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.