iron lung see no end in sight

Hopping on a call with Jon Kortland and Jensen Ward, the duo that have made Iron Lung a powerviolence institution over the past 26 years, I’d built up this story about what happened after 2013’s White Glove Test that slowed down the band’s output. That album was sprawling and ambitious, a record meant to be played on your turntable with an accompanying noise piece played on a second turntable, but that couldn’t have been the root cause. Though when you look at the numbers, maybe there’s something to it. Between 2001 and 2013 the band tallied 25 releases, compilations notwithstanding. Between 2014 and 2024? Four. Something had to have happened, right? Call it music writer brain, but it’s easy to romanticize some narrative that feels larger than life when the plain fact is life happened. It really was that simple.

It’s fitting that on Adapting // Crawling, out April 18 on their very own Iron Lung Records, that’s also what their lyrics are about. A far cry from the days of Iron Lung singing about arcane medical devices and cruel healing practices, the slow progression towards centering the humans in their songs is on full display here. In many ways, Adapting // Crawling is the soundtrack to the fight to stay alive at a time when everyone, and everything, makes that harder than it ought to be. 

It’s a record about mental health and individual freedoms failing the common good, while retaining the ambitious elements Iron Lung developed leading up to White Glove Test. The song-infecting-a-song suite of “Purgatory Dust,” “Virus,” and “Purgatory Dust (Finale)” recalls the band’s experimental side while still anchoring in the sound that can only be made by Kortland and Ward. There’s a reason that the de facto tagline for their label, the plainly titled Iron Lung Records, has always been: “We know what We like and what We don’t like.” Those capitalized “We”s are important. 

I know you two have lived in different states since before White Glove Test came out in 2013. But, as the years have gone on, has the approach to being a long-distance band changed at all? Have you developed new ways of working or better ways of working?

Jensen Ward: You want to go first Jon or should I?

Jon Kortland: You go ahead. 

Jensen: We never have to take turns ever; it’s weird. I know, let’s both say the same thing at the same time. Ready?

Both: Travel. 

Jensen: Perfect. No, really, for almost the entirety of this band we’ve almost always lived in different cities. We started in Reno and we both lived there, obviously, and I, almost immediately, moved to the Bay Area like six months after we started playing music together in this band. I lived there for a little while, then I came back to Reno and we lived in Reno together for a short time, then Jon, you moved to the Bay Area, right? 

Jon: Yeah. 

Jensen: Then I moved back to the Bay in 2003 or something, only for that summer. Then we both decided we’d move to Seattle together. This was 2007-ish, right around the time we were writing Sexless//No Sex and we were working at the same place, living in the same apartment, so we were together all the time. I think it made that record a specifically dialed-in idea and approach. Previously, we were always in different towns. When we wrote Life. Iron Lung. Death. we were living in different cities so we had to approach the record in a different way than we did when we wrote the first batch of songs when we lived together and were just coming up with how we were going to function as a band. So we had a slightly different process for the first album. 

For the second album, since we were living in Seattle, that was the farthest I think either one of us had lived from where we grew up. I was born in the Bay and was raised in Reno, Jon was raised in Reno as well, so that was home for us. When we moved to Seattle, it was a totally different situation to be in. The weather was different and the people were different; everything was different. That was a big factor in unifying what we were doing at the time. I think we made, and I think other people would agree, that’s the record that people gravitate to for the most part. That’s the one everybody knows the best. We got Nick Blinko artwork for that one so it really made a big splash when we put it out, and that was so awesome for us. 

With White Glove Test, Jon moved back to the Bay and I stayed in Seattle so we had created this distance between ourselves after 2000-whatever that was… 2009?

Jon: It was 2010, yeah. 

Jensen: Since then, we’ve lived in different cities very far apart. It was a lot of moving between three cities that’s not ideal for being in a band, especially when it’s just two people. But also, because it’s just two people we’re able to circumvent a lot of the issues that bands with more members have. When you add stress to a situation, everyone’s personalities amplify and they either implode or get strong or whatever it is they do. But since it’s just the two of us, we have an easier time navigating that. We’ve worked well together for so long that it really makes the distance issue not a huge deal. 

