In recent years, this beloved thing that we call Hardcore has been having itself a little moment. Whether it’s via an algorithm, or their ever-expanding local scene, more and more folks are flocking to alternative music in 2025.
For the seminal hardcore label, Revelation Records, there is no better time than right now to reissue some of their most beloved back catalog. Not to mention the fact that a lot of their releases are hitting those nice, round numbers like 20, 25, or 30 years since they originally debuted, which is all the more reason to celebrate.
That brings us to why we’re here. Last month Rev announced that they would begin taking orders for the deluxe repress of all three albums — The Nerve Agents (1998), Days of the White Owl (2000), and The Butterfly Collection (2001) — by one of my all-time favorite bands, The Nerve Agents. I sat down with front man, Eric Ozenne, to get the story on how it all came together.
It's hard to believe that it's been over 25 years since The Nerve Agents formed. Now Revelation just announced that all 3 albums by the band are getting repressed. Can you tell us what brought this whole thing on?
That's a good question. So… we were just hanging out and this thing, the pandemic, suddenly happened. [laughs] It brought us all closer together. That's pretty much it. We all connected during the pandemic.
I think before The Nerve Agents guys connected, it was Adam Lentz from Revelation Records. He had this bright idea “hey, it's roughly the 20-year anniversary, right?” So we thought “yeah, that would be cool.” I think the self-titled album had not been reissued on vinyl, it had been out of print for a while, and Epitaph had not done the vinyl for The Butterfly Collection in a long time.
It was just the one pressing, right?
I think so. Which makes it rare, right? [laughs] Depending on how many are pressed… So Adam was like, “you know what we should do is an anniversary reissue of the self-titled.”
Right.
Then we started talking about all of the records, and how it'd be cool if we could roll them all out. We thought “well, Epitaph has The Butterfly Collection,” but Adam thought “maybe we should talk to them and see if we can get some limited licensing, just to put it out just for the anniversary.”
We started talking about repackaging it and really kind of doing it up as a thing. Then the band got together. We started kind of… hanging out, talking quite a bit during this time, the five of us, and it really kind of took off from there.
But then there were some, I would say… disagreements within the band, about people and where they were at with everything. So we kind of shut it down, because we were really bummed on what was going on, and I won't get into the details of that. But yeah, we shelved it for a long time.
I think it came back up in 2023, maybe? I reached out to Revelation after talking to the guys in the band and said “despite the differences that we've got going on let's just put it out anyway, because I think it's really important for the sake of… One, people still care about this band. And two, it's a relevant enough band to reissue and put out there for like new generations, if they're interested at all. And then, you know, for us - we wanted to just preserve it historically. Like with the packaging, what we've done is added like booklets to each of the records.
We've got multiple friends, other band members, and just people who were around the band. And that community of The Nerve Agents was brought in to write stuff. We certainly didn't get everybody involved with The Nerve Agents over time, that would be insane. But we got a lot of people… including yourself, right?
Yes indeed [laughs].
[Laughs] So it was super fun to put together because we essentially created a timeline with these three albums. Revelation was able to get Epitaph to give us a three-year licensing deal for them to put it out. That was really cool of Epitaph. They've been so awesome in this process, because they keep extending it, as we keep dragging our feet on getting this thing done!
It's just been a really cool process, a bit of a history of The Nerve Agents, through the experiences of some of the people that were involved. And a lot of new photos, and artwork from Linas Garsys.
Oh yeah, those are all awesome.
Yeah, he did a lot of our shirts, flyers, and stuff. All three of the reissues look incredible. Tom Klein from Revelation, the art guy there, he did a fantastic job on this stuff. Really laying it out and putting it together.
I actually walked into Revelation one day with my mockup of The Butterfly Collection, which may have the biggest booklet that we put in. I put it on like… paper trash bags with a bunch of Sharpie pens, marking up where things should go. It looked just like a giant piece of garbage! And I handed it to him and was like “this is it. This is what I've got!” [laughs]
Sounds a bit like a ransom note, if anything?
Yeah, yeah, kind of like a ransom note! Yeah. I can't say enough about how much Tom did on this thing. He did such a great job. And we've added some things. We had Linas do some new artwork for each record. All three of those have these new Obi strips.
Obi strips, yeah.
They go on the vinyl. Yeah. There's a t-shirt design that's based on the Obi art. So it's really, really cool. I'm really looking forward to it. It’s out May 16th I believe, and you can pre-order right now.
