“I try not to think about it.”Įven stranger is how their fans have started to look to the band - Dan in particular - as role models. Have A Nice Life are well aware of the dissonance between how they’re perceived and who they really are. Anyone expecting to find pictures of abandoned hospitals or some such edginess on Dan’s social media would instead be greeted with dad jokes and footage of the singer playing songs with his kids.
In addition to working as a teacher, Tim maintains a farm with his family (the most recent addition a trio of alpacas), and Dan is happily married and a father of two. The punchline is that despite making music singularly focused on death and suicide ideation, the two are by all appearances living well. This, incidentally, is the set up to the second joke in band’s name. Dan and Tim had become, entirely by accident, the patron saints of the alienated, the depressed, and the terminally nerdy music collector. Within a decade, Have A Nice Life had gone from an internet oddity to selling out concerts in Brooklyn and playing coveted spots at Roadburn Festival in the Netherlands. “That urge to make music with whatever you have on hand.” Despite the generation gap, it isn’t too hard to see shades of the band’s lo-fi immediacy and emotional vulnerability in the emo-influenced Soundcloud rap scene. “I recorded that guitar part in my bathtub and now it’s on the front page of Us Weekly for a rapper’s eulogy,” he says, stunned. Tim was stunned to discover that rapper Lil Peep had sampled the band’s A Quick One Before The Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut on his song Shiver. Have A Nice Life’s influence extends beyond the world of rock music. Before Have A Nice Life hit the stage at Brooklyn Bazaar, Thom Wasluck of Planning For Burial thanked Dan for taking a chance on him 10 years prior, and launched into a performance that shared the same doom-and-gloom ingredients as Have A Nice Life, repurposed for a metal setting. On top of their own releases, the duo have earned a reputation for putting out haunting, day-ruining, lo-fi music on their label Enemies List. “When we first announced that we were putting out The Unnatural World, I had people emailing me three days later asking where the record was.” “Have A Nice Life fans are intense,” says Jonathan Tuite, whose record label The Flenser released Deathconsciousness’s 2014 follow-up The Unnatural World. The record was like a Creepypasta come to life, an album so thoroughly haunted by death that you’d feel cursed by association just listening to it. The rawness of their recordings and their deeply distressing subject makes them a hard sell for most listeners, but for an audience hunting down and sharing the darkest music they could find, Deathconsciousness was everything they could have asked for. I couldn’t do anything,” Dan laughs.ĭespite rarely performing live and having almost no conventional press coverage, Have A Nice Life developed a fanatical cult following. “He’s fucking yolked so he had no trouble with it. Barrett later took Fantano rock climbing to thank him for the coverage. NOT EVER.” t-shirt and was an e arly champion of Barrett’s solo project, Giles Corey. Fantano would frequently wear the band’s iconic “NO FUN. Aided by their relative anonymity and Deathconsciousness’ ominous liner notes, which described a fictional medieval cult that worshipped God’s murderer, Dan and Tim quickly became the stuff of internet myth.Įqually important to the band’s popularity was the support of Youtuber Anthony Fantano. The result of this patchwork process was 2008’s Deathconsciousness, a double disc album that quickly became a viral hit amongst internet communities like /mu/, sputnikmusic, and rateyourmusic. “He would record part of an acoustic song, go do Tae-Kwon-Do and I’d add a Rammstein ending.” “Dan was a latchkey bandmate,” Tim chimes in.
“We would get together once a week, work on music for a few hours and then go get burritos.” “We never had any intention of these songs existing in the flesh” Dan says, voice hoarse after a sold out show at Brooklyn Bazaar. Shortly after the death of Dan's father, they started recording those songs on a shoestring budget, burying their voices under dense layers of distortion. The Connecticut duo are hard to pin down to any one sound, you can hear traces of black metal, shoegaze, post-punk, and emo in equal measure, but none of their music would be a suitable soundtrack to the good life.ĭan Barrett and Tim Macuga formed Have A Nice Life in the mid-2000s and quickly earned a reputation for terrorizing local open mics with morbid acoustic songs. The punchline to this version of the joke is the band’s music. On the surface the band’s name is dripping with sarcasm, the phrase being the kind of thing you only say to someone you have no plans on ever seeing again. Though little to nothing about their music is funny, Have A Nice Life’s name is a joke.