Northeast Regional embarked on making In the Desert, its new, sprawling studio album, almost as a dare to each other.
Before its members had arrived at an album title or set the specific course they’d chart across varied sonic landscapes of dynamic — often explosive — post hardcore punk, The Richmond, VA-based band was at a crossroads.
By that time, the band had already evolved from the recording project of Jeff Byers (Guitar and Vocals) into a fully fleshed-out and functional going concern, composed of five friends with several decades worth of DIY touring and no shortage of ‘ex members of _____” to their credit.
Shortly after the release of the band’s Fitness EP in 2024, Byers alongside Mike Morris (Guitar and Vocals), James Doubek (Guitar), Tyler Worley (Bass) and Zach Nelson (Drums) faced the eternal question every band at one time or another contends with.
Okay, now what?
Do we continue to sink time and money into a passion project as adult responsibilities continue to pile up? With limited time on Earth, is this the move?
What’s the worst that could happen? People might like our songs?
Unconcerned with the glory that awaits more professionally-minded lifers, Northeast Regional forged ahead in their leisure time for pleasure, not profit. In this fashion, they’d write and record In the Desert with one another, as time allowed, for its own sake.
Big life events informed the making of their most ambitious recording to date, and ultimately inspired its name. For Byers, it was the birth of his daughter and his father’s diagnosis of an aggressive form of dementia.
“Not having the ability to recall most of your life story, good or bad, was very sad to me,” he says. “As guys in our 40s, being decidedly middle-aged, I think it’s natural to look out and think about what time you have left and what to do with it.”
You can hear Byers working it out as if in real time on “Deconstructive Surgery,” the album’s opening salvo. He screams, “Time is water in the desert. A market with no future. You drink and drink ‘til supplies dry and stop.”
For Morris — who penned and sings three songs — plans to move out of the country with his family to Oman were underway before the album was completely written.
With the band’s remaining time together in short supply, the band continued to meet week after week to develop the album’s 11 songs mainly for the love of making music together and as living proof of their shared experience.
With expressive detours, explorative arrangements, and newfound flights of fancy, the album delivers a much-needed adrenaline shot for anyone that still loves guitar-based rock music. That enduring, adventurous spirit is captured in the vast Omanian desert Morris would eventually photograph for the album cover. Have a look: it’s stark, winding, and immense.
Over the course of writing, rewriting, and generally pouring over In the Desert, the band recast their previous post hardcore barrage into a more expansive and dynamic light, one crafted to utilize available space, filling it with the idiosyncratic styles of all those present.
With their triple threat of guitarmanship, this meant not needlessly layering the same parts, but rather building off of each other to employ maximum creative possibilities through restraint. This gives each song a greater shape and sense of its own terrain on In the Desert.
In this way, Northwest Regional sees the forest for the trees — sonically speaking at the risk of mixing metaphors— with a sweeping sequence sure to usher listeners through John Reis-like peaks and Revolution Summer-tinged valleys.
It’s an album for a particular point in time. It’s not necessarily a beginning or an ending. It’s the moment where you acknowledge time is limited and have to answer the question, “what are you going to do about it?”
Track Listing:
Intro
Deconstructive Surgery
MR
Indulgence
Alt Bounce
Meander
Sick Days
Long Live The Dullness
Trade Secrets
Rolling Thunder
Detours
Widows Memorial
Pressing Information:
5 test presses
200 black vinyl