READ MORE: 2018 interview with artist Linas Garsys (AFI, Striking Distance, The Nerve Agents)
Yes, everyone go get that shit right now (here). But in getting all this stuff together, sort of digging through the eons, was there any stuff that you had never seen before? Did you have memories that were completely reawakened that you’d forgotten about?
Well, yeah, it was quite the journey to go on, as far as digging through everything. I mean, I'm digging through my own stuff that I had here. I was actually digging through your site that I hadn't looked at in a while. We put out a call on Instagram years ago, asking for things that people had. Stories, and people were sending pictures and that kind of stuff. So we had some new stuff come in.
There were also a lot of photos I hadn't seen. I was like, “woah, that's crazy!” And I didn't have the recall on some of the memories that were coming up. It was super cool to see these things rise to the surface.
You know, I remember during 2020, I sat and talked this same way with Andy (Granelli) for No Echo. So anyone that's reading this go back and read that as well, because that's a great interview!
Yeah [laughs].
READ MORE: 2020 interview with Andy “Outbreak” Granelli (The Distillers, The Nerve Agents)
But it was funny because he said something to me. I asked him “what do you remember about, you know, Y or Z?” And he's like “you know, that was like kind of a long time ago, 20 years, and my memory is getting a little hazy.” I was sitting thinking to myself “that can't be possible. It’s 20 years, it's not that long.”
Then, two years later, someone asked me about something that happened 20 years before and I was in the exact same place! So he really was onto something but I just couldn’t see it then. Anyway, there's been a lot of people that are excited about this. They're all sharing memories. A lot of folks have been saying those are some of the best years of their lives, going to those shows, building that community, and friendships that have lasted and so forth.
Yeah.
It seemed like you had such a tight-knit community, at least from the East Coast looking to West. What do you think was the catalyst in building that community?
I think you're really hitting on something. As I talk to the guys in the band, we've talked a lot about how the biggest thing about The Nerve Agents was the people that came to the shows. Where they're almost at every, or a lot of shows, they built this. They were the community. And hardcore, that's what you get. A lot of community.
The Nerve Agents to me was this really special thing because it was crossing borders. At the time, hardcore was very much its own sort of thing. And I know that if you go back into the '80s, it was blended over more, but we saw a lot of hardcore with like the straight edge kids, and just seeing the shaved heads… just like the classic Youth Crew sort of look. But we had a lot of that going on during the '90s in the Bay Area.
We had Redemption 87, Powerhouse, Second Coming, Model American… we had all of these different bands. There was just a really strong hardcore scene that was rising up in the '90s.
When The Nerve Agents came in, we were at what felt like “the tail end” of something in the hardcore scene. A scene that shifted into something different. Not because of The Nerve Agents, but what we had seen, at that time, was there was just a division, between punk and hardcore, and what we were doing.
The Nerve Agents was bringing all of our stuff to bear - the music and the creativity. We're seeing this division, so we were like “let's shake this up a little bit and come out and bum people out. If they don't want to be at our shows and they can leave, right?” And so we threw on the old Social Distortion / 7Seconds eye-makeup, and we got a lot of bummed out people around that.
[Laughs] Oh yeah…
But what happened from that, and I think it kind of gets to your point, is that we then had two different sets of people showing up to the shows. And what I think happened for us at least, was that the Bay Area punks and the Bay Area hardcore scene started to kind of merge together a little bit, at least at our shows.
Not to say that every show was like that, but that's what we started seeing. So that became our community. We started seeing people that were listening to Rancid, AFI, The Casualties, and all these things. And then you’ve got people listening to Powerhouse, All Bets Off, and The Second Coming. You've got all of these kinds of people that are listening to both sides of things, which I feel like is the line that we walked. That created this really tight-knit community who really loved our band at the same time.
The only way our band works is if you have that group of people, who were there day in and day out, because there was so much energy back and forth from each other. And I think that when we would play and go on stage, we felt really… we felt loved. We felt like we were there with them. The crowd was kind of an extension of the band. And I think that was super cool.
Oh for sure.
I think that it extended out, throughout the whole time we were together. After that first like year, year and a half, was really when that started to gel.
The first show was in ’99? Or was it 2000?
’98!
’98…
Yeah, ’98. Yeah. Because I had moved. I started The Nerve Agents in ’98 with six months left before I moved to Los Angeles. And it was to be a temporary band. So I was like “let's just do this, we'll put a record out. It's going to be awesome.” I had all this arrogance around it. I was like “we're going to make this happen!” [laughs] And we went out and actually did that! And it was really cool. So cool that I couldn't even let it go once I got to LA.
