Brand New walked into Reflection Sound Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina in early 2003 carrying more baggage than most bands accumulate in a career. Jesse Lacey had co-founded Taking Back Sunday, left after a personal rupture with guitarist John Nolan, formed Brand New, and written "Seventy Times 7" about the whole mess on their debut Your Favorite Weapon. Nolan fired back with "There's No 'I' in Team." The feud was public, it was Long Island emo scripture, and it had made Brand New famous for the wrong reasons. Deja Entendu was the record where Lacey decided the feud was not going to be his whole story.
The band they hired to help them escape it was not an obvious choice. Producer Steven Haigler had worked with the Pixies, Quicksand, and Local H. He had no particular footprint in the emo scene, and according to the band's own label bio, he was reportedly "not amused" with their material when they entered the studio, causing tension that ran through the sessions. That friction was probably the point. Lacey had been explicit about wanting to change what he didn't like about Your Favorite Weapon. Drummer Brian Lane told interviewers that Lacey had written much of the new material on an acoustic guitar in his bedroom, and that the band's musical tastes had expanded significantly. Haigler was a producer who could hold those ambitions to account.
The album that came out of Charlotte on June 17, 2003, on Triple Crown Records and Razor and Tie, was eleven tracks that moved in directions pop-punk had no map for. It opens with "Tautou," a hushed, fingerpicked prologue that has no business existing on a record by a band whose previous album was built on power chords and shouted grievances. From there it pivots hard into "Sic Transit Gloria... Glory Fades," which is the kind of song that makes you understand why the scene needed it. The guitars are enormous and dissonant, the dynamics are real, and Lacey is writing about pressure and complicity with an obliqueness that Your Favorite Weapon never attempted. "The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows" follows, and by then the argument is already made. "Play Crack The Sky," the closing track, was a late addition recorded separately at Sapone Productions, an acoustic gut-punch that ends the record in near-silence. The first pressing of that record was 1,000 CDs. Within weeks it had sold out and the phones at every major label were ringing.
The context that shaped Deja Entendu was not just the feud. It was a band looking at the emo scene they had helped build and deciding, consciously, to complicate it. Lacey was listening to Sigur Rós and Outkast. He named them specifically when asked about artists breaking new ground, and he was candid that Brand New was not trying to do what those artists were doing. He was trying to make a good record, not a genre-defining one. The title, French for "already heard," came to him watching an episode of Jeopardy!, and it reads as a kind of pre-emptive shrug at the critics. The album acknowledges its own inheritance and then does something different with it anyway. "Guernica" was written after Lacey's grandfather was diagnosed with cancer. "Good To Know That If I Ever Need Attention All I Have To Do Is Die" is about the music industry's appetite for young bands. These are not songs about a girl who cheated with your bandmate. The emotional range had expanded because the life had.
The record charted at number 63 on the Billboard 200, modest by any major-label measure, but the scene registered it as a seismic event. Jason Tate, who ran AbsolutePunk and had his finger on the pulse of every message board in the genre, said that when Deja Entendu dropped it was "a completely scene-altering album" and that "literally overnight, bands were ripping it off." Pete Wentz, then writing lyrics for Fall Out Boy, said after hearing it: "This is the future of music, Fall Out Boy is gonna aim towards this." Before the album was even out, Brand New had sold out a 24-date headlining tour with Moneen, Senses Fail, and The Beautiful Mistake on word-of-mouth alone. They also earned a slot on the 2003 Warped Tour. The machine was already moving.
What happened after is well-documented. Every major label came chasing. Lyor Cohen sent Thursday's Geoff Rickly to personally lobby Lacey toward Island Records. Lacey turned him down after watching Island pressure Thursday to rewrite War All the Time. Vagrant made a hard push. Brand New eventually signed with DreamWorks, then absorbed by Interscope, on the condition of total creative control. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me followed in 2006 and went further still. But the turn happened here, in Charlotte, with a producer who was not amused and a band that had decided a personal feud was too small a reason to exist. Deja Entendu is the record where Brand New chose what they were going to be about, and the scene has been living in that choice ever since.
