Twenty years after the release of their debut album, Death From Above 1979 are marking the anniversary by attempting to liberate the USA and Canada and making a tour stop Friday night at Underground Arts in Philadelphia.

In 2004, the Canadian punk duo released “You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine,” a collection of 10 tracks piling distorted bass amps, synths, and drums that would work great in a sweaty basement or in a discotheque. The record catapulted the band straight into the spotlight, landing on video game soundtracks, late night TV shows, and even in opening acts for Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age back in 2005.

During that tour, however, the band decided to break up, starting new projects and doing solo work before reuniting in 2011 and releasing three more albums, including The Physical World, which just recently turned 10 years old.

Sebastien Grainger, the band’s drummer and lead vocalist, isn’t really a nostalgic person. But as the band has set out touring and rerecording their new record, it turns out it wasn’t as easy as he originally thought it would be.

“It seemed to uncover a lot of ghosts and hauntings that I didn’t really realize were there, and maybe those are things that need to be exorcised,” Grainger said. “It’s coincided with opening up the archive, seeing old photos of the time and realizing how much has changed, how much I’ve changed … how supremely confident yet naive I was, how I felt like I had figured it all out in a way, but also I was very self-conscious.”

The rerecording isn’t just an experiment to give the band a chance to do something different with the material. It also provides them a way to celebrate it.

“We’re just going to get this 20th anniversary off the shelf and out into the world,” Grainger said. “And then once that’s done, I don’t ever want to look back, to be quite honest.”

But the band gets a lot of joy in playing the record live, as Grainger says he, along with the band’s bassist and synth player, Jesse F. Keller, have gotten far better at playing over the years.

“I still feel like our band has maintained the desperation and the rawness,” Grainger said. “The live show and the way we wrote those songs, they were pushing at our absolute ability at the time and we’re kind of always doing that. They’re not easy songs to play, but we’re so accustomed to like riding that fine line between it being really good and it falling apart.”

“I think it’s just the nature of the music and it’s the nature of remaining a two-piece and having all of that pressure on you,” Grainger said.
The band’s intense touring regimen has landed them in the City of Brotherly Love quite a bit over the years. Grainger said Philly has an “interesting energy” which has resulted in some “really raw shows for us.”

“The Philly shows are always such a relief to me because it has that East Coast punk rock energy,” Grainger said. “We used to play that basement at that church (First Unitarian) and those were fun times.”

“I also remember playing a crazy show in Philly where we were sponsored by this hybrid malt liquor energy drink called Sparks, and we were playing this tiny bar and they were giving out this drink for free,” Grainger said. “The audience, they were just like stacking these cans, like making Jenga kind of towers of these cans and the energy in the room was totally insane, completely cracked out, because people are drinking, they’re wasted, they’re spinning out of control. There’s always been this very kinetic feeling with Philly.”