Dead Poet Society

Asked what he wants audiences to take away from FISSION, the forthcoming second album from Dead Poet Society, Jack Underkofler offers eight small but powerful words:

“We want to leave them with the truth.”

The affable and engaging 30-year-old delivers these words with the forthrightness that marks his discussions about the band he fronts—completed by Jack Collins (guitar), Will Goodroad (drums), and Dylan Brenner (bass)—and the art this collective of college friends has exhaustively dedicated themselves to molding, often to their own detriment.

It’s an answer that epitomizes the dedication with which the quartet approaches their craft and their search for its purest, most meaningful form.

“It’s not as simple as saying we want our music to leave people with a positive outlook,” Underkofler explains. “You want music to speak to wherever you find yourself. We want to leave people feeling that whatever they are experiencing is valid, no matter what place they are at in their lives.”

After a decade of defining, redefining, and perfecting their art, Dead Poet Society finds themselves on the eve of their sophomore release with a clearer vision than ever before. Make no mistake—Dead Poet Society is a uniquely captivating group, rock’s next great breakout act, with FISSION set to capture hearts and challenge minds.

Following their acclaimed debut full-length –!– (2021), FISSION seeks to unpack the personal journey its creators have undergone since. As its title hints, the 13-track album explores personal change and the turbulence of growth, taking, as Underkofler attests, “a microscopic and broad look at the events that changed who we are.”

There are deep reflections on relationship breakdowns, examinations of addiction in all its guises, ruminations on the responsibilities and challenges of adulthood, and struggles with the evolution, loss, and continual search for self. “In a lot of ways, this album is about unpacking the emotional pains that come with being an adult,” Underkofler says.

“The past few years have left me in a constant state of growth through life events that I had little control over or didn’t pan out the way I wanted them to,” he admits. “There’s a ‘before’ you and an ‘after’ you, and there’s no going back. Life tends to force your hand, and it’s futile to fight it. You have to accept that the things that happen to you will change you and let them build you into the next phase of who you are.”

“There is a constant battle to not mourn who I was because the things you go through define you and turn you into a person worth being,” he adds. “But that can be difficult to wrestle with. There is a positive to it, but it is birthed through a lot of pain.”

“It’s both exciting—‘Fuck you. I’m gonna take this head-on’—and at the same time, you’re terrified of how you’re going to get through the next month,” adds Goodroad. “One day, you’re super confident about where life is going; the next, you’re second-guessing everything. It’s like the myth of Sisyphus—it’s a boulder you have to push up the hill every day.”

Twinned lead singles “Running In Circles” and “Hurt” weave through fears of following the wrong path while hiding behind false fronts. “How Could I Love You” and “I Hope You Hate Me” tackle the sometimes bittersweet, more often simply bitter, fallout from a tumultuous relationship. “81 Tonnes” sees Underkofler revisiting a time of particular helplessness and instability, pleading:

I need peace now, slow my body down, can you pull me out?
Too afraid of fission and faith to save me from myself.

That track, in particular, gave guitarist Collins his clearest understanding of the emotions he and his bandmates share and were bringing to life through music. “Jack described ‘81 Tonnes’ to us as being about being left with ‘a permanently altered state of mind,’ which felt like the perfect summary of so many of those songs on the album to me,” he says. “They all lead you to the finish line of, ‘I’m a different person now because of all this...’”

To some extent, through FISSION’s creation, Dead Poet Society has become a different band, too—more attuned, more accomplished, and more deliberate in defining their sound. “We worked a lot more on guitar tones, bass tones, drum sounds, and paid close attention to melody,” Collins nods. “The aim was to make our sound bigger—we wanted a more dynamic record where you could hear the best representation of us live. I feel like the evolution is us maturing a little bit and wanting to create a sound that was less an obvious reflection of our influences—Muse, Queens Of The Stone Age, Nothing But Thieves, Royal Blood—and more definitively our own. We don’t control where the inspiration comes from. We just had to obey the songs and what they were telling us to do next.”

“We hone in on a feeling rather than a sound,” adds Underkofler. “This album is the defining moment of when we truly became Dead Poet Society. It’s the closest we’ve come to realizing the essence of the ideas we’ve always had for this band.”

The result is a compelling record of depth and substance, weaving through anthemic alternative, dark hard rock, and progressive indie. FISSION is at once comfortingly familiar and disconcertingly alien; raw and analog—“profoundly human,” as Goodroad describes—while possessing a colder, digital inflection.

Unexpected turns and deviations reveal themselves often, and repeat listens uncover even greater secrets. It’s a multifaceted record of contrast and cohesion, where the bright glow of the ballad “Tipping Point” and album highlight “My Condition”—the kind of infuriatingly hooky earworm anthem that dominates alternative radio airwaves—coalesce with the industrial-leaning mechanics of “Hard To Be God” and “KOET.”

“I think the best way to make other people feel something is to make yourself feel something. The best songwriters are people who can take a particular emotion and create the most narrow translation so that when someone hears that song, they feel exactly what the writer felt,” Underkofler says. “If someone hearing a song can be taken to the exact headspace the songwriter was in at the time, for me, that is the mark of a great songwriter. And I feel with these songs, we’ve achieved that better than ever before.”

It’s a headspace you’re left to ruminate in long after Underkofler is finished protesting,

But what if I’m always alone?
And I don’t like who I am anymore?

on the closing “Black And Gold.”

Because when all is said and done, the truth is that the impact of FISSION—and Dead Poet Society—will reverberate now and for years to come.

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