Yesterday’s Radio Dept instagram post sent me down a little rabbit hole – never an unpleasant place to be – but one of the things I discovered was their official website, which I never knew about. To be fair, they’ve had and abandoned a few web presences over the years, and their recent inactivity didn’t really indicate that they’d been working on their HTML skills in the interim, but indeed there is a good old fashioned website. And on this good old fashioned website which has about two years of dust on it, from the last news item, there’s some gold to be found.

First, there’s an English transcription of an interview with Jonas and Martin from the band about the long-running legal battle with their former label Labrador. It was a really interesting read because, as a fan of a lot of the bands that came through Labrador in the early aughts, that one of their flagship bands would be engaged with such a protracted legal battle with the label was strange and disappointing for someone who wanted very much to believe in an indie music utopia. But business is business is bullshit, I guess.

Interview: The Radio Dept. vs Labrador Records (legal battle) @ theradiodept.com

Another gold mine of sorts is their downloads section which – again, in a wonderful throwback to yesteryear – actually has MP3s for download, including a host of complete live show recordings. One of them come from their May 2009 show at The Bell House in Brooklyn as NYC Popfest’s headlining act. It was their first North American tour (but not first show, as that was the night before in Manhattan) and was more than enough to get me on a plane for a great weekend, right before my life fell off a cliff… but I digress. The whole show is available to download and while not amazing quality, is still very listenable.

The Radio Dept. / Live in New York (2009) – bootleg @ theradiodept.com

There’s also complete video footage of the show and it looks… well, pretty bad, even for 2009. I do sympathize – I was right up front with an excellent full-frame DSLR and was struggling to take stills, I can’t imaging how futile it must have felt trying to film with whatever video camera they had from the back of the venue. But at least it exists, and here it is.