Brand New flew to Charlotte in February 2003 and recorded most of a new album in a single month. They came home with Deja Entendu, and nothing about them was the same afterward.
The band, formed in 2000 in Merrick, New York, had spent two years touring behind their pop-punk debut Your Favorite Weapon. That record, produced by Mike Sapone, was fast and bratty and good at what it was. Deja Entendu, tracked at Reflection Sound Studios in Charlotte, North Carolina, was something else entirely. Producer Steven Haigler, who had worked with the Pixies on Trompe le Monde and with Quicksand on Slip, pushed the band toward texture and space. The songs slowed down. The guitars got heavier and stranger. Jesse Lacey's lyrics stopped being about high school and started being about something harder to name.
The album opens with "Tautou," a quiet, almost ambient piece that sets the temperature before "Sic Transit Gloria...Glory Fades" kicks the door in at track two. That sequencing is a statement. The band knew what they were doing. They were telling you the record you thought you were getting was already over. Tracks like "Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don't" and "Me Vs. Maradona Vs. Elvis" carry the emotional weight of people who have stopped performing their feelings and started excavating them. "Guernica" is the album's center of gravity, slow and enormous, the kind of song that makes a room feel smaller.
Haigler produced tracks one through ten at Reflection Sound. The closing track, "Play Crack the Sky," was recorded and mixed separately by Sapone at his own studio in New York. That split is audible. "Play Crack the Sky" is acoustic and stripped, a deliberate exhale after everything that came before it. The band has said the song was a late addition, and it functions like one: a coda that earns its place by being completely unlike the rest of the record.
The album's title is French for "already heard." Lacey told MTV it was a tongue-in-cheek response to critics who called the band derivative. His framing: if you're going to say we sound like everyone else, we'll name the record after the complaint. That kind of self-awareness runs through the whole album. Deja Entendu is a record that knows it exists inside a genre and refuses to be comfortable there.
Released on June 17, 2003, through Triple Crown Records and Razor and Tie, the album charted at number 63 on the Billboard 200. That number undersells what actually happened. The two singles, "The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows" and "Sic Transit Gloria...Glory Fades," both reached the top 40 on the UK Singles Chart and earned MTV airplay. The album eventually sold over 500,000 copies and was certified Gold by the RIAA. For a band on an independent label, those numbers were significant. For a band that had just made a record this strange, they were remarkable.
The band on the record is Jesse Lacey on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Vincent Accardi on lead guitar and backing vocals, Garrett Tierney on bass, and Brian Lane on drums. Accardi co-wrote five of the eleven tracks. The performances are tight without being clinical. Lane's drumming in particular gives the record its physical weight, the kind of playing that makes you feel the room.
What Deja Entendu did was prove that a band could grow up in public and not lose the audience in the process. The pop-punk kids who bought Your Favorite Weapon followed them into something darker and more demanding. The record sits at the hinge point of Brand New's catalog, between the band they were and the band they became on The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me three years later. Charlotte was where the hinge turned.
