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 Shirt” — a creepy-horny post-punk drone that writhes for four minutes on a single chord — somehow made it to MTV. Shudder to Think broke up in 1998, not long after the band jumped into the film world with music for movies like “Velvet Goldmine” and “First Love, Last Rites.”
Now the group is back in action at a moment when its omnivorous stylistic approach — not to mention Wedren’s flamboyant presentation — echoes in the work of arena-filling acts like Sombr and the 1975.
“I’ve been so gratified to see that our crowds are getting younger,” says drummer Adam Wade, which gets Wedren nodding. “I’m so curious how they found us,” the singer says. “Was it an algorithm? Was it a cool uncle?” He laughs. “Maybe it was a super-nerdy uncle.”
It’s a sunny afternoon in the Hollywood Hills, and Shudder to Think’s members — the remaining two are guitarist Clint Walsh and bassist Jherek Bischoff — are gathered on a deck behind Wedren’s home. After Shudder to Think split, Wedren found a second career as a film and television composer in Los Angeles; among his many credits are “School of Rock,” “Yellowjackets” and the Disney Channel’s “Bizaardvark,” for which he recalls once recording vocals by a 13-year-old Olivia Rodrigo in his tidy backyard studio.
The studio is where Shudder to Think has been working on a new album — the band’s first non-soundtrack LP since 1997’s “50,000 B.C.” — tentatively set to come out in early 2027. The group dropped a comeback single last year then followed that with a three-track EP this month that includes a cover of Depeche Mode’s “Something to Do.” Between releases, the musicians have been playing gigs like the one they did Sunday night at Hollywood Forever’s Masonic Lodge. (Everyone in the band now lives in L.A. except for Larson, who recently moved to New York from Sweden with his wife, Nina Persson of the Swedish band the Cardigans, and their teenage son.)
Snappy new tunes like “Thirst Walk” and “Who Sent You?” tap into the classic Shudder sound, with muscular grooves and catchy but off-kilter melodies. Yet Wedren reckons that because of the anything-goes spirit of pop in the 2020s — “Post-internet, there are no strictures,” he says — the band no longer runs on “this stick-it-to-you thing,” as he puts it. “It’s just a natural expression now.”
“There’s no dogma anymore,” Wade says, compared with the late ’80s and early ’90s, when notions of identity in rock and punk were much more rigid than they are today. “We had fun trying to tear that dogma apart,” says the drummer. Adds Wedren: “The things that come easily to us now and that are part of our musical lexicon, some of those things were for sure a ‘F— you’ to the audience. We were just like, Let’s twist the knife.”
It’s a bit of a humblebrag, but the musicians credit at least a portion of Shudder to Think’s unconventional attack — the strange chords, the eerie harmonies, the rhythms that seem to stop and start without warning — to a lack of technical proficiency.
“I’m quite grateful for our idiocy,” Wedren says. “None of what we wrote would have been written had we known what we were doing.” “Oh, it would’ve sounded insufferable,” says Larson. “I mean, I think to some people it did sound insufferable.”
There was also the matter of taste: In an era of hand-wringing over the value of ’70s soft rock and arena rock, Shudder to Think included a sultry cover of Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “So Into You” on 1994’s “Pony Express Record”; when the band toured behind that album as an opening act for Foo Fighters, Wedren would join Dave Grohl and his group to perform Journey’s “Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’.”
Shudder to Think in 1995.
(Jim Steinfeldt / Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images)
“People hated it,” Wedren remembers with a laugh. “But Foo Fighters and we are huge Journey fans, so we were like, Yeah, let’s do it. It was a much more conservative time, ears-wise.” (These days, Wedren and Walsh also play the hits of Billy Joel and the Doobie Brothers, among other giants, in the Middle Aged Dad Jam Band, an L.A.-based troupe founded by the comedian and filmmaker David Wain, whom Wedren has known since they were kids.)
Everyone in Shudder to Think says Wade got the ball rolling for the band’s reunion, which the drummer acknowledges grew out of his envy watching friends and contemporaries in groups like Velocity Girl and Pavement get back together. “They seemed so happy, and I was so happy for them,” he says. “I realized I want to do that.”
Also: Thanks to cuts from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, Wade had lost a job mixing sound for a friend’s production company with a once-steady stream of government contract work.
“I got hosed by DOGE,” Wade says, shrugging.
“We’re doing this because we felt bad for Adam,” Wedren jokes. “We didn’t want to see Adam without a smile.” (Stuart Hill, Shudder to Think’s original bassist, opted out of the reunion.)
So far, the shows have been enthusiastically received by fans, though Larson says he’s been advised by friends who’ve been in this position to manage expectations. “They told me there’s a romantic period,” he says, “and then when you’re still back after however many months — ‘We’re still doing it, y’all!’ — it gets a little harder.”
The new LP will provide a reason to keep touring. But of course it’ll also be judged against the beloved oldies. Whose comeback records do these guys admire? Larson and Wedren point to the series of albums made over the last decade and a half by Swans, the experimental rock outfit led by Michael Gira; Wade mentions Van Halen’s 2012 song “She’s the Woman,” for which the band reunited with David Lee Roth.
In a funny way, the musicians point out, the punishing economics of the modern record business can be viewed as a creative boon.
“None of us are depending on this for our nut,” Wedren says. “I’m not sure what I’m depending on anymore,” Larson adds. “But if we can’t depend on this as a thing, that frees up space in your mind to not be worried about your livelihood.”
Surely no one would claim that Shudder to Think ever played it safe in order to get paid.
“Probably not,” Larson says. “But there was that ’90s self-hatred thing too, where you’d punch yourself in the d— to see what would happen.”
Wedren smiles. “Lot of great music came from punching yourself in the d—,” he says.
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