by Erik van Rheenen

You know the comedic phenomenon where, if you stretch a joke out long enough, it skirts past the brink of humor and circles back to absolute hilarity? Well, if the punchline is Brand New sending out lyric booklets for The Devil and God are Raging Inside Me to select fans nine years past due, the joke might hit in one of two ways: either Brand New is brilliant — the kind of band with the foresight to devote nearly a decade of planning to an elaborate setup — or we fans are all certifiably insane for hanging on this long.

In a sense, the latter must be true, because calling oneself a Brand New fan requires some small sacrificial offering of sanity. To believe in the prospects of a Brand New record waiting in the wings is to put blind faith in the notion that a band that has rested dormant for six quiet years since Daisy will, from the blue, miraculously release a new record. Fans suffering through most bands’ extended stretches of inactivity would simply shrug it off, waiting with patient hands tucked in their pockets for some official announcement from the band’s camp.

Not Brand New fans. Any apparition of new information gets chased with evangelical zeal and unflappable devotion, metaphorically pinned to a crisscrossing set of clotheslines by a safety pin, matrices tracing whispers through interwoven hints and clues haunted by phantoms of plausibility. Watching an AbsolutePunk thread’s worth of Brand New fans suit up as an amateur Scooby Gang and track down answers — from Brooklyn billboards to Tesla references to the mysterious Fusion Anomaly site, with apparently invisible ties to Brand New’s webpage — shows just how much the band means to its most devoted fans, and some of the theories hatched are ones worth incubating. Maybe Brand New really is forecasting its cinematic end come 2018. Maybe it’s not all that far-fetched to think we might get an album on Easter, or July 10. Hell, maybe this is just the first motion in the rollout for Shone’s sophomore record. (Be patient: has anyone checked HeatThing.com lately?)

Here’s the brilliant part: all of this might have everything to do with some grand Jesse Laceian scheme to announce new music with a sweeping sense of pomp and circumstance, or it might have nothing to do with new Brand New music — just a communally-shared amalgam of wishful thinking and delusional hope. But Brand New is one of just a scattering of bands with a fan base devoted enough to become enthralled by this sort of mystery, meticulously planned or not. The band’s cloak-and-dagger method of suggesting news without giving it all away plays right into fans looking at cryptic liner notes with a sense of adventurous challenge — that dedicated detective work just might ultimately map out the elaborate scheme ahead of them and reveal plans for new music from a band that’s kept silent long enough.

And even if all the sleuthing comes to nothing (though, for this Brand New fan’s two cents: I think this is leading up to something, and fast), well, Brand New still wins by capturing fans’ imaginations while keeping the nagging possibility of new music at the forefront of their minds. Plus, who doesn’t like a good mystery every now and again?

With apologies to Jesse Lacey, I think I’ve finally diagnosed that vague something in “Okay I Believe You, But My Tommy Gun Don’t” — it’s the incurable madness of being a Brand New fan. It takes a special kind of insanity to look for Brand New in the details of obscure websites and map coordinates, but it’s the special kind of insanity where, even if they had a cure for it, we’d tell the doctors to fuck off and leave us to our sleuthing: we have a mystery to solve, after all.