Parts & Labor have today released their new single titled ‘Seamripper’, from their upcoming album ‘Set of All Sets’, dropping July 10th viaErnest Jenning Record Co.. Fifteen years away from the album format has done absolutely nothing to soften Parts & Labor. If anything, ‘Seamripper’ arrives like a machine that spent a decade and a half gathering rust, sparks, and bad intentions before finally exploding back to life. The track opens a new chapter for the band with enormous confidence, trading nostalgia for brute force and proving that their return is not an exercise in looking backward. This is a song that wants to push through walls rather than admire old photographs.
What makes ‘Seamripper’ so thrilling is the way it twists together seemingly incompatible ideas. Thick industrial textures grind against towering melodies while the dual drummers create a restless pulse that feels both mechanical and human. The song carries the weight of noise rock but never loses sight of the hook. Every distorted layer seems to fight for space until the entire arrangement locks together into something surprisingly uplifting. Parts & Labor have always understood how to turn chaos into catharsis, and this song may be their most convincing example yet.
The lyrics frame social collapse through images of fraying fabric and torn seams, giving the song a vivid emotional center beneath all the sonic wreckage. Lines about brokenness and fear land with genuine force, yet the chorus feels like an act of reconstruction. Rather than wallowing in collapse, the band searches for ways to stitch together something new. That tension between despair and hope gives the song an emotional dimension that lingers long after the final blast of feedback fades.
Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw sound completely reenergized throughout the track, delivering melodies that cut through the noise with surprising clarity. The expanded lineup pays enormous dividends, with the twin drum attack providing momentum that feels almost impossible to contain. The arrangement constantly shifts and mutates, moving from crushing riffs to shimmering passages without losing focus. Every second feels purposeful, as if the band is determined to make up for every year spent away.
As the first taste of ‘Set of All Sets’, arriving July 10, ‘Seamripper’ suggests that Parts & Labor have returned not merely intact but transformed. The song feels larger, heavier, and more ambitious than much of their earlier work while preserving the ecstatic spirit that made the band so compelling in the first place. Few reunion tracks manage to sound this necessary. ‘Seamripper’ does not reopen an old chapter. It tears the binding apart and starts writing an entirely new book.
About Parts & Labor
On July 10 noise-punk firebrands Parts & Labor, one of the defining bands of Brooklyn’s 2000s underground, will release Set Of All Sets, their first new album in 15 years, via Ernest Jenning Record Co. Today they are excited to share their new single “Seamripper” which is out today on all streaming platforms.
Merging dungeon synth riffage, two drummers, and huge hooks, “Seamripper” is an industrial re-shuffling of Parts & Labor’s signature noiserock components. The result is a futuristic mix of Melvins, HEALTH and Nine Inch Nails. Framing societal breakup with needlework terminology, the verses describe a world “All broken and frayed, all broke and afraid” and the choruses sound like a new world being knit.
On the song, the band’s Dan Friel reflects, “’Seamripper’ is probably Parts & Labor’s heaviest song. With two drummers, and Chris Weingarten back in the band, I was excited to do something inspired by the Melvins/Big Business albums, but the sludgy dungeon synth riff became something else entirely. I don’t think it sounds much like anything else we’ve done, and I like to think it doesn’t sound much like anyone else either.”
Set Of All Sets is colossal double album featuring a double-drummer lineup. Spanning 79 minutes, it’s an expansive, blown-out surge of apocalypse-pop that imagines utopias while confronting the overwhelming weight of the infinite.
Their first album since 2011, Set of All Sets finds the band re-energized, rebooted and expanding their punk-kosmische, matching their skyscraping melodies and squelching electronics with hypnotic rhythms and frenzied tumbles of percussion. Parts & Labor co-founders Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw are joined by the simultaneous battery of drummers Christopher Weingarten and Joe Wong — asynchronous members during their critically acclaimed four-album run on indie rock titans Jagjaguwar. The power trios that made 2007’s breakthrough Mapmaker and 2011’s swan song Constant Future have merged into a single four-piece, at once a brand new vision, a clamorous continuation and a recapturing of the deafening sound of their “final” two shows in 2012. With eight weaponized limbs from two veteran drummers, Parts & Labor surges forth with rhythms inspired by Tanzanian singeli, ecstatic free improv and the motorik of vintage krautrock.
Friel and Warshaw beam with the most majestic and triumphant melodies of their career, windswept cascades of bubblegum Boredoms and Big-Music-gone-hardcore. Weingarten and Wong alternate between propulsion and chaos: Snares and roto-toms ping-pong across the stereo spectrum, junk percussion clatters and tumbles, robotic rhythms collide with frantic machine-gun blurs. As latticework rhythms cycle and distort, the group’s three-part harmonies puzzle through lyrics about feedback loops, indecisiveness, the Anthropocene and quantum theory, all shouted through the language of rock anthems.
