Existential Thread

👋

Hey, hi. Thanks for coming.

So… here’s a thing.

We love making music — we do. We also love playing it. We even love, sometimes, the surrounding malarkey: the 3-hour drives, the overnight flights, deciding how many t-shirts to print so they last through a long run of shows; racing all morning to come up with gags for an afternoon livestream, trying to make tweets that both announce a tour and aren’t boring as hell, trying to make Instagram stories that both push a pre-order and don’t seem desperate, trying to make TikToks that will force people to “duet” with us, whatever the fuck “duetting” is(?).

That junk can be kind of fun, because at least if you mess up, nobody goes to jail, nobody dies on the operating table. And — you do it all for the music. To get these songs, which you believe in so deeply, out into the world.

Of course you know that “the world” isn’t going to hear your new songs, not even a particularly significant slice of it. But thousands. Hundreds of thousands, actually. And what kind of entitled prick do you have to be to wish that more than hundreds of thousands of your fellow human beings would listen to something you made?

And yeah, that’s part of the problem. You want more, but you feel like an asshole for wanting it. (How many people have less!) A common condition, we know, not exclusive to pop musicians… but giving yourself and your time over to a project that asks you to PUSH and CAJOLE and MARKET and SELL all the time if you want to get anywhere — and repeatedly assures you that if you don’t, no one will — is, well, somewhat shame-inducing. Not to mention exhausting.

We love Lobes. We love Huffy. Heck, we love ‘em all. And sure, every show hasn’t been 💯, but most were in the high 90s, and we really probably are better today than we ever have been, and these last couple of months, touring the new record, have been hugely gratifying.

But, guys… we can’t do it forever. At some point, somewhere down the line, we won’t have 10 songs we love, but we’ll put out an album anyway. At some point, maybe not too many years from now, we won’t care what goes on the tour t-shirt, so we’ll ask our management to print whatever they thing will sell. At some point — this one could happen any day! — we’ll tell our social media team to stop asking us for photos and captions, and to just post whatever they want.

At some point, inevitably, we’ll walk on stage, play the show, then pack up and go back to separate hotel rooms without having said two words to each other.

We don’t want to wait around for that to happen.

After many, many, literally dozens of hours spent discussing it over the last few months, and yes, dozens of beers, we’ve decided that Lobes will be the last We Are Scientists album. We’ll finish out the touring that’s been planned for this year, including still unannounced runs this fall — and we will love every minute of it — and then… well… 😬🫣 guess there’s plenty of time to figure out what comes next.

This is not goodbye. Lobes is barely two months old, and this is gonna be a great year. But we wanted to let you know where our heads are at.

With love (and a touch of squalor),

Keith & Chris