Brain Thrust Mastery: U.K. Tour

🤵🏻‍♂️🤵🏼‍♂️

May 24, 2024

This November, in several of the U.K.’s finest venues, we will play our album Brain Thrust Mastery live, on stage, clothed.

Look:

PRE-SALE Wednesday 29 May 10 A.M. BST —> Link goes out to this mailing list.
LONDON PRE-SALE also 29 May, but you must SIGN UP HERE for access.
GENERAL SALE Friday 31 May 10 A.M. BST

Let’s do an F.A.Q.…

Why now? Look, we don’t control everything. We don’t control the timing of things. We finally got the rights to reissue BTM on vinyl (more on that soon), and we wanted to play a couple shows to celebrate, and so these are the shows. Our promoters, the very fine SJM and DFC (we don’t use promoters whose names include full words), wanted to announce the tour before summer, before people’s brains get too hot, before all the special elections and car chases and secret adoptions and stuff. And they’re probably right. So this is the cart; stay tuned for a horse.

When can I buy tickets? So soon. The general sale, for normal folk as well as military personnel of any rank, is next Friday, 31 May, at 10.00am BST. There’s a pre-sale, of course. If you’re reading this (assuming you’re signed up to our mailing list/substack thing), you will receive a link next Wednesday (29 May) at, you guessed it, 10.00am BST. 🎉 EXCEPT FOR THE LONDON SHOW. That show has a pre-sale the same day (29 May), but you have to sign up here to gain access.

What’s the deal with the London show? Why all the secrecy and a separate link? There isn’t really a good explanation — not narratively good, anyway. Last year, we made a pact with our agent and our promoters and Crom that we weren’t going to play any shows in the U.K. this year, because next year (2025) we want to really tear it up — really just play the U.K. till there’s no more U.K. to play (we want to become the premier experts at playing the U.K.). And we have BIG PLANS for London in 2025. But then we came to an agreement with Universal Records to reissue Brain Thrust Mastery, and this empty-ish year (2024) seemed like a good time to do that (as opposed to 2025, when we’ll have new, more important music that references topical stuff like Chat-GPT and Bennifer 2.0). And dropping BTM vinyl without a couple of BTM shows seemed dumb. So in a bid to stay on course, and for reasons we don’t FULLY understand, our wonderful agent and Manager Kat and our three-lettered promoters said SURE, YOU CAN PLAY IN LONDON, BUT IT WILL BE A SECRET. A KINDA NON-SECRET SECRET THING. So that’s what’s happening. It’s a small show. Will probably sell out pretty quickly. Join the pre-sale for sure if you want to come to that one.

Is this some kind of anniversary? No.

Will you be playing anything besides Brain Thrust Mastery at the shows? I like that album a lot, but you have SO MANY OTHER GOOD SONGS. Oh, thanks! It’s true. And yes, we’ll be playing two sets at these shows: Brain Thrust Mastery in full, and then a second set with some of your other favorite songs, and some that you admire greatly but don’t “love,” and one that you didn’t even realize was a W.A.S. song.

What about the whole TV en Français: Deluxe thing? What the hell is happening? True! Yes.😉 So much weird timing. The TV en Français: Deluxe thing IS TOTALLY happening. In fact, it should have dropped two weeks ago. As readers of this newspaper know, problems at the pressing plant caused us to move that release date to the end of June. In the meantime, we will continue to celebrate that mighty album with weekly Demo Drops (“Sprinkles” demo coming this weekend), frequent theme dinners (private events in our homes), and stuff like that. The Second Coming of TV en Français is very much upon us, friends, and to celebrate that fact, we are announcing some Brain Thrust Mastery shows 🧐. IDK. It’s best not to interrogate it too fiercely, this sloppy bounty we call life.

How about another shot of you guys in those fancy duds Virgin Records rented you for the Brain Thrust Mastery artwork photoshoot?