Parts & Labor, will release Set Of All Sets, their first new album in 15 years, on July 10 via Ernest Jenning Record Co. Ahead of the the LP’s arrival, the band have the LP single “Arterial Material.”

The band’s BJ Warshaw shares, “’Arterial Material’ grapples lyrically with health issues and the challenges of navigating our frequently inadequate care systems. I wrote the lyrics long before the delusional, anti-science fever dream known as ‘MAHA’ came to prominence. On the one hand, the song confronts head on how hard it is to separate fact from fiction, to make sound choices when faced with dire side effects, to determine whether the latest trend is truly a miracle elixir or merely a pharmaceutical corporation’s cash grab. On the other, in spite of the frustrations I’m vocalizing around the slow deterioration of my physical self, I’m so grateful for the care I’ve received. The song kicks off with feedback generated from my hearing aids, prescribed to mitigate my fairly crippling tinnitus, alongside samples from my audiology testing. Nestled in the cacophony are audio samples from my various MRIs.”

All Sets finds the band re-energized, co-founders Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw are joined by the simultaneous battery of drummers Christopher Weingarten and Joe Wong, members during their four albums released on Jagjaguwar.

More than a decade since announcing their “indefinite hiatus,” the band returns against all odds: Brooklyn’s soaring rents have driven most of its members miles from their homebase and each other, Warshaw lives under the shriek of crippling tinnitus, the concept of “forming a band” becomes less of an economic viability every year, and both the music industry and world at large have essentially imploded. In turn, a band already steeped in paradoxes — noise and pop, ambient and punk, storm and calm — have created an album about building the impossible. “What if we built a house no one can live in,” Friel sings in thrash-pop blast “Haunted Limbs.” What if we wrote a song no one could play?” Songs like the Verhoeven-esque “Better Run” and percussion-phase ballad “Anti-Lions and Lemonade” invent utopias, a fitting vision for an album that conjures a punk orchestra from four musicians.

“If some certain quantum theories are true, everything that might exist, does exist through parallel universes. Grappling with that feels simultaneously full of promise and struck with grief, that anything is possible, but also that this is the universe we’re stuck with,” says Warshaw “We wanted to turn towards promise, to build this thing against so, so many odds. To fight against our own inertia and fraying hope.”

From 2002 to 2012, Parts & Labor were part of the Brooklyn of loft parties, parking lot shows, with $10 cover charges, sweaty handstamps and Todd P emails. Parts & Labor were leading lights of a noisier, scruffier, more art-damaged shadow economy alongside musicians like Black Dice, Oneida, Sightings, the USA Is a Monster, Zs, Tyondai Braxton, Aa, Japanther and more.

“It’s curious how little of the indie music from the aughts concerned itself with politics,” author Ronen Givony writes in the recently released Us V. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade in New York (Abrams Books). “For all the ruptures, chaos, and tragedy of the Bush era… the cultural response amounted to a collective numbness, trauma, and grief. No music stood in contrast to this tendency more than Parts & Labor.”

Parts & Labor toured across the U.S., Europe and Japan, playing shows with Mission of Burma, The Fall, TV on the Radio, Deerhoof, Battles, Melt-Banana, Lightning Bolt, Titus Andronicus, Oneida and many more. Their final bow, held at Brooklyn’s 285 Kent in February of 2012, was a cacophonic send-off that united Weingarten and Wong on one stage and ended with the audience tearing the stage to pieces.

During the following 14 years, Dan Friel has released eight albums for avant-rock lodestar Thrill Jockey: four toy-keyboard scuzz-pop solo excursions and four LPs with his interstellar power trio Upper Wilds. Joe Wong has become an in-demand film and TV composer, penning the music for Emmy-winning shows like Russian Doll and Master of None alongside releasing a pair of psychedelic pop solo outings. BJ Warshaw has been co-running a multidisciplinary artist retreat, LEVEL, in a former Boy Scout cabin in Chapel Hill, NC since 2016. Christopher Weingarten has maintained a formidable career as a music writer and recently launched the all-star “artisanal white noise” app Fuzzzel.

“It felt like all the things we were worried about back in the day – techno-fascism, authoritarianism, rapacious capitalism, societal division – were coming true if not getting worse,” says Warshaw. “Reuniting has been a lifeline. The doing is the antidote.”

Parts & Labor
Set of All Sets
Tracklist

1. Endless Cycle Pt. 1: Repetition Nil
2. Endless Cycle Pt. 2: Edges of Forgetting
3. Many Worlds
4. Descending
5. Haunted Limbs
6. Seamripper
7. Arterial Material
8. Anti-Lions and Lemonade
9. Descending
10. Endless Cycle Pt. 3: Better Run
11. Endless Cycle Pt. 4: Working in Storm
12. Indecision Tree
13. Descending
14. Parallel Tracks
15. Off By One
16. Like They’re Here to Stay
17. Set of All Sets

Pre-order Set Of All Sets by Parts & Labour HERE