Death From Above 1979 have long maintained the reputation for raucous, in-your-face rock music that’s packed with energy and hooks galore—and if you were thinking they’d let up more than 25 years into their career, think again. Private Lives—the fifth album from the powerhouse duo that is Sebastien Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler—finds DFA 1979 more invigorated than ever before, with sharp and tangy melodies complementing the duo’s signature low-end thickness and eternally cool swagger. Simply put, these guys make it sound easy to make music like this, even as their approach remains nearly peerless.
The invigorating and at-times surprisingly serpentine Private Lives arrives after a rare moment of looking back for such an in-the-moment band; following the release of 2021’s sensational Is 4 Lovers, Grainger and Keeler underwent several retrospective performances, specifically a tour celebrating the 20th anniversary of their groundbreaking debut You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine as well as several shows commemorating the 10-year anniversary of their second album The Physical World from 2014, which marked their reunion after a brief breakup period between the pair. “Playing old songs every day really inspires you to want to make new songs,” Keeler says, while Grainger sardonically adds, “Playing The Physical World shows was the final nail in the coffin for me in terms of celebrating our past. I was so sick of praising ourselves.”
So DFA 1979 got to work near the end of 2025 on assembling what would become Private Lives, unearthing unused but privately cherished demos and drawing from their wealth of experience to craft what Grainger refers to as “the fastest record we’ve ever made. “The way we made this record is in line with the linear process we’ve had since the beginning, when we lived together and writing music was just a matter of going down a flight of stairs,” Grainger explains, before drawing parallels between how this one came together and the creative process of 2017’s Outrage! Is Now. “We write separately, put it all together in a pot, and say, ‘OK, what do we have here?’”
Joining the buds alongside this watched pot is producer and Montreal music scene veteran Adrian Popovich, who DFA 1979 have known since his time in the seminal garage rock band Tricky Woo. “They were a very important band for me,” says Grainger, who also plays with Popovich in the rock band American Lips. “Watching them play live was a revelation. They caught me up to the real spirit of rock and roll.” Cutler adds that Popovich’s expert guidance allowed him and Grainger to feel freer than ever before. “In the right circumstance, you can do a lot of things without having to explain what you’re doing—but I still reflexively explain myself, and I don’t know why,” he explains. “As time went on, that became less necessary while working with Adrian. He understood the value of what it is that we do, and I don’t think we’re egotistical enough to see what Adrian sees in us.”
The results are a record brimming with megawatt boldness, as Grainger’s vocals are more front-and-center than ever before on songs like the cascading anthem “Like My Ex Did” and laser-guided hardcore missile that is “Dreams”. “I’m far more discerning with what I’ll sing on,” he self-effacingly states, while Cutler is far more effusive: “You can hear the level of increased confidence in his abilities, and that inspired me to play less at times, because I knew that there’d be something else there to fill in the spaces. During mixing, I kept asking the vocals to be louder as a result.”
Let’s talk about the volume for a second: Private Lives is capital-L loud, but not in an overly aggressive way. The driving backbeat and pummeling riffs of the title track are awesome like a giant wave, while “Escape From Steeltown” winds and wiggles until building to an energizing, shout-filled climax topped with ziggurat guitars. “Lyrically, it started out as a bit of nonsensical stream-of-consciousness, but a theme started to emerge in regards to a family member of mine’s current life predicament,” Grainger explains while talking about the tune. “Her story is quite compelling and harrowing, so I wanted to talk about the situation while maintaining this elusive psychedelia. When I was done with it, I was quite emotional.”
Indeed, Private Lives is as personal of a record as its title suggests; “TV Don’t Talk Back” addresses the persistence of paranoia while “Like My Ex Did” zeroes in on the surprising and not-at-all-pleasant aftereffects that the dissolution of a relationship can carry. The raved-up “Mystery,” meanwhile, enlists Lovefoxxx of Brazilian party-starters CSS to duet with Grainger in a song about family life: “It’s a song about me and my daughter, so I needed a boy-girl duet for my ‘daughter’ to respond in the second verse,” he explains. “Right away, I was like, ‘Luísa from CSS has to sing this.’ We’d been talking about doing something together for a couple of years, and it just made total sense. When I asked her, she was super enthusiastic about it and pretty much did it right away.”
The dancefloor-collapsing breakdown that is “Mystery” is just one of many moments on Private Lives that reaffirm DFA 1979’s status as one of North America’s pre-eminent rock acts, a continuation of a catalog and live presence that has remained nearly unmatched through several decades running. “When you’ve been doing something for a long time, you can almost do it on autopilot—but that’s not the nature of this band,” Keeler says while discussing how Private Lives fits into the band’s considerable legacy. “There’s no back seat here, we’re both driving all the time. We never have the feeling that we have anything to prove to anyone but ourselves—but if anyone was wondering whether or not we are still that band, I think this record really types that out in bold for them.” Well said.
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