Surgery & Pleasure

Hagen’s answer for Vundabar’s new era arrived through deconstruction. Physically unable to play with the band or to strum a guitar, he wrote this new Vundabar material completely differently: Holed up alone and building layered guitar parts by recording individual pieces until they formed a whole. He’d been broken himself, and in turn broke down what the band was, gaining a better understanding along the way.

After cutting hundreds of demos, Hagen culled the material down to the TK songs that make up Surgery And Pleasure. These explore a complex cycle of grief and all the ways it manifests in unexpected forms — physicality and escapism in “Beta Fish,” sarcastic self-pity in “Let Me Bleed,” a moment of mercy and empathy in the sprawling six-minute epic “I Need You.”

If there’s any making sense of these things, Surgery And Pleasure chooses to view loss not as subtraction in life, but some kind of twisted addition to how we see the world around us. Musically, too, Vundabar have reemerged, the same but different than we’ve ever heard them. Carrying more scars, but more perspective for them.