Sean McLennan

New York’s hardest noise rock trio, Unsane, are in the midst of a rebirth of sorts. Having gone from inactive after 2017’s Sterilize for a couple years, to active again with the band’s most current lineup featuring longtime vocalist and guitarist Chris Spencer and friends Cooper on bass and Jon Syverson on drums. The three joined together to jam some old Unsane material for fun over the course of the pandemic and quickly found new footing. Fast forward to today, and they’re now touring Europe and, soon, some parts of the U.S.

More importantly, Unsane have been remastering and reissuing some of the band’s oldest material via Spencer’s label, Lamb Unlimited. This includes last year’s remastered release of Improvised Munitions & Demo, originally slated for a release in ‘89, with added ‘88 demo material. Now, the remastered reissue of the band’s most celebrated LP, the self-titled Unsane, originally released in 1991 via Matador Records, is available with more on the way.

During Unsane’s period of inactivity, Spencer continued to create music with his more current project, Human Impact, a creative collaboration with Jim Coleman of Cop Shoot Cop, bassist Chris Pravdica, and drummer Phil Puleo. New Noise caught up with Spencer to discuss the period in time that surrounded the self-titled LP, perhaps Unsane’s most cherished piece of work.

What was influencing your writing around the time you recorded some of your first material for Unsane? Did a lot of inspiration stem from what was going on in New York with hardcore at the time or do you recall other elements inspiring you more so?

That super early stuff I was just doing on a four-track, on, like, a Tascam, and showing it to Pete and Charlie—the original drummer and bass player—and really just trying to get something off the ground, you know? Just trying to get some shit that we could just go out and do our thing, and have it really trying to not be too derivative of anything and just kind of doing our own thing. Just trying to get us shows, that was really the main thing.

I guess the influences were really just kind of where we were at the time. New York was really fucked up, and, you know, it was drugs everywhere, burned-out cars, and kind of all kinds of shit all around us, so that definitely had a huge influence on us. Especially as we were going into that first, self-titled record. But you know, I grew up with Iggy, Hendrix, and Flipper, so I was definitely influenced by what I liked, but I really had no idea what I was doing.

With Unsane veering direction a bit into more experimental, noise-oriented music, deviating from that dominating NYHC sound surrounding those times, do you recall how Unsane were able to sort of exist in that space back in those days?

Some nights, it would be CB’s (CBGB) Matinees on Sundays, and I’d go and check that out, you know? CB’s was a big part of it. My friends worked there; we’d just go and hang out, you know, no matter what was going on. Sunday’s it was always a hardcore matinee that was always going on that you could check out, so we were always around it, but a lot of that early hardcore stuff was a little bit before us.

Was there a lot more experimental music happening around those times that was more of a “You would only know about it if you were there” type deal, that was maybe overshadowed by the dominating hardcore scene?

There was. Like, Cop Shoot Cop was around; we shared a practice space with Cop Shoot Cop and Pussy Galore, so we were kind of in this weird space, slightly different from the hardcore scene. Pussy Galore obviously, Cop Shoot Cop with their two-bass thing and the samples, there was, like, a whole underground noise scene.

A lot of us played CB’s and The Pyramid. The Pyramid was also a really big one, it was on, like, Fifth and A; our practice space was on Second and B, you know what I mean? So it’s four blocks away. It was kind of this whole East Village, Lower East Side scene. The hardcore scene was going on, too, but a lot of those hardcore shows people would come down from Connecticut, and you know, they drew a lot of people from outside the neighborhood. And we kind of played different clubs.

The Pyramid was kind of this weird, cool, art, trans-scene club. They would have noise bands on, like, Tuesday or Wednesday, so their bread and butter was weirdo drag shows, and then they’d have us down in the basement. Like, people are taping down their dicks and stuff like that for the drag show after us (laughs)—It was a weird scene.

I feel like when I think about what gave Unsane a strong identity over the years, I think of your playing style on guitar. I’m curious; while you were developing your playing style when you were younger, how did you see your instrument playing a role in your songwriting outside of playing traditional riffs?

I’ve always been in three-pieces, and it’s kind of funny, because again, when I was very young I didn’t really know what I was doing, but I knew that you just kept playing because you had to really fill things out. A lot of it is just this manic, keep playing, keep playing, keep playing, without many stops and starts, and with us, when I did, I tended to really overload the amp, so I would stop and there would be shrieking feedback at parts, which I really liked.

