Plague Vendor

When Plague Vendor were about to make their new album By Night, singer Brandon Blaine didn’t exactly know what he wanted it to sound like, but he did know what he wanted it to look like. “A house that’s falling apart but lit up like crazy,” he says now, six months after finishing a record that captures that exact feeling of ruin and regeneration, of charisma and catastrophe and of slashing at the night with nothing but pure electricity. Where 2016’s BLOODSWEAT ended with a to-be-continued moment and Blaine shouting “Romance!” into the silence, By Night ends with a second of feedback and noise. It's a perfectly spent finish to an adrenaline rush of a record that asks, “What just happened?”

Plague Vendor are already used to making nothing into something. It’s a place where the only way things happen is if you make them happen. A fearless our-way-is-the-hard-way work ethic and famously physical live shows won the band a ferocious fan base, a flash-bang debut album and place of pride on the Epitaph Records roster. When they called that album BLOODSWEAT they might’ve just been explaining what it took to make it. (Or they could’ve just been talking about those live shows.) And when they stepped back into the studio in the late summer of 2018, they were ready again to do something new.