Anniversary records are often exercises in preservation, but here, Occurrence take the opposite route. For Anniversary, the New York trio of Ken Urban, Cat Hollyer and Johnny Hager return to five songs from their earliest releases and deliberately pull them apart. Vocals are rerecorded, synth parts are replaced or expanded, arrangements are stripped back in places and pushed harder in others, turning the EP into a conversation between who the band were and who they have become.
‘My Days and Nights Belong to You’ is especially significant as the first song Urban and Hollyer ever made together, and revisiting it ten years later inevitably carries some emotional weight. But the point isn’t simply to recreate the past with better equipment. The band use hindsight as a creative tool, asking what the song can become now that they understand their own musical language more clearly.
‘Shiver Bed’ goes even further in that direction. Originally relegated to B-side status, the track is revisited precisely because the band felt they never quite got it right. And that willingness to confront dissatisfaction rather than canonise everything from their early years makes Anniversary even more interesting than a conventional celebration.
The same applies to ‘If He Were Here’, where Hager reapproaches the vocal from what he describes as an “older, wiser perspective”, while ‘The Joy Ripper’ is pushed into something even more ferocious than its original incarnation.
But it’s closer ‘I Like You More When You’re Stoned that appears to undergo the most dramatic transformation. As the first Occurrence song Hager ever sang lead on, it becomes a marker of how much his relationship with Urban’s dense electronic production has evolved. Additional heavy-metal guitar from Damien Baldet and sampler and tape work from Wayne Feldman help give the new version an even broader palette.
Throughout, Occurrence’s blend of experimental electronic pop, synth-driven intensity and shoegaze-adjacent atmosphere remains recognisable, but the performances feel more like a reclamation than anything else.
The EP acknowledges the importance of the band’s first decade without treating those early recordings as untouchable objects. Instead, Occurrence test them against everything they have learned since. And for a group looking towards its next phase, revisiting the past turns out to be less about remembrance than renewal.