White Glove Test was certainly that. We did the majority of writing for that record in San Francisco. I flew down and we would practice and just write the songs. It felt kind of crazy for a time because I think it was the first time we had been that far apart and still trying to do something creatively taxing, which was make an album. I love that record, I think that record’s great—and I like them all—but with each new album that we end up doing, we end up pushing our personal boundaries and our agenda further along each time we do something new. Which should be the goal of any band really, to improve and expand what it is they’re doing. I think that is certainly the case with this new album as well, and we really took our time with this one. 

Jon, you’re back in Reno now. I know in the past you guys have described Reno as this really odd place. Kind of beautiful but has a real underbelly to it. What brought you back there and how does it feel to be there now? 

Jon: Reno, when I first moved back, was really depressing. It was just a lot of tragedy and stuff going on. That was a huge influence on the writing for the record. But Reno has changed a lot since the time that we lived there. Obviously, so many things are gone and new stuff is there, and it’s whatever. But having that distance between us is not ideal. 

For the entirety of Iron Lung’s existence, you could basically count on one release or more a year. After the Savagery EP in 2014, things slowed down on the release front. What precipitated that? 

Jon: Well, we did start touring a lot at that point so there wasn’t a lot of time to write because we were just constantly playing, so that was one thing. I don’t know if we totally slowed down at that point after Savagery but we were just focusing on other things within the band. What do you think, Jensen? 

Jensen: 2013 and 2014, that was White Glove Test and Savagery, those releases are linked in my brain because we were doing so much around that time. We did this ridiculous tour of the United States for White Glove Test where we were going to play a show in every state that we’d not played a show in yet. We achieved that goal, which is amazing, but we just wanted to say that we played a show in all of the 50 states, which I don’t think a lot of bands really do. We were like, “If we route it in this weird way, we can do it.” We played Hawaii and Alaska and Maine, all these places that are kind of outliers for most touring bands. You don’t really go up there because it’s really a pain in the ass. As soon as we were done with that tour, we immediately did a bunch of other stuff. We went overseas a bunch, did some regional tours in the U.S., then we were bringing other bands over. We were busy; just so busy. 

In that time, we were able to write the Savagery record. We put limitations on what we were doing for that record. We didn’t want the songs to be super long because we wanted it to be the maximum amount of songs on a very short format. It was sort of protesting all the work we were already doing anyways. It was like, “Let’s do something easy!” 

Especially after a record like White Glove Test which was kind of two, if not three, records in one. 

Jensen: White Glove Test was a really involved process so I think we wanted to do something that was a short, sharp, shock kind of thing. We managed to do it. Then we brought a friend’s band from Spain over [Una Bèstia Incontrolable] and we did a bunch of touring with them in the U.S, then we went to Japan and Australia and Korea; we went to all of these places. 

That was right at the end of 2014 and I was really tired. I just needed a break for a little while because I was super burned out, and I didn’t want to hear our songs anymore. I just had to stop and do something else for a little bit. Certainly not break up the band or anything like that, I was just burnt and I needed a break. I intended it to be, I don’t know, six months, max. Then all these other life things happened. Because we weren’t touring as much, we had to figure out a different job situation for each of us. I’m lucky in that I have a job where they kind of let me go for as long as I want and I can always come back and it’s not a huge deal, but I know Jon’s situation wasn’t quite that easy in San Francisco, because it’s a very tough city to live in. 

You started working at the record store around then, right, Jon?

Jon: I did.

Jensen: And that became quite consuming. 

Jon: All-encompassing. 

Jesen: To say the least. 

Jon: And we can’t speak any more on that. [Laughs]

Jensen: Yeah, we don’t want to talk about that. So that all happened and then we were like, let’s make a deal where we’re not going to play a lot of shows until we write something new. We got over the idea of wanting to be on a break or whatever and it was like, alright, I have some creative juices flowing again. So we started working on a new project. And, I don’t know, we just didn’t finish anything that felt cohesive and correct. I know we were doing other bands at the time too so maybe we were focusing on those a little bit more? It gets a little fuzzy. In that time, we had planned on doing other tours as well, we had some stuff in South America set up, but it was almost like we were getting distracted with playing shows or doing these tours or these other little things and it was taking away from time we could have been writing. We weren’t writing really effectively at that time and I, also, started a family in that time as well and that’s incredibly time consuming, and is still incredibly time consuming. 

