Expert Work Records out of Columbia, Missouri proves that they have a knack for uncovering great under-the-radar bands long forgotten or even unpublished - think of Tintoretto or We Contain Multitudes - and their newest release by Drill for Absentee is proof for that. Just think of a band that might somehow have influenced Thursday in all its Post-Hardcore glory with shifty beats, variable singing and screaming parts and spoken word elements. And all of that is just Side A of Strand of a Lake Vol. 1 and Vol. 2!

Drill for Absentee – a band between tenses, not tensions. Drill for Absentee’s music – a result of tensions, not animosities. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, okay? We are talking about a band from Philadelphia, PA, where it was formed 30 years ago by band members Michael Nace (guitar/vocals), Kevin Kelly (bass/vocals) and Bryan Sargent (drums) who set out on a journey through Math-Rock infused Post-Hardcore. The guys released a demo, a 7”, a CD EP and a collection of live-recordings before they separated before the millennium. However, there is also the new version of Drill for Absentee, with Mike and Kevin now being joined by new drummer Ken Kuniyoshi, whose joining also changed the locale of the band drastically, because he lives in Japan, so that the band is now an intercontinental trip, with Nace and Kelly also living on different ends of the States. Of course, that had a hand in the way the three write songs and record them, as all band members recorded their parts separately before Kevin mixed them. However, between 1995 and 2025, there is also another moment to note: the first part of this new release was already released in 2022 digitally and is now accompanied by four more sets that were recorded between August 2022 (before the release of Vol. 1, mind you) and March, 2025. This to me seems important, because it is also audible that the first part is brimful of energy, of youthful playfulness, of happiness of creating something together again. The second part is not less intriguing but we will get to that is a moment. Just to get back to the opening statement of this paragraph: Drill for Absentee was a band, has been a band and is a band. Hopefully they will be a band for more than their first incarnation.

Now there were never any kind of real animosities that I had read about, also not when the band split in 1999, so why “tensions”? Well, listen to the different soundscapes on Side A and Side B: Where the former is much more June of 44 or Fugazi (maybe one might also find some traces of a record called Full Collapse on this one?). A lot of things are happening on the four tracks, there is a friction between the shifty drumming, the various layers of guitars and the pumping bass lines. It sounds a bit like the teenage band that tries to combine too many influences into one song – but with one difference: There is Kevin’s bass that holds all the things together, that provides a kind of guiding light, even when Ken is releasing his inner Animal, for example during the middle part of ”The Bad Days of Blonde, Black Nails”. Nevertheless, there is also a bit of tension between the two sides of the record as Side B shows a band that took its time, more time than for the first four great tracks. These tracks seem to be a bit more experimental, a bit more Indie. They might remind the audience more of Slint or the melodic parts of mid- to late-era Sonic Youth, when dissonance was less important. If anybody wants to say the tracks remind one of a poppy version of Don Caballero 2, then I might want to throw in American Football (the album, not the EP) for good measure as well, especially as a reference of the more hushed vocals on Vol. 2.

Now, what to make of Strand of a Lake Vol. 1 and Vol. 2? Easy – listen, even if it’s not easy listening, because it will take your mind to many places, but maybe not a lake. Thank you Expert Work, thank you Mike, Kevin and Ken. As mentioned before – please, more than four years and more than a handful of EPs, okay? Would love to hear more of the the two different sides of Drill for Absentee!