The Jawbreaker reunion that no one thought would ever happen did unfold at last year’s Riot Fest, in a set that sounded like no time had passed since the band’s break-up in 1996. Blake Schwarzenbach, Chris Bauermeister, and Adam Pfahler have actually stayed on the road, playing shows in New York and Los Angeles earlier this month. They also recently signed on to play at Seattle’s Upstream Music Fest + Summit in June.
This is all very good news for fans who enjoy hearing Bivouac songs live, but Schwarzenbach tells the Going Off Track podcast (via Brooklyn Vegan) that the band wants to focus on making new music this summer. “It’s for our own excitement. We can’t keep playing these same songs,” the Jawbreaker frontman says. “I mean, they’re wonderful for people who have not seen it—we’re lucky there are people that wanna see it—but we need some new songs to make it exciting.” (This writer did catch one of the three Hollywood Palladium shows the band played, and heard other concertgoers say the set list was only slightly reworked from night to night. It was still great, for the record.)
So this summer, the band is just “gonna be trying to write, jam. What we really wanna do is just riff out and see what comes,” Schwarzenbach says. “I’m spending the next month writing at home, and then we’re gonna converge in San Francisco and go in a studio and see what happens.” Here’s a hint of what’s to come: “I like the more band-like jams that we have [like “Bivouac”] or “Jet Black” or songs like that, that could only be as a unit.”