We had a big festival thing in 2017, and we recorded the Crutch Field record in that time so we would have something new to release for this festival, but I don’t know if there was anything new that came out? Maybe there was a mixtape or something between that Savagery EP and that Crutch Field thing. It was slow going there for a little bit. Then after 2017, I think we were still trying to write some more stuff but we weren’t doing a ton of it. Our lives were really busy and we were just working on other shit. 

At that point, we’d been a band for 18 years or something. We were kind of like, “Well, whatever. We don’t need to release a record a year forever.” I know Neil Young has a lot of albums, like 69 studio albums or something like that, but nobody needs that much Iron Lung in their lives. Unless you have polio, then you need it. 

How would you two describe your relationship to writing music for Iron Lung has changed since the early days? Were there specific intentions you had then that you still have now? Have your creative goals evolved over the years? 

Jensen: For myself, I’m still definitely approaching this band from the same starting point that we had when we first started playing together. The intention was always that we were going to be singing about these old medical things, be it machines or practices or whatever. The only thing that changed as far as my lyrics go was, when we first started, it was very informational. The initial chunk of lyrics for songs was about very specific things. Our friend had shingles and he had an incredibly painful time in his life when he had this disease, so we wrote a song about the disease but not as much about his struggle with it. Over the years, I’ve gravitated more towards how people react to their situations in having to deal with their diseases or their affiliations and then subdividing that reaction into a little more of a political undercurrent. I started to see a lot of parallels between the politics of living in the United States and what the direct scientific connections to those things are and how that science affects people’s lives. I started double-writing lyrics that could speak to either part of that equation. That’s the main change that’s happened. But as far as our sound goes, or whatever influence we have worked from, I think those focal points have remained the same. I think that’s created a really nice anchor for us to behave as a band. 

You know how classic rock bands will be like, alright, we’re super into R&B and blues and whatever, like early Rolling Stones, then they hit that psychedelic period and they just change? Then they hit that strung out on drugs period, and they change again. Then they’re like, fuck, the ‘80s are here, I guess we gotta make a new-wave record, and they change again. But we’ve never changed with the times like that. We’ve always come at it very focused in what we want our sound to be and haven’t really deviated from that much at all. We’re steadfast in that way. 

Jon: One thing that I think is funny is that, when we started, the sound we were dealing with was sort of out of vogue. 

Jensen: Very true. 

Jon: It was waning. It was sort of a bad word to say “powerviolence.” We embraced that; that’s what we like. We were against the grain from the beginning, so it didn’t really matter what we were doing. That being said, we can really do whatever we want. I do think that the lyrics have changed. They have become more personal and more humanized, and more socio-political for sure, because how could it not be at this point? But the approach to writing the music, in some senses, I would say it’s slightly different because we’re older and our bodies function differently. We have more knowledge of certain things but it’s basically the same approach. 

Jensen, I know you had to have some surgeries and you had some shows where B. was playing drums and you were just singing. I know, as someone who had some medical stuff happen, it made these songs hit in a different way for me. How did it feel to devote a good chunk of your creative life to exploring the ugliness of the medical industry and then become reliant on it to allow you to keep on doing that? 

Jensen: I definitely have gone through, as you put it so succinctly, “medical stuff.” [Laughs] I’ve had a lot of surgeries but none of them were really crazy ones. I’ve never had to have a heart transplant, nothing super crazy like that. All of my stuff is related to overuse or skateboarding injuries. I had to get a bunch of knee surgeries, and then my wrist, which goes back to 2007 when Jon and I worked together in this kitchen. I got a repetitive stress injury to my wrists and I think the amount of touring we did between then and when I eventually got carpal tunnel surgery, it got so bad. After I quit the kitchen job I was doing a lot of construction and cabinetry, which is really, really intense on your hands. Overuse from work, both of those jobs, and then also playing drums constantly, in multiple bands, did a number on my wrists and fingers. 

