Have A Nice Life’s New Album On Pitchfork

Listen to Have A Nice Life’s highly-anticipated new album, The Unnatural World, in its entirety now via Pitchfork Advance.
 
New England’s Have A Nice Life has been a truly enigmatic band since its inception. 

It’s two primary members, Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga, met while studying at UMass Amherst and began performing “oddly aggressive acoustic songs” at local coffee houses and open mics together.  After graduating, Dan and Tim kept writing and minimally released a few demo recordings that continued to sail under the radar.  Over the course of the next five years, these recordings were expanded upon and became Have A Nice Life’s debut LP, Deathconsciousness (2008), which was initially pressed on 100 CD-R’s and expected to sell pretty casually.  Over time, the album (which was accompanied by a dense, 100-page booklet) generated quite a bit of interest through online exposure and glowing fan reviews  and eventually sold out its first pressing.  Have A Nice Life kept printing copies, eventually on formal CD and vinyl formats on their own label, Enemies List, to keep up with the seemingly endless demand from an almost cult-like following.
 
Two years later, Have A Nice Life released an EP, Time Of Land, once again via Enemies List at their three only live shows in 2010.  The curious were able to find a scavenger hunt link in the liner notes that led one intrepid soul to uncovering an additional “hidden track” buried deep in the woods of western Massachusetts a few months later. A digital copy of the record was (and still is) made available free online.  Now, the band is gearing up to release The Unnatural World on February 4th, 2014 through The Flenser/Enemies List.