Headphones 20th Anniversary Reissue!

Remastered audio, bonus tracks, expanded package

Hello friends! We’re celebrating the 20th Anniversary of the Headphones album with a remastered and expanded reissue.

Read on for more details…

This 20th Anniversary edition, remastered by Christopher Colbert at National Freedom (The Walkmen, Richard Swift, Pedro the Lion), is housed in a gatefold jacket with expanded artwork by Grammy-nominated designer Jesse LeDoux, plus liner notes by writer and Belmont University Associate Professor David Dark. The self-titled album threads a delicate needle, simultaneously personal and prophetic. Songs like “Major Cities” tackle the macrocosm of American imperialism with clarity and anger, while tracks like “I Never Wanted You” unearth the raw wounds of interpersonal defeat. These are stories of inner and outer collapse, of bullies (both personal and political) wreaking havoc, yet rendered with humanity. Even in its darkest moments, though, Headphones pulses with the hope that honesty might light a way forward—if only we’ll bear witness to the truth.

Undertow has an exclusive limited edition Clear with Black Splatter vinyl (500 copies) that comes with a bonus 7” on black vinyl with two extra songs. We also have hand-numbered limited edition compact disc (500 copies). You can pre-order those directly from Undertow.

All orders from Undertow get full album download + bonus tracks immediately after purchase (MP3 + WAV).

Also check out the exclusive Transparent Red with Black Galaxy vinyl Suicide Squeeze has available (250 copies).

And there’s a retail version on Yellow vinyl available at record stores.

The remastered album is also available at all the usual digital outlets.

SONGS
1. Gas and Matches
2. Shit Talker
3. Hot Girls
4. I Never Wanted You
5. Major Cities
6. Natural Disaster
7. Hello Operator
8. Pink and Brown
9. Wise Blood
10. Slow Car Crash

BONUS SONGS
The Five Chord
Gas and Matches (acoustic)
* Included on a separate 7" record that comes with the LP
* Included on the CD as bonus tracks.

In 2005, Headphones arrived as a seismic shift in David Bazan’s already formidable canon—a collection of synth-driven confessions that push the boundaries of narrative songwriting. Stripped down to its barest essentials, the album finds Bazan and collaborators Tim Walsh and Frank Lenz constructing an audaciously raw soundscape: no guitars, just synthesizers, live drums, and Bazan’s unmistakable vocals. Twenty years later, it remains a masterwork of emotional excavation and geopolitical reckoning, as relevant today as the day it was released.

On its twentieth anniversary, Headphones feels more vital than ever. For those who’ve lived with it since 2005, this reissue is a chance to revisit an old wound, to press on it and see what’s healed and what still aches. For new listeners, it’s a chance to sit with something audacious and true—an album that invites us to reckon with the ways we fail each other—and the ways we might still be good. Twenty years on, Headphones remains a rare album that doesn’t just speak to you, but asks you to listen harder.

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