I got double carpal tunnel surgery on my wrists and I wasn’t able to play drums for a while. I think, even when we told people… I remember a show one time where I was talking about how I couldn’t feel my hands on stage. We were playing these songs and we’d have to stop all the time, not mid-song, we’d make it through the songs—luckily our songs are short—but I’d be shaking my hands like crazy because I couldn’t feel anything. Or I was wearing gloves because they had more grip on them or something. I was doing all these things that were very obvious that something was wrong if someone was paying attention; I didn’t make a big deal out of it. 

I remember announcing at this show, “I can’t feel my hands so it’s going to take me a second,” and I just talked a bunch of shit on the microphone, which people like for whatever reason. So I said, “I can’t feel my hands,” and then somebody in this song just goes, “the stranger!” I didn’t know what that meant. [Laughs] Apparently that’s a thing that you do when your hands are totally numb and you masturbate and it’s like a stranger is jerking you off or something like that. I was like, “Okay, that’s where people’s heads are at so I need to approach speaking publicly about these issues in a different way.” I’m having this moment of vulnerability on stage and it was met with this incredible sarcasm, which is hilarious, because it is a super funny thing to say, and I’m sure I just laughed it off, but I was just like, “Well, this is weird.”

This is an intensely personal thing where you have an injury or some sort of ailment that you have to deal with to the point where you need to employ the American health system. It’s certainly not an easy system to navigate, it’s an expensive thing and, a lot of times, it just doesn’t work. We’ve written songs about that sort of thing for a long time. I don’t know how many friends or family members you’ve had who have gone through any sort of medical stuff but it never really seems to work out for anybody the way that it should, and that’s ridiculous. Our country has a ton of money, we should be able to take care of its citizens, but we don’t. That’s the shortest version of it, and it’s not exactly a news story that anybody doesn’t already know, but having to process going through all of that, personally, is really hard. I don’t really know how else to put it. It’s just such a difficult thing to do. 

I also didn’t have health insurance for a long time. When I injured my knees I had to walk around with a completely severed ACL for two years. I had all kinds of other stuff going on that was sort of related to that before I could get a job where I specifically did not tell that job that I had this pre-existing condition in the hopes that they would give me insurance so that I could use that insurance to get this surgery on my knee. I was able to do that, ultimately, but it took a long, long time. It shouldn’t ever take someone that long. Now, because I waited so long, I did more damage to my knees than I should have. As I’m getting older, I’m now having to deal with a lot of those issues and it really, really sucks. 

Man, I’m really sorry. That’s just awful. 

Jensen: You know, it’s not ideal but, at the same time, my internal organs are healthy so there’s that. I can be fully cognizant in my suffering with all my joint pains [Laughs]

The curse of consciousness. [Laughs] Following that, the pandemic happens and there’s this very brief moment of people recognizing this is a fragile system and we’re all vulnerable because of it. But from what I can tell from this new album, there’s this exploration of what those things do to someone’s mental health as well as their physical health. What about going through that opened you up to explore this topic on Adapting // Crawling? 

Jon: Well, it was very personal for me. The pandemic was a time that was a complete avalanche of garbage pushed at me. I had never experienced that kind of avalanche. I had health problems. I lost my mom. I lost tons of friends. I lost pets. And I know other people did the same. How could it not be personal? We have to write about what we feel at that point. It’s much more difficult to be medical and impersonal about it. There’s definitely that aspect of the pandemic. We were also having a very difficult time writing music during that period. For me, it was a completely nonexistent creative period. It was a really hard time to navigate. 

First off, I want to extend my condolences for everyone you lost during that time. I’m really sorry, Jon. On a similar plane, I know some people who were productive during that period of time but for me it was a fucking brickwall. 

Jon: It absolutely was. 

With the physical distance between you two, I imagine that only highlighted how far you were from your creative outlets. 

Jon: It definitely did. I was very, very isolating towards myself. It was a strange time, and it was a strange time to come out of into another… whatever world we’re in now. It’s all reflective in the lyrics at this point. 

