Crash Harmony Returns With Their New Single - Orange Background

Crash Harmony, photo by Jon Drake

Crash Harmony, a New York City indie rock band, has released their debut album ‘No One Asked For This’ via New Jersey’s Magic Door Record Label. After a 30-year hiatus, the quartet returns with a full-length album of ten songs and a video for ‘Orange Background’, which Nils Nadeau describes as “a letter from our college selves to our grown selves and also, in a way, from Generation X to what we have now in the world,” following the previously released video for ‘Velour Goddess’.

Crash Harmony is formed by Dave Derby (vocals, guitars), Mike Potenza (guitars, keyboards, vocals), Jon Nighswander (bass, vocals), and Nils Nadeau (drums, percussion, vocals). The band was established in 1986 at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and had not played together since May 1988, when they began recording this album in 2022.

Mixed and mastered by Ray Ketchem (Guided by Voices, Elk City, Gramercy Arms, Luna) at Magic Door Recording in Montclair, NJ, this album was recorded by Ketchem and Dave Derby in NYC, and produced by Ketchem together with Crash Harmony.

“Yale rock – an oxymoron too good to be dismissed, meeting as undergraduates swept up in the current of something more exciting than college – a New Haven music scene that was real. While college was for figuring out what you wanted to be, college rock was for figuring out what you wanted to sound like. Crash Harmony was absorbing everything, and trying it all on for size at house parties, frat houses, and clubs throughout New England.”

Dave went on to The Dambuilders (and then Gramercy Arms), Mike served on The Anderson Council, Jon left for Europe, and Nils wandered north. But no matter where they went, Crash Harmony still kind of mattered. Eventually, they had to come back. They had to return to that place so, decades later, Crash Harmony reformed to make a new record of old songs – a rock-and-roll reenactment of the New Haven scene that changed them forever.

On October 18, ‘No One Asked for This’ will be released on vinyl and digitally everywhere, including Apple Music and Spotify. In all formats, it can be ordered directly from the label via Bandcamp: https://crashharmony.bandcamp.com/album/nobody-asked-for-this

Track list:

01 Velour Goddess

02 Last Night’s Girl

03 Building Blocks

04 Under Your Skin

05 German Camp

06 Dancing With Joan

07 Orange Background

08 WrIting You Out Of My Scene

09 Floating

10 Cymbelline

Orange Background – Video directed & filmed by Dan Karlok at Magic Door Recording