If the return of The Radio Dept. to both the stage and the studio this year wasn’t cause enough for celebration, they’re also returning to record stores this year. Or more specifically, their second album – Pet Grief – will mark its 20th anniversary with a limited edition vinyl reissue on November 13. This isn’t the first reissue of the record – there were runs in 2011 (that’s the one I have) and 2020, but all of those are long sold out and apparently the record has transitioned from misunderstood to beloved in that time.
When it was originally released, I was part of the “misunderstood” demographic as I missed the wall of fuzz that made their 2003 debut Lesser Matters an all-timer for me, even if the aesthetic shift had been somewhat telegraphed with the This Past Week EP the year before, but I quickly came around to the quiet beauty of the record. In this new interview with The Line Of Best Fit, however, it seems like that shift also caused dissent within the band and their label:
We kind of left that album. It wasn’t a good feeling really between us and our feelings about the album. At least that’s what I think he thinks too. But then we made Clinging afterwards and became better friends again with that album.
Johann Duncanson, The Radio Dept
How Johan Duncanson made peace with The Radio Dept.’s Pet Grief @ The Line Of Best Fit
It’s only been through a new audience discovering the record through streaming and social media that it has been recently reappraised. A very interesting read that also points at where they’re going with their new record:
I never really realised that was happening until very recently,” he says. “Then we saw ‘Sleeping In’ taking off a bit. If you go into streaming services and see the top songs, it’s almost exclusively Pet Grief now.
Johann Duncanson, The Radio Dept
How Johan Duncanson made peace with The Radio Dept.’s Pet Grief @ The Line Of Best Fit
The only video from the record came for the preview single “The Worst Taste In Music”, which Duncanson describes in the TLOBF interview as “It’s like a vain kind of way to comfort yourself after someone has left you”.
And since I have the link on my clipboard, here’s their performance of the song at Pitchfork Festival in Chicago in July 2011.