Jensen: I had a really similar experience to Jon in that I could not make any music at all. That whole time that we were locked down was just me watching the news and being so freaked out by the world. In our band, we’ve written a multitude of songs around polio. The way that people behaved during the major polio epidemic in the ‘50s, and the way that people behaved during the COVID pandemic, are eerily similar. There was a lot of willful ignorance as far as the information that was out. As we were locked down, we’re learning new things about COVID all the time, because it’s essentially a new thing, even though it’s a virus-based thing, and we’ve dealt with viruses in the past, be they measles—welcome back!—or polio—also, welcome back!—or any of the things you get vaccinated for when you’re a kid. Mumps, rubella, whatever, we’ve had different outbreaks and epidemics that people have had to deal with over the years but polio was the one that we looked at the most, for obvious reasons, which is where iron lungs come from. People’s behaviors, and the resistance to wearing a mask, was shocking. 

With the influenza thing in the early 1900s, it was a flu that went around that killed a bunch of people and everyone was just like, “I’m not wearing a mask! Fuck that! That’s crazy!” I saw so much of that being mirrored in how people were reacting to COVID. People who were having superspreader parties where they were like, “We’ll all get it and we won’t have to worry about it anymore” and then all those people died. It’s like, well, okay, that didn’t work. I would have to go grocery shopping and I’d wipe down my food with alcohol or whatever, all the crazy things people were doing to try to stay safe, then there were other people who were like, “I’m going to take horse dewormer! We’re going to inject bleach and suntan our nuts!” All this stuff that people come up with to try to solve these problems except for logic and common sense. If you can stop the spread of this thing by wearing a mask in public, that’s a very easy thing to do. In Asian cultures, if you get the flu or have a cough, you wear a mask in public. It’s the most basic, simple thing that stops the spread of infection very effectively. 

I don’t know why everyone here was so resistant to it. I think it’s our sense of American freedom and this “don’t tread on me” mentality. I understand wanting to be your own boss and rejecting what it is that authorities will tell you to do. I get it. Also, wearing a mask? Uncomfortable. If you’re a glasses-wearer [Jensen gestures to the camera] all three of us, it fogs up inside, it’s super annoying. I had to try to work during all of that too? It was awful. But we made it through. They came up with a vaccine that was effective and we were able to start hanging out again. But during that time, there was no traveling, at least not for me or Jon. 

The creativity just stopped for me. It created this mental block where I was like, the last thing I want to do is sit down with a guitar and strum some chords and come up with a cool riff. Because at what point would that riff make it to a person’s ear? Because we’re never going to play a show. We’re never going to practice. We’re never going to record these songs. There are all these things in my head that we were never going to do again because this shit’s over. I had very little hope that anything was ever going to get back to normal. It created this block for me that I just couldn’t get past. 

At one point during the pandemic I wrote a twenty second piece of music that we ended up changing and using for this new album but it was the only thing that I did. Twenty seconds of music was the only thing that I wrote during that entire lockdown period. That and I had to do, for my work, we were doing these telethon things, and I had to write a Christmas version of the Night Court theme song. So I didn’t write anything, but I did learn it and put some jingle bells in it instead of the whistle, but that was the extent of my creativity. It was really, really bad. And mentally, it was extremely difficult. Super depressed, super anxious, and just angry, and I couldn’t channel it effectively into anything. 

When did that dam kind of break? When were you having discussions, both from the societal safety end, and from the personal, mental end, did it feel like you could get back in a space of doing Iron Lung again?

Jon: We started recording a record in 2019 just prior to everything going to shit and we weren't happy with it. We were discussing, the whole time, how we could change it or what we could do and not coming up with any kind of answers for it. Honestly, it was probably two years ago when we just started rewriting everything and rethinking the whole process. How things opened up, we opened up with it, too. I was kind of resistant. I was a long-time mask-wearer. I was the only person on the plane wearing a mask. Everybody’s thinking I’m super crazy, which I probably am, but I didn’t care. But we started working through it and we basically started from scratch. Maybe not having that creative time we were able to build everything up and just push it forward. Granted, it did take a while to do that but I think, at that point, we were like, we need to make this the best that we can so let’s just keep working on it. If that doesn’t work, we’ve got to scrap it and move on to something new. 

