mewithoutYou announce new dates for ‘Brother, Sister’ 15th anniversary tour

mewithoutYou have once again announced dates for their Brother, Sister tour, which has been pushed back more than once due to COVID. The partially-belated 15th anniversary run will go down in December and January. All dates — including NYC's Le Poisson Rouge on December 5 (tickets) and LA's Regent Theater on January 21 (tickets) — are listed below.

For those unfamiliar, Brother, Sister is one of mewithoutYou's best albums, and we named it one of 15 albums that defined the 2000s post-hardcore boom, writing:

mewithoutYou started out as a band clearly taking cues from Fugazi and At the Drive-In on their early EPs and 2002 debut album [A→B] Life, but by their 2004 sophomore album Catch for Us the Foxes, they perfected an art rock/post-hardcore blend that could sound like OK Computer as much as it could sound like Relationship of Command. The band's unique guitar patterns — which could range from atmospheric post-rock to hard-hitting but atypical riffage — sounded like no other band on their own, and then once Aaron Weiss' distinctive spoken/shouted vocals came in, there was a 0% chance you'd ever mistake mewithoutYou for someone else. Catch For Us The Foxes is a near-perfect album. Its 2006 followup Brother, Sister uses mostly the same formula, and it's even better. More so than CFUTF, Brother, Sister is a start-to-finish concept album in the tradition of albums like Sgt. Pepper's. It starts and ends with the same lyric, it has a recurring song that shows up in three different forms throughout the LP ("Yellow Spider," "Orange Spider," and "Brown Spider"), songs flow right into each other, and there's no better way to hear these songs than in the order mewithoutYou sequenced them. Brother, Sister has some baroque pop instrumentation in the form of harp, horns, and melodica, but what makes it so unique is it really is still largely a post-hardcore album. Heavy guitars and raucous screams still drive the bulk of the album, and sometimes — as on the devastating album closer "In A Sweater Poorly Knit" — they use guitars to mimic baroque pop arrangements. (They also have guest vocals on two songs by Jeremy Enigk, who deserves a Grammy for his stunning performances on this LP.) It makes sense that the list ends here, because after Brother, Sister hit, it felt like post-hardcore's wings had been spread as far as they could go. (Even mewithoutYou themselves ditched the genre on their next couple albums.) The genre needed to go away for a little while, reset, and come back in a new exciting form, which it did (and which mewithoutYou also contributed to). Now, post-hardcore is going in directions that we probably couldn't have even imagined in 2006, but still, Brother, Sister remains an album that sounds like the future every time you listen to it.

mewithoutYou have been planning to break up after this tour, so see them while you can. Stream Brother, Sister and check out the tour poster…

15 Albums That Defined the 2000s Post-Hardcore Boom