Touring to celebrate the reissue of Occupational Hazard will be particularly cathartic for Unsane’s lead singer and guitarist, Chris Spencer. During the original press tour, he was violently attacked coming out of a bar in Vienna.
“The record was done, and I went to Europe to do interviews. I was jumped by a few guys coming out of a bar. They thought I was military because I was wearing camo pants. The doctor told me that there had been a lot of attacks on the US military around that time. I had staples holding me together. They had to do exploratory surgery and wound up lifting out my internal organs. Part of my small intestine was removed to stop the internal bleeding,” he recalls.
“A couple of weeks later, I was on tour for ten months, wearing a girdle to support recovery. Hitting the guitar each night was painful. The other guys were joking that if my guts spilled out, they’d call the tour. After that, the band took a long break so I could recover. In retrospect, we should have taken a break before the tour. For me, the best part of this will be that I’ll be able to play these songs in much better physical condition.”
The record sounds even more menacing than it did in its original form and contains some of the band’s best work. If you are unfamiliar with Unsane, this is a great place to start. The collection’s impact is due in large part to the band’s relentless touring.
“These songs came from the era when we just went into touring overdrive. That created a dynamic. We played these songs a lot before the record came out. By the time we got to the studio, these songs were locked in,” says lead singer Chris Spencer. “Some people call it ‘tour tight’. When you get that synergy, playing the songs together becomes like muscle memory.”
When he is not busy with Unsane, Spencer also fronts Human Impact, another outlet for his cathartic dispatches from the darkest recesses of life. The band’s artwork is notoriously grisly, and Spencer takes pride in being the ringleader of these macabre images.
“A lot of my inspiration comes from when I was living in New York and how fucked up it was at the time. It’s changed a lot since then,” he says. “The meat markets where I used to buy gallons of cow’s blood for the artwork are gone now.”
The creative process for these projects was always run-and-gun. “We had to go in and do things quickly, so we had to have plans. We called it a blood run. I’d take a photographer friend, James Rexroad, with me, and I’d set up the idea. We’d find a space that looked cool, and we’d just defile it with the cow’s blood like a crime scene. It’s a very guerrilla way of doing it. We never had permits. When we did Occupational Hazard, the cops did show up, so we pretended to be film students who didn’t know what we were doing. We got it done, but we had other stuff we wanted to do. We had some flames in other versions of the Occupational Hazard cover.”
The remaster and reissue of Occupational Hazard have been part of an ongoing project to restore the band’s music, which began during the pandemic.
“In 2020, Todd Cote, our manager and booking agent, got everything back for us except Total Destruction, which Atlantic owns. Thanks to Todd, I have these DATs, and I can remaster and reissue on our label, Lamb Unlimited, and then we just hire publicity. Being able to reissue Improvised Munitions, our very first record, was very exciting. The test pressing was sold to a record store, and a fan bought it. I found this guy, and he let us borrow it for the remaster. The sound quality really needed some help,” Spencer explains.
However, Total Destruction, which was released during the partnership between Matador Records and Atlantic Records, will not be part of this campaign. “We were going to do it chronologically, but the issues with Atlantic ruined that idea. We never wanted to work with major labels. Matador’s great, but Atlantic was a nightmare. They’ll sign so many bands, but if you get stuck with a label that isn’t interested in you anymore and you owe them two more records, you’re fucked,” Spencer said.
Spencer was thrilled to revisit Occupational Hazard, which has a distinct mix of grit and polish and has only become more powerful. “The first place we worked on Occupational Hazard was all analog, and that gave it a thickness and heaviness. But we got the rough mixes back, and we thought the mixes were a little muddy-sounding. I called Dave Sardy, who had been working on some big projects with bands like Slayer at the time, and asked him to work on the tracks. He insisted that we go to a studio in midtown, and when Dave tells you we need to go to a certain place, you go there. It helped to go from a lo-fi, gritty, dirty place to mix at a high-end studio,” he shares.
They worked with longtime collaborator Andrew Schneider on the remaster. “The sound just pops out more. At that time, things sounded more compressed. I even noticed things that Dave did more in this remaster. For example, there is a subtle vibrato guitar on the first track. It has more clarity and push, and it’s louder. At the time, we weren’t as conscious of mastering. We didn’t have the experience. We would go with who the label used. Now, we insist on using someone who gets our sound. Andrew knows us, so it was great to work with him again.”
Between touring, Spencer and the bands will begin working on the next Unsane and Human Impact releases. Despite Unsane’s enduring popularity and dedicated fan base, Spencer is grateful, but sometimes surprised, by the size of the group of people who call themselves Unsane fans. They even earned a special distinction from Slayer’s Tom Araya when they opened for the metal legends. “He told me we were the only band, including Motörhead, that fans didn’t throw stuff at,” Spencer laughs. “I don’t write these songs to be popular. It’s catharsis and venting, a personal outlet for me. I’m surprised people like it.”