Jensen: I’m glad that we had that time to reset. I know that, at the end of 2019 when we did that session, it was such a disappointment. We spent all this time on it and came out of it and were just like, “Ehh.” Then everything fell apart. It was like, geez, what are we doing? We have 40 minutes of music recorded and I don’t want to do anything with it. I don’t want to think about it. Then the world said, “You don’t have to.” [Laughs] 

After both being vaccinated and being able to fly, we were slow to be able to get back to the process of writing and creating anything. I think we were still processing a lot of what happened during that lockdown era. It sucked, man. 

I think it’s really admirable that you didn’t release that 2019 record because it felt like, in 2021 and 2022, it was a real boom period for music. Bands were releasing a ton of stuff, touring a bunch, there were a ton of reunions because of nostalgia for the before times. You probably could have just put that out and had people get really excited for a new Iron Lung record, but you held yourselves to a higher standard. Coming back to that material, did you pull anything from that release for Adapting // Crawling? 

Jon: Very few of those pieces ended up on the new record, as far as I can tell. If they’re on there, they are so mutated at this point. That other record is a whole ‘nother record that’s where it belongs—in a vault. [Laughs] 

Jensen: We sort of reconfigured one song from that session and that was it. I’m glad for that. Everything that we wrote after, once we got back to it, everything leading up to this new album is some of our best work, realistically. We pushed ourselves to make something that’s new and fresh and really intense. I think a lot of that sprung from being cooped up for a long time and not being able to do what it is that we’re here to do. It’s great to be reinvigorated in that way. 

I’ve always viewed Iron Lung as a progressive band, not in that classical sense, but White Glove Test, then Savagery having a different concept, and everything having a deliberate evolution behind it. Looking at this album there’s the song-infecting-another-song concept of “Purgatory Dust,” “Virus,” and “Purgatory Dust (finale)” all intersecting. How did that concept come up and how much work did it take to make it a functional piece of the album instead of a gimmick?

Jensen: Music is a fun thing to play around with, and people have always had cool and innovative ideas, and us putting a sound inside of another sound is certainly not a new thing, but I always wanted to do that. I always wanted to put a song inside of another song. The pandemic, and being able to write about the pandemic, we had a unique situation where we could write about how people were reacting to this outside pandemic trying to attack them or kill them or not affect them at all, however people were feeling about it. We could write about that and their behaviors but also, we could infect that song with the very thing they were reacting against with a completely different tone. I don’t want to say “sound scientists” because that sounds really pretentious and we’re definitely not but I sort of approached it that way. I was like, “We’ve got to put this idea inside of this other idea and then present it as one idea.” We were able to pull it off, which is really cool. Other than that, I don’t know how to answer the question that I already forgot that you asked. [Laughs] It was something I always wanted to try and I’m really happy we were able to pull it off. 

Jon: I loved the puzzle of it. I love to experiment with stuff and the idea presented was like, “Okay, really? How do we do this?” It did take a few tries to make it right. It was kind of complex and, I mean, those are the kinds of things I always like on recordings. I do appreciate a studio. I do appreciate a live recording also, but there’s a lot of things you can do in a studio that are interesting and fun that sound new and fresh, or they sound like something that’s been done before but it’s still somewhat new and fresh. 

Jensen: I don’t know of a lot of punk records that have that sort of thing on it. 

Jon: Absolutely not. 

Jensen: It was fun to be innovative in that way within our genre. I like the idea of pushing punks to listen to our music and be challenged by it. At the end of the day, we’re still a hardcore band. We play fast, angry songs that are loud. We’ve always been that. We’ve always been a hardcore punk band. I love the idea of a kid whose only sense of what punk is is listening to the new noise-pogo thing or the new beatdown thing, it’s collectively in the same zone. If we can convince those kids to listen to this and be like, “What the fuck is this? This is different. It’s still kind of what I listen to, I guess? I don’t know.” I love that “I don’t know” phase in people’s heads and I want to explore that all of the time. 