We started playing a lot of shows down in Southern California, particularly in Long Beach at the PCH Club, which was this little, tiny, hole in the wall building. I don't even know, it had like two rooms in it? It was on the side of this highway and I don't even know what it was, but we just packed that place. Not just us, but the hardcore kids down there.
We played with all kinds of bands down there. It was super fun and that really started building us up. Then when I left LA after about a year, I moved back in 1999 to the Bay Area and then things just kind of started blowing up from there. We just were getting on really big shows and things moved really fast for us.
READ MORE: Buddyhead’s Travis Keller on His Upcoming Documentary, Pissing Off Fred Durst & More
Well, I didn't necessarily want to bring this up, but was there ever any regret at the way things fizzled at the end? Did you ever feel like your mission was incomplete?
[laughs] Well, it did feel like it was an abrupt ending. You know, Dante and I have talked about this a lot, and we were not on the same page, he and I. Some things culminated into a back and forth issue between him and I. And basically I said “it's either him or me.”
Right…
And of course, nobody wanted to make that decision. So I said, “screw it, we're done.” And it actually really worked out perfectly because my daughter was born about two weeks later.
Oh, wow.
And I was 100% in on being the best dad I could be. Essentially it was the right time… but the wrong time. The Nerve Agents were really at a peak point.
Yeah exactly.
We really wanted to see a fourth album this way. What it amounted to, you know?
I think the evolution of the band, where you guys got on the third album, was so interesting. I always thought “what would it possibly be on the next one?” Some people, they didn't necessarily want the band to go into new areas. They thought “the first album - that's hardcore.” And maybe some folks might’ve wanted it to be more goth punk.
But I always wondered: were there actually songs in process? Were there any other unreleased demos that never made it out? Even a practice room recording? And what would they have sounded like?
[Laughs] No, no. Everybody always asks that question. No, there was nothing! We had put everything out, and we really weren't practicing for our next record. We were only, what, like six, seven months into The Butterfly Collection?
We had just come off a tour in the summer. Here we were in the fall, doing a couple of shows. 9/11 had just happened. A lot was going on at that time. We did a big benefit for 9/11, right after it happened. Our last shows really were… I think after that benefit at the end of September, at the Phoenix Theater in Petaluma.
We ended up doing our next shows in December, which was five shows with Lars Frederiksen and The Bastards, that was the last handful of days in December, and those were our last shows. It was crazy, I remember that very distinctly… because we were really not on the same page. All of us were really in different places. I drove to San Diego by myself. I think we took like four different cars for five of us.
Jeez…
That's just how not on the same page we were. [laughs] And so, you know, we get down there and we're playing sort of at the top of things, for ourselves. But I had lost my voice after the second show.
Once we got to Santa Cruz, and did these two shows in the same day, I completely lost my voice to the point where, the next show was two shows in the same day in San Francisco, and I had no voice at all. It just went out.
A lot of this [*mimes pointing mic to crowd*]
That's exactly it. That's the good thing about having a bunch of people there, at sold out shows, is that everybody knows the words! So I was able to pull it off, but it was really bad. I was struggling from that and I didn't know that those were going to be our last shows… but they were.
Do you ever feel a sense of regret by not having that final, official goodbye?
I don't have a sense of regret. It would have been nice if we could have done something like that. I did that with Redemption 87 like three times. [laughs]. The band ended three times with these big final shows, they were really wonderful.
But to be honest with you, it probably wouldn't have been any different than what we did on those last shows, because we had two packed Santa Cruz shows and two packed San Francisco shows. That's four shows in The Bay Area and they were loaded with people. For The Nerve Agents it was always kind of a love fest with our community of people.
Right.
I don't think I have any regrets at all. I tend not to really regret things. I'm trying to think if I did regret things - would I regret this? Probably. [laughs]
I can imagine with this amount of time passing, that looking back you could have done a bit of self reflection. Throughout all this experience did you learn anything about yourself? Did you think back to who you were back then and maybe “who am I now?”
Sure. Well, that's an interesting question. I actually really like it because it makes me think of something that I do often, which is… when I grew up, lyrics for hardcore bands, punk bands, whatever, were so meaningful and impactful to me as a young teenager.
I still lean on lyrics from Youth of Today. Some of the Youth of Today lyrics got me through the Marine Corps. [laughs]
You know, like I said, some of these things are really just embedded in me. So when I look back at my own lyrics… actually, those are my lyrics.
Right, right.
I look back at those and I'm like “okay, you were 16 when you wrote this song… how resonant is it now for me?” Some of these things are actually part of my values system now. Like when I was in Unit Pride I wrote a song called “One Will Do.” I use that still to this day in the work that I do, working to help veterans and things like that. So, you know, “making a difference,” that kind of thing.
