Parts & Labor End 15-Year Hiatus with Double Album ‘Set of All Sets’

In the early 2000s, Parts & Labor were a live nerve in the Brooklyn underground—a band whose blown-out synth, Hüsker Dü-sized melodies, and protest energy made them a constant at sweatbox warehouse shows, rooftop parties, and park gigs alongside Oneida and Liars. Between their scrappy start and 2011’s Constant Future, they released five albums that kept noise, pop, and political urgency in uneasy, productive tension. Then the band went dormant.

That silence breaks with Set of All Sets, a double album spanning 79 minutes. It’s a deliberate re-entry: co-founders Dan Friel and BJ Warshaw reassembled the project with both of their original drummers, Christopher Weingarten and Joe Wong, forming a two-drummer lineup for the first time. The result doesn’t sound like a reunion chasing past glories. Early glimpses suggest a record built around physical impact and destabilizing scale—Shepard-tone crescendos, blown-out textures, lyrics that Warshaw describes as holding “antimonious and dueling meanings,” cycling between self-destruction and the refusal to repeat old mistakes.

The band’s own track notes, released alongside the album, treat these songs as arguments, not artifacts. That stance—serious about noise’s capacity to unsettle and clarify—is what always set them apart. Fifteen years on, it still does.