Vundabar cut the antics with their album ‘Surgery and Pleasure’

Continuing to feed their reputation as one of the hardest-working bands in indie rock, fuzzed-out post-punk trio Vundabar have announced a new record, Surgery and Pleasure, out March 7 via Loma Vista Recordings. They’re sharing a new single “Spades” with a video today, and will kick off a spring 2025 tour with a hometown show in Boston on release day.

“Surgery And Pleasure is a more mature synthesis of all the stuff we’ve explored before,” Vundabar singer/guitarist Brandon Hagen says of the album’s fusion of old-school Vundabar energy with a newfound muscularity and slickness. “In a way it feels like a return. It’s grownup Vundabar.”  

While Surgery And Pleasure was born from a difficult period of his life, Hagen didn’t want the record to wallow. “I was really ready to be done moaning,” he cracks. The music is rarely reflective or lachrymose. Instead, it’s one of Vundabar’s most visceral and urgent collections to date. Hagen sought an “extreme version of something very everyday and common.” He wrote many of the songs so that it could just as easily be about someone dying, the end of a relationship, or some unidentified something irrevocably breaking. All of it was interchangeable, leading to the same conclusion. “I was dealing with how to accept that change is inevitable,” Hagen explains. “These things can’t be fought. It’s about acceptance and empathy.”