Collapsing Scenery - Stand-Up Tragedy

Collapsing Scenery has always been a band of contradictions. Formed by Reggie Debris and Don Devore (Ink & Dagger, Frail), it’s a project that doesn’t just push the boundaries of what a band is and what music can be, but violently shoves them out of the way. In fact, to call Collapsing Scenery a mere band does the (mostly) LA-based outfit a huge disservice—it’s a fever dream of electronic chaos, ethereal beauty, acid-tongued political polemics, world-weary irony, deadly sincerity, punk, acid, disco, techno, shoegaze and whatever other muses enter the room at the right time. Intellectual and cerebral yet simultaneously visceral and primal, this is a band that seeks to truly explore and reflect every aspect of the human condition, as well as the folly and the fury, the joy and the despair, of being alive.

That’s been their aim since forming in 2013—first through a string of EPs, then with their 2019 debut album, Stress Positions, and then again more recently with 2023’s second album, A Desert Called Peace. They’ve done so again now—and better (or, perhaps more accurately, worse) than ever on this third full-length. Because Stand-Up Tragedy holds a cracked and dirty mirror up at the wreckage that is the world in 2025, as well as their own lives within it.

“This record is definitely born of a lot of personal pain,” admits Debris. “And it was very much a Covid record, too, so there’s an apocalyptic feeling behind it all—there was, honestly, a thought that making music or art felt almost pointless in some way. Everyone and everything was so hermetically sealed and we were all unsure if we’d ever actually be able to put stuff out or perform again, so the idea of performative tragedy just really fit the of mood of the album.”

Though A Desert Called Peace was also a Covid record, Stand-Up Tragedy is a reminder that – despite the claims of people and politicians to the contrary – the pandemic isn’t actually over, and there are myriad effects of it still being felt today. A number of the 10 tracks that make up this album are actually from the same session as the former record, but they felt, Debris says, as if they were “part of a separate body of songs.” The result is a sequel of sorts that traces and captures the narrative and the trauma of the last few years—on both a personal and universal level. In other words, it’s the hangover from the pandemic—that dull, incessant throb inside your head that, despite your best efforts, won’t quite go away—and the wider implications that have arisen on a societal level as a result.

“I think like that we, as a society, did a very bad job of processing and mourning and making any sense of what we all lived through together,” says Debris. “The state of our public discourse, of our politics, of our society, seems incredibly sick and fractured, and I think that has to do with the trauma that we all lived through that we never really spent any time publicly processing.

And that’s definitely reflected on this album. There’s definitely a sort of a bitterness to it that is trying to capture some of that.”To some extent, then, Stand-Up Tragedy is Collapsing Scenery’s public processing of that time period—though it’s one that feels just as relevant and in tune with the world right now, a few years one, as it does about that dark void of non-time we all we went through. The result is a record full of more rage and more beauty, more fury and more love, than anything the pair have ever crafted before. In this disposable day and age of corporate algorithms, Spotify playlists, Instagram doom scrolling and TikTok-length attention spans, the band have also dared to make an actual album with a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s one that unfolds as it progresses, that you have to listen to intentionally, and which very much deserves to be listened to intentionally. That’s also the only way it’s possible to fathom how a record that starts with the laid-back slacker-post-punk of “Uncanny Guest” can finish with the pulsating, dreamy electronics of “The Acceptance World”. (continue reading full bio on DISCO)