How Shudder to Think came back to life

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Set us as preferred When the members of Shudder to Think reunited in 2025 — more than a decade after they’d last played together and nearly three decades since their last album came out — the physical demands of the band’s live show were not not on their aging minds.“Being on the clock as we all are, it was like: This needs to happen now or it’s not gonna happen,” says singer Craig Wedren, who formed Shudder to Think amid the volatile mid-’80s Washington, D.C., punk scene that also produced Rites of Spring and Fugazi.Back then, Wedren would whirl and shimmy across the stage, letting his quasi-operatic vocals rip as his bandmates slammed out twisty-turny riffs; to ready themselves these days for such an onslaught, the musicians have taken to doing “some qigong stuff” before shows, according to guitarist Nathan Larson.“All the stretching and meditating — I think it’s been good for my body,” Larson says.

“Way better than being in the van chugging NyQuil,” Wedren adds, “which was our low-rent time-killer back in the day.”Saddled — or blessed? — with a confrontational edge, Shudder to Think was as intense as any of the other acts associated with D.C.’s Dischord Records label.But its music was weirder and more expansive, with knotty prog-rock structures underpinning luscious pop hooks; as the band’s peacocking frontman, Wedren’s performance of gender and his arch yet impassioned emotional tone complicated established ideas about masculinity in underground guitar music.By 1993, the band had built a devoted following — devoted enough that Epic Records signed Shudder to Think to a major-label deal in the hopes that the group might slip through the door that Nirvana’s success had opened for left-of-center rock bands.

That never quite happened, though the band’s song “X-French Tee Sh...