Adam Bravin, left, and Justin Warfield founded She Wants Revenge in the mid-aughts.
Adam “DJ Adam-12” Bravin, one half of the L.A.-based darkwave duo She Wants Revenge, figured the renaissance would have run its course by now.
But for Bravin and childhood pal Justin Warfield, who will make the first stop of their latest tour at the Majestic Theatre on April 24, it’s still going strong.
She Wants Revenge enjoyed its original heyday in the mid-aughts, when songs like “Red Flags and Long Nights” and “These Things”— hey, remember the music video with Garbage’s Shirley Manson? — from their self-titled 2006 release drilled their gothic, Joy-Division-meets-Interpol sound into our collective musical consciousness.
Five years later, the band went on what felt like permanent hiatus following the release of their third album, 2011’s Valleyheart. Warfield started a family, and Bravin pursued a side project: Love, Ecstasy and Terror.
“It wasn’t that we broke up,” Bravin explains. “We just took some time for ourselves.”
Four years later, fate — in the unlikely form of Lady Gaga — intervened.
Gaga requested that the producers of American Horror Story include the duo’s biggest hit, the spooky/catchy/menacing “Tear You Apart,” in the fifth season of the show. The show didn’t just use a snippet as musical wallpaper — it built a scene around the entire song, effectively creating a new music video starring a glamorous coke-sniffing Gaga — and simultaneously reviving/expanding the appeal of She Wants Revenge.
“A lot of people thought we were a new band,” says Bravin, laughing.
A series of sold-out reunion shows followed — and so did an urge to return to the studio. Last fall’s unexpected release of “Big Love,” a song that could have fit effortlessly on any of the band’s three earlier releases, got Bravin and Warfield thinking, but not necessarily in the way you might expect.
“We spent a long time as artists saying one thing,” says Bravin. “She Wants Revenge is a lane we have both chosen to be in for a long time. Now we’re thinking, why don’t we experiment? Our favorite bands are bands that continue to evolve. Why don’t we try that with ourselves? Why don’t we try to do something new?”
Both Warfield and Bravin, who once DJed for former President Barack Obama, have a hip-hop background, and they’ve deployed that in service of some new material. One of those songs, “Fix It All,” has been a hit at the band’s recent live gigs.
Not that the new stuff is going to displace “Tear You Apart” in the setlist, mind you.
“I’m a DJ,” says Bravin. “There comes a point when I have to understand that it’s an art form. I’m not there to teach everyone a lesson about the depth of my musical vocabulary. I’m here to make them have a good time.”
