Tap any face to see why they're in the photo

Who shaped them

Have A Nice Life

Have A Nice Life

Since 2000 · United States

Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga formed Have A Nice Life in Connecticut in the mid-2000s, recording largely on their own with minimal equipment and self-releasing their debut, Deathconsciousness (2008), as a double album packaged with an invented fictional pamphlet about a fabricated historical religious movement. Their story

Full songs onSpotifyApple MusicYouTube
See them on the map

Press ▶︎ to play

Loading…

It really plays! Press the middle

Who they shaped

Nobody on the map lists them as an influence yet.

Behind them, left to right: Dead Kennedys, Swans, My Bloody Valentine, Joy Division, New Order, Kraftwerk, Descendents.

The bigger the face, the stronger the proof: they said it themselvesreporteda critic, or widely accepted

Deathconsciousness cover

Start here

Deathconsciousness (2008)

Hear it onSpotifyApple MusicYouTube

Deathconsciousness buries pop melodies under thick, distorted layers of guitar and drum machine, the production so dense and murky that entire songs sound like they're being heard through a wall. "Bloodhail" pairs a genuinely catchy vocal melody with a wall of scraping noise and a martial drum pattern, the mix refusing to let any single element sit comfortably on top. Elsewhere the record slows into doom-laden dirges that barely qualify as songs in a conventional sense. Self-released with almost no attention, it has since become one of the most quietly influential cult records in underground guitar music.

Sleeve notes

Have A Nice Life

Deathconsciousness · 2008

Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga formed Have A Nice Life in Connecticut in the mid-2000s, recording largely on their own with minimal equipment and self-releasing their debut, Deathconsciousness (2008), as a double album packaged with an invented fictional pamphlet about a fabricated historical religious movement. The record's combination of shoegaze-style guitar walls, post-punk basslines, and doom-laden atmosphere found almost no audience on release but slowly accumulated a devoted following through online circulation over the following decade.

Barrett has continued to work in a similar vein through Have A Nice Life and his solo project Giles Corey, the latter shifting toward a starker, more folk- and country-inflected sound while retaining the same preoccupation with despair and mortality. Deathconsciousness in particular has become an unusually influential cult record within underground guitar music, cited by artists across black metal, shoegaze, and slowcore-adjacent scenes.

Since 2000 · United States