“I had the idea that when I was an adult I would figure out a lot of personality flaws and issues that I’ve had my whole life,” Barrett says of those inward-facing anxieties. The eponymous lead single had some fans predicting that the album would be focused on climate change, but Barrett’s on-record malaise straddles, as he says, “That inward and outward-facing sense of, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s just hard to be alive right now.’” With all that misery in mind, Have a Nice Life’s first album in five-and-a-half years, Sea of Worry, is very much on-brand: “Lyrically, all of the songs are anxiety-driven, in one way or another,” Barrett says. Those are very powerful systems operating on a brain that still fuckin’ thinks, ‘I need to pick up a banana in the woods because I might starve to death.’ It weirds me out, and I think that stuff comes out in the music more often than not.” It’s very easy to get sucked into it, and I worry about that. “The internet is like, a resentment factory.

“One of the things about the online universe-which is where Have a Nice Life is a band essentially-is it’s very easy to turn very resentful,” he says. Pre-order buy pre-order buy you own this wishlist in wishlist go to album go to track go to album go to trackĮven so, Barrett sees something inherently broken in the very web-based communities that put his band on the map. “It’s an intensely gratifying thing, because neither Tim or I thought anybody would listen to it, and we really emptied a lot of ourselves into that record.” (Naturally, Have A Nice Life have their own subreddit as well.) “No one would know who we were if it wasn’t for the internet,” says Berrett.

r/indieheads, which boasts a userbase over 800 times that size, awarded it a 9.02/10 score in a community poll. 4chan’s /mu/ board-that small, impassioned, and notoriously picky bunch who helped signal-boost Death Grips and Car Seat Headrest into the public consciousness-rated it #10 on their essentials list. But somewhere between Dan Barrett and Tim Macuga’s initial self-release and its seven-and-counting vinyl reissues, Deathconsciousness attracted a fervent audience in various online music communities. Deathconsciousness, the 2008 debut from Connecticut duo Have A Nice Life, is the last album you’d expect to go viral: 85 minutes of eclectic lo-fi home recordings from central Connecticut, somewhere between between post-punk, dark ambient, and darker folk, all inspired by and emulating the deepest pits of depression.

Sea of worry have a nice life