Brand New

Merrick, 2000

Brand New formed in 2000 in Merrick, on the south shore of Long Island, after Jesse Lacey left Taking Back Sunday, where he had been the founding bassist. The line-up that made every record has barely moved since: Lacey on vocals and guitar, Vincent Accardi on guitar, Garrett Tierney on bass and Brian Lane on drums.

The first album, Your Favorite Weapon, came out on Triple Crown in 2001 and sold in the region of 50,000 copies — a regional pop-punk record, fast and sarcastic, written largely about people the singer knew. It is also the record the band has since treated as a separate country: when they returned to the stage in 2025 they played songs from four of their five albums and left the debut out entirely.

The records that changed the terms

Deja Entendu, released in 2003 through Triple Crown and Razor & Tie, reached number 63 on the Billboard 200 and was eventually certified gold. It swapped the debut's speed for something quieter and more self-conscious, and it worked well enough to start a major-label bidding war that ended with Interscope.

What followed was the band's defining mess. Demos for the third album leaked online before it was finished, which infuriated the group and forced a rebuild. The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me arrived in 2006 on Interscope: twelve tracks, from the opening of Sowing Season through Millstone, Jesus Christ, Degausser and Limousine to the closing Handcuffs. It also went gold, and over the following two decades it became the record the band is measured against — the one the 2026 tour is named after.

Daisy, in 2009, was louder, more abrasive and more divisive, and it charted higher than anything before it at number 6. Then the band effectively stopped: six years with no album, broken only by the singles Mene in 2015 and I Am a Nightmare in 2016. Science Fiction, released in August 2017 on the band's own Procrastinate! Music Traitors, went to number one on the Billboard 200 — the first and only time they topped the chart, and, as it turned out, the last thing they released before everything stopped.

November 2017

Three months after Science Fiction reached number one, Lacey was accused of sexual misconduct involving minors in the early-to-mid 2000s. He issued a public apology. The band cancelled the dates that remained on the schedule, including a UK run, and then simply stopped — no statement of a break-up, no explanation, no further releases.

The silence lasted seven years. For most of that period Brand New existed only as a back catalogue and an unresolved question, with no indication from any member about whether the band still existed at all.

The return, and the argument attached to it

The first crack came on 15 December 2024, when the four of them played a private charity event in Nashville in support of Make Life Skate Life — their first performance together in seven years. On 3 March 2025 the reunion was made public with three shows at the end of that month, and the reaction split immediately. Some long-time listeners wrote about crying at the news; others said flatly that no record was good enough to justify disregarding the people who had come forward.

The first public show was on 26 March 2025 at the Bomb Factory in Dallas, the same building where the band had played in 2017. They opened with The Quiet Things That No One Ever Knows and played eighteen songs, including the live debuts of Waste and Batter Up. Lacey's only greeting was that it was nice to be back in Dallas. He did not address the allegations.

On 31 March 2025 a 24-date US tour was announced, opening on 30 May at the WAMU Theater in Seattle. Four days after that announcement, on 4 April 2025, a woman writing under the name Aiyana published a Medium post alleging that Lacey had begun grooming her in 2006, when she was fifteen and he was in his late twenties, describing inappropriate contact and pressure to keep the relationship hidden. Neither Lacey nor the band responded publicly. The tour went ahead, and by November 2025 it had crossed the Atlantic, taking in Glasgow on the 17th and the OVO Arena Wembley on the 19th.

That gap — between a band operating at arena scale and a frontman who has said nothing since 2017 — is now the standard frame for writing about them. A Defector essay published around the reunion, by a writer who first saw the band on Halloween 2006 in Des Moines, sets the problem out plainly rather than resolving it: knowing someone through their lyrics, she writes, does not tell the full story, and the reunion arrived without any accounting for what came before it.

Twenty years of The Devil and God

On 18 June 2026 the band announced a run built entirely around the third album's twentieth anniversary, under the tour title 7 Years + 13 of The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me. Sixteen dates were announced, from Nashville on 29 September to Phoenix on 14 November; demand pushed that higher, and the schedule now runs past twenty shows, with second nights added in Chicago on 4 October and Boston on 19 October and extra stops in Pittsburgh, Virginia Beach and Newport, Kentucky. The rooms range from the Aragon Ballroom and Roadrunner up to Barclays Center, the Coca-Cola Coliseum in Toronto and the Honda Center in Anaheim.

The tour opened at The Pinnacle in Nashville on 29 September 2026, with the band on stage at 8.15pm and off at 10.20pm. No support act was billed, in Nashville or on the dates that followed — the band plays the whole night themselves.

Where that leaves them

Brand New have released nothing new since 2017 and have not published a statement explaining the return. What they have instead is a back catalogue that keeps selling tickets and a live operation that is now larger than the one they shut down nine years ago. Both things are true at once, and the band has shown no intention of reconciling them in public.

For anyone deciding whether to go, the facts are not in dispute and are not hard to find; the allegations stand unanswered, the shows are selling, and the choice is being left entirely to the person holding the ticket.