So a lot of it was sort of utilitarian in terms of making the songs sound thick and just giving it more space. With a three-piece, if you bring down the dynamic, it really drops, you know, like If I go to a high part, everything drops out when you play live, so there’s just really a lot of as-thick-as-possible chords and a brief high part, and back to a chord, then high part, so a lot of it was just dealing with being in a three-piece, which I think I overplayed, but you did what you had to do, you know?

From what I’ve read, a lot of the more recent reissue and remastering ideas and activities of Unsane’s older material stemmed from simply just wanting to jam old material with your friends Cooper and Jon (Syverson). Did the idea of creating Lamb Unlimited and remastering and reissuing the old material come about before you obtained the rights to the material, or did you recognize the opportunity after you gained those rights back?

Well the whole thing really came out of the pandemic. Because everyone was in lockdown, my friend Todd, who’s actually our manager and booking agent in the states, Todd Cote, just called me up one day and was like, “Hey, I got nothing to do; would you want me to try and get your entire catalog back?” I had sort of tried before, but as a guy in the band, usually, you know, some of the labels were pretty cool and friends of mine, and they’d be like, “Yeah, of course, you know, you own it, so we’ll give it back to you.” But some are a little harder to get your shit back from, you know, they kind of dodge you a little bit, but Todd, as a third person, was really good at making it happen.

He got it all back and hooked me up with this thing called Virtual Label, which sort of takes care of the supply chain stuff for me so I’m not sitting around mailing records all day. So he got all the rights back, and Virtual wanted to do it, so we figured we’ll just reissue chronologically and strangely enough found the first unreleased Unsane record, Improvised Munitions, which is also a weird story which I’ve told a bunch:

We recorded this short record for this guy, Ernie, from Circuit Records—long story short, he had a huge cocaine habit, but we gave him the recording, and it was our big break, you know, he was doing Cop Shoot Cop and stuff. Then he, one night at the Pyramid, he handed me a test pressing, which I took home, and then Ernie disappeared and totally vanished off the face of the earth.

So then I went on tour, me, Pete, and Charlie were living in a van. I had these crazy, junkie roommates who, while I was out of town, proceeded to sell any vinyl that was in my room, which the test pressing was one of. Then cut to, I don’t know, 20 years later or something, I find out via the internet that there’s a guy that has the cassette of that first record. I was like, “Holy shit, how did he get that?” Found the guy who bought my test pressing in a used record store, you know, downtown New York, in like ‘91 or something.

So then we were able to get in touch with that guy, finally, and get it remastered. Andrew Schneider, again, remastered that one too, and actually released the record. Who knows what happened to Ernie; he may have been killed because of his drug debt or something, or who knows!? He just totally disappeared. So we were able to finally get that out, so me and Todd were like, OK, we’ll just reissue the entire catalog, and we’ll start at the beginning; that was seriously the beginning, even though we did re-record those songs for the self-titled album. So we were able to get that out; now we’re doing the self-titled. Next, I’m not sure if we’re going to do singles, probably, but we’ll see.

So reissuing that stuff, and again, everyone is in lockdown, so I was working on a house out in the woods down in East Texas. I was hanging out with Cooper (bass) and Jon (drums), and I was like, “Hey guys, let’s just fuckin’ play this early shit, just for fun,” because none of us had anything to do; everyone was just sitting around.

So we just started rehearsing it for a few months, just having fun, just playing a set as though we were going on tour, when we weren’t. Then we got that first record out, then we started getting into the self-titled one. And I was like, “hey guys, do you want to just play a local show and just do this shit we’ve been practicing forever?” So then that started; then we got offered a shit ton of stuff. Now we’re just playing that early shit; we do ‘Committed’ and stuff like that, so we do a few of the later things, but generally, it’s like 80 to 90% the early shit.

We never played those songs when Vinnie and Dave were in the band. Vinnie’s drumming, stylistically, was way different. Great drummer, great drummer, but the songs sounded so different from his style, when he joined the band, me and Pete just agreed to write new shit. You know? So we didn’t even play these songs for that entire period of time, which was a long period of time. So it’s really fucking amazing to go back and play this early shit. It’s a little different. With the guitar stuff, I actually do a lot more shit, so it’s really fun.

As you went back and remastered some of your oldest, most cherished creations on the self-titled album, what do you appreciate about those songs? Do you hear them in a new light? Do they transport you back to a place in time?

