Music

Against Me! say "someone fucked up" at Sire Records

by Ciaran Thompson

Last week punk band Against Me! ended their five year relationship with record label Sire and according to a post on the band’s website frontman Tom Gabel said, “We have nothing but gratitude towards all the people we worked with at the label and feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to make the records we made while with the label.”

This week however the band were outspoken about their true feelings for the label and in an interview with Rock Sound, Gabel said Sire gave their latest record White Crosses a considerable lack of promotion.

“I think that they [Sire] made some serious mistakes,” Gabel said. “For instance, there was a version of the first single ‘I Was a Teenage Anarchist’ that was not a finished version; it had some slightly different lyrics, some of the backing vocals weren’t added in and that we had just sent it in as like, ‘Hey listen to this,’ and then once the album came out, they started pushing the singles, one of them made the mistake of sending the unfinished version to every radio station in Canada. So every radio station in Canada played the unfinished version of ‘I Was a Teenage Anarchist’ because someone fucked up. And it’s just like, ‘Are you sure you’re paying attention to what you’re doing?'”

“Our deal had run out — [Sire parent label] Warner had another option but they declined to take the option,” he continued. “They’re just making massive cuts and a lot of the people who are unfortunately losing their jobs are kind of our team at the record label who we’ve worked with on the past couple of records.” [Exclaim!]