A lot of the straight edge lyrics from bands across the board, and my own song “Wide Awake” from back in Unit Pride, those things still steer me. Now that I'm no longer drinking, smoking or any of that stuff throughout my years. So these are things that still help guide me. I love looking back at them and going… “that still stands.”
It's amazing when that actually still works, when you know you’re still the same person. At times people talk about “are you this person when you come into the world? Or are you carved into this person?” And I think a lot of times we are that person, we just have to find our way there. When you do look back and you can say “I’ve always been this way” it's kind of a self assuring thing. You can say “yeah, I am the person who I'm supposed to be.”
Yeah, that's a good point because we do come into this world with stuff that is from our parents, from our ancestors, all these kinds of things are just who we are DNA-wise, right? That's the “nature” part of nature/nurture. And when you have this nurturing piece that you're speaking to, like, we carve our way and we kind of nurture along these pieces of ourselves, or somebody else helps nurture us along.
Like our peers or these bands that we love, the lyrics. One song from one band could be such an important, impactful thing. And maybe you don't even listen to the band anymore, but those lyrics still stick right? [laughs]
Yeah.
So, that is how we kind of shape ourselves and shape our values. A lot of these things, for some people, they're not necessarily spiritual people, but you can find that a lot of the shaping tends to find its way into what’s like a spiritual context. That's why this spiritual thing speaks to me because all of these things I've been holding on to for so long.
Right, right.
And here's the context for it. So, I think it's super cool to have that. If I look back on every single band I was in, you can find, from Unit Pride to Redemption 87 to The Nerve Agents to Said Radio to Bird Legs, all of these same themes. They're all there. They're just regurgitated into a different version of what I wrote when I was 16.
Ok so to service the fans… there's obviously the one question that I have to ask…
[Laughs] God, I know what it is: “Is there going to be a show?”
[laughs] Is there any hope?
There’s no hope. [Laughs] We talked about it in 2020, and I think we were kind of feeling close to like… maybe there's something that could happen? But… no.
Fair enough. Had to ask!
It's not going to happen. I'm not going to go into the reasons why, or who, or what, but it's definitely not going to happen.
On a side note, from my perspective… there were other members that were in the band at certain points - maybe they could be reached out to and it could be a reunion from a different time period in the band? You know what I mean?
[Laughs] We've worked out all manner of different concoctions of things. It's just it's not gonna happen. Even if we had all five of us standing there, ready to play, then maybe it would happen. But, you know, I think it's just there's always one thing that gets in the way.
Well beyond that, do you want to talk about any other projects? You mentioned Bird Legs. What else is on the horizon for you right now?
Yeah. We've been working with Revelation over the last couple of years on putting out a Bird Legs record. So I'm hopeful that's still going to be happening in this same year, in 2025. The plan is for it to be out either by summer or fall.
That's what we're looking at right now, at least as it stands. That band is the guys from Redemption 87. It’s Gary, the drummer, Jade on guitar, myself, and Ryan Doria from OverExposure, he's playing bass for us, and he's a fantastic bass player. So yeah.
That's exciting.
I’m excited. We already recorded the record. It's a good record. I like it a lot.
I had one last question. And this is for me because it's one thing I've always wanted, and I always forget, to ask you. This is a very hyper-focused, like trying-to-figure-it-out for years type thing. The song “Next In Line."
Yeah…
The very last line is not in liner notes, and I can never make out what you were saying there no matter how I listened. I was like “I got to ask Eric this time.” Is it a James Hetfield style scat where you're just trying to figure out what to say there?” And then you decided “let's just leave that”?
[Laughs] No, it's just… you’re talking about when I go “la da da da da da, da da da da da… da da da da” right?
Yeah!
So that’s… that's just my impression of Morrissey, actually.
[both laugh]
That's exactly where that comes from. I’d been listening to a lot of Morrissey back then.
I see, I see…
Yeah!
That answers the question for the ages for me! When that song came on, I’d always be like “maybe now I'll hear it? If I don't think about it, maybe I'll hear it…” And there we go!
[Laughs] It sounds nothing like Morrissey.
No, but it’s interesting to know where it came from. So thank you for that! And thank you for chatting.
***
Everyone go grab a couple copies of these newly repressed albums and some very sick t-shirt designs at RevHQ, and Follow @thenerveagents and @the_poisoning_nerve_agents
Tagged: redemption 87, the nerve agents, unit pride
