Brand New’s Daisy (2009) is an album of paradoxes. It is both violent and tender, chaotic yet eerily composed. The band’s fourth studio effort marks a sharp departure from their earlier works, abandoning much of the melodic melancholy that defined Deja Entendu and The Devil and God Are Raging Inside Me in favor of a rawer, more abrasive sound. Yet beneath the cacophony lies an intricately woven tapestry of themes and symbols — fire, the woods, disconnection, and destruction. Daisy is an album of hidden meanings, its layers demanding to be uncovered. The album cover, its lyrical preoccupations, and its aesthetic choices all coalesce into a meditation on dissolution, rebirth, and the terrifying beauty of the unknown.
The cover of Daisy is striking in its quiet menace. A lone deer stands frozen amidst a darkened woodland clearing, its body illuminated by an unseen light source. The image is pastoral yet disquieting, a scene that evokes both the natural sublime and the uncanny. The deer’s gaze—neutral, almost indifferent—renders it a symbol of mute observation, a witness to the chaos that unfolds in the album’s lyrical narrative.
Deer, in both folklore and literature, often symbolize vulnerability, innocence, or sacrifice. Yet in Daisy, this innocence feels compromised. The dark woods behind the deer loom as a space of danger, a place where innocence goes to die. The image suggests a collision between serenity and savagery, foreshadowing the album’s thematic preoccupations with the fragility of life and the inexorability of destruction.
The photograph also situates the listener in a liminal space — a threshold between wilderness and civilization, light and shadow. It invites interpretation but offers no clear answers. Why is the deer there? What lies hidden in the woods? Like the album itself, the cover resists easy categorization, its mystery mirroring the existential uncertainty that haunts the record’s lyrics.
If one thematic thread runs through Daisy, it is fire. Flames and burning recur throughout the album, both as literal imagery and as a metaphorical device. In “Vices,” the opening track, the cacophonous eruption of sound feels like a sonic inferno — a visceral baptism by fire that scorches the listener. “Sink” offers the refrain, “Throw me into the fire,” an image that evokes both annihilation and purification.
Fire, as a symbol, is inherently dualistic. It destroys, but it also clears space for new growth; it consumes, yet it also illuminates. In Daisy, this duality is weaponized, suggesting a cyclical process of creation and destruction. The constant invocation of flames underscores the album’s preoccupation with impermanence — relationships burn, beliefs burn, and even the self is consumed in the blaze. Yet fire also implies agency, a way of reclaiming control over one’s fate by embracing destruction as a form of renewal.
The fires in Daisy also serve as a critique of human hubris. Throughout the album, there is a sense of natural forces retaliating against humanity’s attempts to impose order. The imagery of burning suggests that the constructs we cling to — faith, identity, civilization — are ultimately fragile, their stability an illusion. This idea resonates with the nihilism that underpins much of Brand New’s discography but is rendered here with a visceral immediacy that feels apocalyptic.
While fire serves as a symbol of destruction, the woods in Daisy represent a space of mystery and disconnection. In both literature and mythology, forests are often depicted as liminal spaces, places where the familiar dissolves into the unknown. They are settings of transformation and danger, where characters confront their fears and emerge changed — or not at all.
In Daisy, the woods are suffused with dread. The imagery is pervasive, from the sinister “dark forest” atmosphere evoked in the music itself to explicit references in lyrics like, “The silence in the woods is so loud.” The woods are not merely a physical space but a psychological one — a symbol of isolation and estrangement.
The natural world in Daisy is indifferent, almost malevolent. It offers no solace, only a mirror to humanity’s internal chaos. In “In a Jar,” the lyrics juxtapose images of natural beauty with unsettling violence, as if to suggest that the sublime and the grotesque are two sides of the same coin. The woods are a place where boundaries blur—between beauty and terror, life and death, sanity and madness.
Yet the woods are also a place of potential rebirth. They force a confrontation with the self, stripping away societal artifice and exposing the raw core of existence. This duality mirrors the album’s overall structure, which oscillates between moments of unbearable intensity and eerie calm. The woods, like fire, embody the album’s central tension between destruction and renewal.
The sonic architecture of Daisy reflects its thematic preoccupations. The album opens with a sample of “On Life’s Highway,” a hymn sung by gospel artist Reverend J. M. Gates, before erupting into the frenzied cacophony of “Vices.” This juxtaposition—between serene religiosity and unrelenting noise — sets the tone for the album’s exploration of dissonance and contradiction.
The instrumentation is raw, almost unpolished, with Jesse Lacey’s vocals veering between anguished screams and mournful croons. The production feels intentionally chaotic, as if the music itself is disintegrating. This sonic approach mirrors the album’s themes of instability and impermanence, creating a sense of unease that permeates every track.
Yet beneath the chaos lies a deliberate structure. The shifts in tone and dynamics suggest a journey — a descent into darkness followed by an ambiguous emergence. The final track, “Noro,” ends with the haunting refrain, “I’m on my way out,” leaving the listener suspended between despair and transcendence. This unresolved ending reflects the album’s refusal to offer closure, its insistence on embracing uncertainty as an intrinsic part of the human condition.
At its core, Daisy is an album about entropy — the gradual unraveling of systems, identities, and meanings. It confronts the listener with the inevitability of destruction but also suggests that destruction is not an end but a beginning. The album’s recurring imagery of fire and the woods serves as a metaphorical framework for this exploration, evoking both the terror and the beauty of dissolution.
The deer on the cover stands as a silent witness to this process, its presence both enigmatic and evocative. Like the album itself, it resists easy interpretation, its meaning shifting with each viewing. In this sense, Daisy is less an album than an experience—a visceral, unsettling meditation on the fragility of existence and the transformative power of chaos. It demands engagement, challenging the listener to confront their own relationship with destruction and renewal. And in doing so, it achieves a rare feat: it not only describes entropy but enacts it, immersing the listener in the beautiful, terrifying process of falling apart.
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