I really just like how raw they are and that there’s room to fuck around for me as a guitar player. Now going back and revisiting them, the lyrics are all just kind of about my neighborhood and about how fucked up shit was, which is also a fun trip down memory lane; they’re fun to do. They’re spastic; they’re a little more uptempo and more aggro, so it’s fun to go back and play them.

With you focusing a lot of your time and energy on this reissuing run with Lamb Unlimited, and rehearsing all of this old material for your upcoming tour in Europe and the U.S., do you find yourself more in a headspace to create music reminiscent of that self-titled material? Or is it more your preference to stick to the sort of progressions you’ve been achieving with Human Impact?

I kind of really like how the really early Unsane shit is done, so if we did, it would be more in that sort of neighborhood. The Human Impact is definitely a full-blast collaboration. Jim sends me ideas; I send some to him—We really work back and forth on shit. Jim’s really cool, and it’s awesome to work with him. Whereas, me, Jon, Coop, is a full-blast, three-piece, aggressive unit, and we really want to keep that ball rolling in that fashion.

From what I understand, by the time the writing process came about for 2017’s Sterilize, the writing sort of landed on you, and even though I think Sterilize is an excellent record and some of the band’s best songs in a lot of respects, I look at a track like Human Impact’s “Genetic” or “E605” or “The Dead Sea” or even the newest single, “Imperative,” and instantly recognize the beauty and benefits of writing with someone as creative and unique as Jim Coleman. Do you feel that writing with Jim and Human Impact has reinvigorated your creativity in a lot of ways?

Totally. Dave moved to Italy; Vinnie moved down to Mexico, which, during that pandemic, that was also another issue. I called Vinnie and said, ‘Hey, I’m in New York; I got this apartment in Brooklyn, you know, let’s play; let’s get some shit going,’ and Vinnie couldn’t; he had to stay in Mexico and run his hostel…When we did Sterilize, it was really like me writing a ton of shit and us just kind of getting together, like, two weeks before we recorded the record. So I had to have a lot of shit pretty much done by the time we got to that phase.

In just a different way, Jim comes out of left field with a lot of shit, you know? So it’s good to bounce what I’ve got off of him. I’ll send him shit, and he comes back with some wild, crazy crap and it’s fun working with Jim, he’s got a shit ton of ideas, so it’s always cool. You know, there’s no lack of creativity there.

Outside of the upcoming, remastered reissue of Unsane and a European tour in October, what other things are you cooking up, either musically or personally? Feel free to share any other news or thoughts you’d like.

We’re doing another Unsane tour in February. We’re kind of doing Texas, out to the West Coast, up to Seattle, through Boise, Denver, and back down to Texas. So we’re kind of doing a winter West Coast loop.

Honestly, before Todd got the whole catalog back and we started reissuing this stuff, I honestly thought I was kind of done doing Unsane. I figured with Sterilize, I’d kind of bookend the band with, what I considered, good records. And once all this started, and we were in lockdown, I was like, “What the fuck!?’ Why would I; if I can do this, why wouldn’t I do it?” When you take something away, you really realize what you lose. Two-and-a-half years of that loop, I wanted to get out and do shit. That pandemic was definitely motivating on many fronts.

I also really want to thank Andrew Schneider for remastering the self-titled; he did a fucking amazing job. Was able to bring Charlie’s drums up a little bit without cranking the guitar too much, It took some real magic to get that thing sounding decent or even better than it did. I really appreciate what he did. That record sounds so much better to me now.

Unsane U.S. February tour dates:

2/6/2023 Albuquerque NM Launchpad
2/7/2023 Tucson AZ 191 Toole
2/8/2023 Tempe AZ Yucca Tap Room
2/9/2023 San Diego CA Casbah
2/10/2023 Los Angeles CA Zebulon
2/11/2023 Costa Mesa CA The Wayfarer
2/14/2023 Albany CA Ivy Room
2/15/2023 Sacramento CA Cafe Colonial
2/17/2023 Seattle WA El Corazon
2/18/2023 Portland OR Mississippi Studios
2/19/2023 Boise ID Neurolux
2/20/2023 Salt Lake City UT Urban Lounge
2/22/2023 Denver CO HQ
2/23/2023 Omaha NE Reverb Lounge
2/24/2023 Kansas City MO Record Bar
2/25/2023 Dallas TX Amplified Live Bar & Grill
2/26/2023 Austin TX Lost Well
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Listen to the remastered version of Unsane here:

Order the reissued and remastered self-titled LP from Unsane here.