Death From Above 1979 Are Just “Death From Above” Now

Death From Above 1979 Are Just “Death From Above” Now

Death From Above 1979 have decided to undergo a shift, dropping the year suffix from their band name. Sebastien Grainger and Jesse Keeler will now be professionally known as Death From Above, as CoS reports. While their social media handles will go unchanged, all future music and shows from the duo will reportedly arrive under the new name. Death From Above just released a new song, “Freeze Me,” premiering it on MistaJam’s BBC Radio 1 show earlier today and promising “it will not be 10 years” until their next album. The band’s last studio album, The Physical World, came out in 2014, ten years following their LP You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine.

The name “Death From Above 1979” was initially chosen after James Murphy’s label Death From Above Records filed a cease and desist against the band. They responded by attaching the legal minimum amount of numbers required to keep the first part of the name, and then penning a statement to Murphy on their website: “FUCK DFA RECORDS FUCK JAMES MURPHY WE DECLARE JIHAD ON THEM HOLY WAR ENDING IN THIER DEATH AND DISMEMBERMENT… james murphy is a selfish piece of fuck that will burn in the flames of a specially dedicated rock and roll jihad. if i had the resources i would fly a plane into his skull.”

Murphy told his side of the story in an interview with Pitchfork back in 2005, saying that he had known about the band name for a long time. “We just tried to make it work as well as possible. I think they seem to understand it now,” he said. “If they wanna be aggro in the press, I don’t care. If that works for you, that’s funny. It’s all very Andy Kaufman to me.”

In an interview with the Guardian from 2014, Grainger and Keeler addressed their diatribe: “That was our attitude then and we now know that James Murphy wasn’t involved in the cease-and-desist. He was on honeymoon,” Grainger said. It’s unclear if that issue has now been resolved. Pitchfork has reached out to reps for Death From Above, DFA Records, and James Murphy for comment.

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