Brand New

Since 2000 · United States

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The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006)

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me abandons the pop-punk hooks of Brand New's earlier records for something considerably darker and stranger. "Jesus Christ" builds a hushed, almost hymn-like verse into a chorus wrestling openly with guilt and mortality, Jesse Lacey's voice sounding genuinely unsettled rather than performing distress. The arrangements throughout favor dynamic tension over immediate catchiness, letting songs unfold rather than resolve quickly. It remains the record most credited with pushing 2000s emo toward greater ambition and darker subject matter.

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Brand New

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me · 2006

Brand New formed on Long Island, New York in 2000, emerging from the pop-punk and emo scene of the early 2000s with an early sound built on hooky, self-aware songs about adolescence and heartbreak. Over successive albums the band shed that early identity almost entirely, growing darker, more atmospheric, and more musically ambitious with each release, guided by Jesse Lacey's increasingly literary and unsettled songwriting.

The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me (2006) marked the most dramatic of those transformations, trading pop-punk immediacy for something closer to a slow-building, almost gothic meditation on faith, guilt, and mortality. Brand New's willingness to abandon a commercially successful sound in favor of something considerably harder to categorize made the record a touchstone for a generation of emo and post-hardcore bands looking to be taken more seriously as songwriters, and its influence is audible in acts that followed across both the emo revival and more mainstream alternative rock.