some friends, with Alex travelling up to New Jersey several times, but couldn’t agree on the musical direction. The plans went quiet again.
Things finally started coming together after Alex spent an evening hanging out with guitarist John Crum following a Fiddlehead show. They’d already discussed doing something outside the straight hardcore of Walk The Plank. Alex mentioned the band he’d been trying to start, and John was interested.
The two began writing at Alex’s house in Virginia, which gradually became Unmade’s unofficial headquarters. Drummer Ryan Burke turned up at just the right time. He’d previously played with John in Collider, a band with strong shoegaze influences, and had filled in for Walk The Plank on a Canadian tour roughly ten years earlier.
Alex had known all these people for a long time. He and Brian had worked together, Ryan already knew John’s playing, and the members had crossed paths through earlier bands. Once they had some songs taking shape, they brought in bassist Robert Mays, another friend they’d known and played with before.
The musical direction came partly from the records Alex and Brian had been watching and listening to together. They’d spent nights going through live videos and music videos by Smashing Pumpkins, Oasis, Quicksand, Sonic Youth and Hum. More recently, High Vis, Basement, One Step Closer and Fiddlehead had been getting plenty of attention.
Parts of Unmade give me a real Wolves Like Us flashback. I was absolutely hooked on that Norwegian band for years, especially around their “Late Love” album in 2011, just before their Fluff Fest appearance. There’s something in Unmade’s sound that takes me straight back to those days.
Those bands gave them some common ground as they started trying out ideas. Alex and John had wanted more space to experiment with different guitar sounds, and there was plenty of older alternative rock in their tastes alongside the hardcore they’d been playing for years.
There was still the small matter of everybody living miles apart.
With Brian in New York and the others scattered between Richmond and the Washington D.C. area, they were doing a good deal of writing through shared demos. John and Alex could work together in Virginia, then send things around and develop the songs between everyone else’s schedules.
Brian and Rob actually finished recording the debut before they’d ever met each other in person.
“Another crazy part of the story was that Brian and Rob did not meet until after the record was made. Because of everyone’s schedules and people living in diffferent places. So we really had to coordinate to make this.”
They took the songs to Ben Green of Fairweather, a friend who’d already recorded and worked with them through other bands and projects. Ben runs Ivakota in Washington D.C., where the instrumental sessions took place across April and May 2026.
Alex remembers having a lot of fun with the recording. The songs kept changing as they tried to make everything sound as big as they had imagined. Tambourines and maracas found their way into the arrangements, along with acoustic guitar and piano. Rob handled the piano and additional guitar parts, while Ben also contributed percussion.
“The recording process was very fun because the songs morphed in the studio, as we kept trying to make the sound be as large and cavernous as possible, but still have a punk edge.”
The vocals had to wait until a separate session in South River, New Jersey. Len Carmichael recorded Brian at Landmine Studios at Trax East 2.0 in May, with Adam Reich at secondBase involved in vocal pre-production. Ben mixed the finished record and co-produced it with the band. Ryan Smith handled mastering at Sterling Sound in Nashville that July.
“Return“, the final song on the 7”, was actually the first one Unmade completed together. Nobody was entirely sure what direction the band would take at that point. Brian was simply happy to be singing again.
“At the time we didn’t know the direction we were going, but I knew I was elated to finally have a voice over some music I really enjoyed.”
He began writing by asking himself, “What have you been up to?”
It was a fairly big question after more than ten years away from making music. During that time he’d gone through periods when he felt lost, struggled to recover from setbacks and was frightened of what he might discover if he seriously confronted his problems.
The lyrics move through those experiences in a fairly direct way. “I tried, I fucking failed” appears alongside “Rising sun we meet again” and “Standing tall, balance restored”. He’s looking at the things that went wrong and the work it took to begin feeling like himself again.
“What I found, instead, was a new lease on life, and a return not just to music, but a return to being myself for the first time in a very long time.”
Alex has been dealing with his own changes outside music. He recently became a father, and he and his wife have gone through difficult family losses. Other members of Unmade have married and experienced major changes in their lives over the last few years.
He still plays in Walk The Plank, although the band today is a very different proposition from the one he started back in 2010. Only Alex and Ian remain from the original line-up. They were young when they first met, and he remembers them being a little crazier back then.
These days the time spent travelling and playing music has a different value. Alex has been hoping to organise European gigs for Unmade in 2027, partly because he has so many good memories and friendships from earlier Walk The Plank tours.
Some of those friendships go back around eleven years, to the band’s first European trip. He still keeps in touch with people he met on the road, and coming back to see them has become one of his favourite reasons to tour.
“We just appreciate the opportunity and chance more to do it. Not that we didn’t before, but now as you get older and go through things, you really grow to appreciate those moments with your friends and bandmates travelling together.”
He also likes how playing in bands can bring people together from completely different places. That’s been the case for Unmade from the beginning, with everybody finding time to write, record and keep things going despite the distance.
“Which kind of is the Unmade story, connecting together in a common bond from a distance.”
The five members have also started their own label, Toro! Toro! Records, to release the 7″. Everybody has a share in it, and they wanted to make the decisions themselves.
“We simply decided, let’s do this our way and under our control.”
The release comes with cover artwork by Olivia Franke and design by Zach Jaeger, while Jessica Dell, Alex’s wife, handled the band photography.
They’ve already written more songs and are hoping to return to the studio in spring 2027. Playing live is also on the agenda, with shows still to be announced. Europe remains a possibility for next year, depending on what they can organise.
Unmade’s self-titled four-song 7″ arrives on 10 November 2026 through Toro! Toro! Records. “Colossus” and “Shadow Tip” are already streaming on the band’s Bandcamp, where the full record will be available on release day. Black vinyl copies can be pre-ordered through Unmade’s online store.