More than a decade since announcing their “indefinite hiatus,” the band returns against all odds: Brooklyn’s soaring rents have driven most of its members miles from their homebase and each other, Warshaw lives under the shriek of crippling tinnitus, the concept of “forming a band” becomes less of an economic viability every year, and both the music industry and world at large have essentially imploded. In turn, a band already steeped in paradoxes — noise and pop, ambient and punk, storm and calm — have created an album about building the impossible. “What if we built a house no one can live in,” Friel sings in thrash-pop blast “Haunted Limbs.” What if we wrote a song no one could play?” Songs like the Verhoeven-esque “Better Run” and percussion-phase ballad “Anti-Lions and Lemonade” invent utopias, a fitting vision for an album that conjures a punk orchestra from four musicians.
The album’s first single, “Endless Cycle” is the album’s maximalist scaffolding: a four-part, 20-minute epic split across the album’s halves. The three-part “Descending” suite exploits the Shepard tone illusion to dizzying ends. The chord progression is constantly falling, never resolves and is designed to loop infinitely. The feeling of moving while staying in the same place conveys the feeling of our current social and political reality: sinking deeper into the mire of techno-fascism but made to believe that we’re progressing to some grand, utopian future. The album’s epic climax is a shout-along that’s equal parts catchy and contradictory: “Forever … For never.”
“If some certain quantum theories are true, everything that might exist, does exist through parallel universes. Grappling with that feels simultaneously full of promise and struck with grief, that anything is possible, but also that this is the universe we’re stuck with,” says Warshaw “We wanted to turn towards promise, to build this thing against so, so many odds. To fight against our own inertia and fraying hope.”
From 2002 to 2012, Parts & Labor were an oppositional, exultant, D.I.Y. blare in the subterranean Brooklyn of loft parties, parking lot shows, musty warehouse spaces, $10 cover charges, sweaty handstamps and Todd P emails. While “NYC revival” bands gobbled glossy magazine spreads, Parts & Labor were leading lights of a noisier, scruffier, more art-damaged shadow economy alongside musicians like Black Dice, Oneida, Sightings, the USA Is a Monster, Zs, Tyondai Braxton, Aa, Japanther and more. Fusing neon pop hooks and the blistering squall that Friel coaxed from his upcycled Yamaha Portasound toy keyboard, the iconoclastic Parts & Labor were outsiders that could have existed alongside ’80s SST bands, ’90s Japanese noise units or ramshackle 22nd Century post-apocalypse wasteland troubadours. The anti-imperialist rhetoric in songs like “Stay Afraid,” “Fractured Skies,” and “Satellites” stood in sharp contrast to a music world bending towards dance-punk escapism and indie-rock introspection.
“It’s curious how little of the indie music from the aughts concerned itself with politics,” author Ronen Givony writes in the recently released Us V. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (Abrams Books). “For all the ruptures, chaos, and tragedy of the Bush era… the cultural response amounted to a collective numbness, trauma, and grief. No music stood in contrast to this tendency more than Parts & Labor.”
In their decade of existence they released five albums and carried the Minutemen’s “jam econo” torch through relentless, van-destroying tours across the U.S., Europe and Japan, playing shows with Mission of Burma, The Fall, TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Battles, Melt-Banana, Lightning Bolt, Titus Andronicus, Oneida and many more. Their final bow, held at Brooklyn’s 285 Kent in February of 2012, was a cacophonic send-off that united Weingarten and Wong on one stage and ended with the audience tearing the stage to pieces.
During the following 14 years, Dan Friel has released eight albums for avant-rock lodestar Thrill Jockey: four toy-keyboard scuzz-pop solo excursions and four LPs with his interstellar power trio Upper Wilds. Joe Wong has become an in-demand film and TV composer, penning the music for Emmy-winning shows like Russian Doll and Master of None alongside releasing a pair of psychedelic pop solo outings. BJ Warshaw has been co-running a multidisciplinary artist retreat, LEVEL, in a former Boy Scout cabin in Chapel Hill, NC since 2016. Christopher Weingarten has maintained a formidable career as a music writer and recently launched the all-star “artisanal white noise” app Fuzzzel.
However, the forces that Parts & Labor roared against in the ’00s — war theatrics, the politics of fear, gentrification, American imperialism — remain an ongoing, metastasizing threat. Their return was inevitable, if only to drive more feedback into the feedback loop.
“It felt like all the things we were worried about back in the day – techno-fascism, authoritarianism, rapacious capitalism, societal division – were coming true if not getting worse,” says Warshaw. “Reuniting has been a lifeline. The doing is the antidote.”
Featured image by Tod Seelie.
‘Set of All Sets’ Tracklist
- Endless Cycle Pt. 1: Repetition Nil
- Endless Cycle Pt. 2: Edges of Forgetting
- Many Worlds
- Descending
- Haunted Limbs
- Seamripper
- Arterial Material
- Anti-Lions and Lemonade
- Descending
- Endless Cycle Pt. 3: Better Run
- Endless Cycle Pt. 4: Working in Storm
- Indecision Tree
- Descending
- Parallel Tracks
- Off By One
- Like They’re Here to Stay
- Set of All Sets
LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/partsandlabor
https://www.instagram.com/partsandlaborforever
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_F8h_5o3JIbf2RjQBGsCSQ