That’s one of our favorite things when we play shows, too. I don’t know how many times we’ve played with other bands that are quote-unquote powerviolence bands or whatever, all the kids in the crowd go crazy, jumping on each other or moshing or whatever and then, when we play, everyone just stands still and just watches us. For a long time I took that as, oh, people don’t like our band, but I don’t give a shit anyway because we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do anyway because this is what we like. But then I was like, maybe they’re just watching us because they don’t understand what we’re doing or they’re trying to pay attention to what we’re doing more than just something that’s easily digestible where you don’t have to think about what they’re doing and can just mosh. I choose to believe that all the people in the crowds are watching us like, “Holy shit this is weird. I want to soak it all in.” But if I’m wrong, then I’m happy to enjoy my delusions of being this great innovator that people want to pay attention to. [Laughs]

To talk about the sociopolitical element, we’re talking about disease and mental health at a time when the head of the HHS is basically saying that people should have medications taken away and they should go to work camps because he believes in eugenics. Much like we say the cyclical nature of human nature between the polio epidemic and the COVID epidemic, it feels like this record is coming out at a time when we’re weeks away from doctors prescribing lobotomies again. 

Jon: It’s weird to me sometimes. Like you said, everything is cyclical, but it’s like, did we come up with this prophecy and now it’s happening? That would be completely delusional to think that but it is very strange. These lyrics were not written for this exact moment but it’s like, well, I guess the divining rod was going the right direction. It’s hard to explain, you know?

Jensen: There’s also that idea of history repeating itself. Humans are predictable in that way. A lot of people will always react the same way to a new set of stressors. I think a lot of the lyrics that we’ve written this time around kind of speak more to the general behavior. Yes, our HHS guy is… how that came to be is a whole different discussion, and it’s awful. We’re all certainly going to be a lot worse off. 

We wrote the lyrics for this new record with that grander sense in mind. When you can speak to the experiences that other people have had, that tends to last a lot longer than a very specific cultural reference or time reference to something. I know, from my end, I wanted to write lyrics that could last and be adaptable to more than one specific scenario. I think that this record was successful in that way, certainly. 

I keep going back to the lyrics that open the record: “Whatever we were, we are certainly not that now.” It’s so simple but it’s really stuck with me. 

Jensen: It’s a really strong statement, and I’m glad that’s the first song on the record because it really does set the tone of what we’re going for. Whatever we were before, it’s not that anymore. It’s different now. It’s gone. We’ve all changed. We all went through a thing that was awful and crazy and we’re all affected by it whether we want to admit it or not. We’ve come out of it being different people. Whether we’re worse or better, I don’t know, I think some of us can claim either direction on that one. I know that I don’t feel good most of the time. [Laughs] I hope this record kind of speaks to that mentality. 

Hearing you two talk about the band’s history, and everything that went into making this record, you’ve both survived a lot that could have broken up most bands. Especially in punk and hardcore, where doing something for a couple years and then moving on once stresses hit, that’s pretty normal. Have there ever been discussions of ending the band?

Jensen: We’ve always felt like we should be a band for as long as we’re able to create something that’s worthy of being in a band. We have never really talked about breaking up. I don’t know if we would ever really break up, we would just do something different. If Iron Lung runs its course, I’m certain that Jon and I would play together in whatever the next thing would be. 

Jon: Most definitely. 

Jensen: But between him and I, there doesn’t really seem to be any sort of endpoint. We just work so well together, and this specific band can adapt and grow with the way that people change, and that’s because we haven’t set limits on it for ourselves. No one can tell us what to do because we release our own records, we’re not driven by a profit, so the money part of it is also not a factor in what we do. Really what this is, it’s 100 percent artistic freedom. There’s no stopping that. You can’t kill the integrity of something like that. 

Jon: It’s funny, we were discussing a new recording pretty much right after we were done mixing this record. We weren’t even done with this record and we were already discussing that we should do this sort of thing next. We always have some kind of concept to get along with it. Whether it ends up being that or not, who knows. But we’re still discussing the future, which is crazy at this time. 

Jensen: I’ve got nothing else to look forward to is what it boils down to. [Laughs]