Carissa’s Wierd Announces ’27 US Headline Tour + Shares “Necklaces Exploding”

Somewhere Further Than Far Away Album Art

Somewhere Further Than Far Away Tracklisting

1. No One Lives Here Anymore

2. Painted Hell

3. There’s Nowhere to Go

4. Necklaces Exploding

5. January

6. What Has Been Done Cannot Be Undone

7. Another Ugly Ending

8. I Don’t Feel Like I Feel Right

9. Just Been Lied To (Part VI)

10. Circling the Ashtray / Sleepwalking Off Rooftops

11. A Place in the Sun

12. Whispering Drunks

13. 3 Palms (Main Theme)

***

Carissa’s Wierd began in 1995 in Tucson, Arizona, after Mat Brooke and Jenn Champion met as teenagers in the smoking room of a goth dance club. Their friendship was immediate. “I don’t know if I’d ever had a friend before Mat,” Champion says. “As a teenager, meeting someone who I could be myself around was pretty priceless.”

Brooke and Champion quickly developed their own way of creating music together. Songs written in bedrooms on the cheapest of instruments, then recorded onto four-track cassettes in Champion’s closet. Both are playing guitar in a loose yet lockstep fashion. Sometimes they’d sing in unison; other times it’d be a jumble of words atop each other. With their whisper-sung vocals, waves of melody, and vulnerable intimacy—no one else sounded like them—not in basements, opening for local hardcore bands—or anywhere else. The band never fit a genre, but they found a following.

Between 2000 and 2002, the band released three full-length albums on Seattle-based indie labels Brown and Sad Robot:Ugly But Honest: 1996-1999 (2000), You Should Be at Home Here (2001), and Songs About Leaving (2002). The band toured constantly; small clubs, shitty hotels, and endless drinking took their toll, and in 2003, they broke up. In Carissa’s wake, a handful of new projects emerged, including Grand Archives, S, Band of Horses, Sera Cahoone’s solo career, and others. Yet the emotional world they created together as Carissa’s Wierd continued to resonate.

Though everyone musically moved on, Brooke and Champion always stayed in touch. Their now long-distance friendship turned from bedroom recordings into phone calls and talks of making something together again someday, and regularly performing on each other’s records. “We never stopped writing music, but when we make Carissa’s Wierd, we are writing just for each other,” Brooke says. “I’ll write a song and hope Jenn thinks it’s good and wants to play on it.” Champion adds, “Same, I just want Mat to think what I’m writing is cool. Carissa’s Wierd brings something out in my playing that I can’t do anywhere else.”

In the years that followed, their music took on a life of its own. With their back catalog falling out of print and the band becoming increasingly difficult to find, Carissa’s Wierd developed a devoted following that stretched far beyond the places and scenes where they began. Now, more than two decades after the band’s dissolution, Brooke and Champion have returned to that world and found something new waiting there. A few reunion shows over the years fed the interest of longtime fans, but more recent shows have revealed an entirely new generation of young fans who knew every word and sang along enthusiastically. Champion and Brooke were blown away.

“It’s not easy music to appreciate,” Brooke says. “It’s often recorded poorly, and the subject matter is just bleak. You have to meet it halfway. And I’m surprised that 30 years later, people are still willing to meet it halfway.”

The renewed interest inspired Brooke and Champion to break open the world of Carissa’s Wierd again. And with Somewhere Further Than Far Away, they stayed true to their origins, recording songs alone in their bedrooms during the winter months of 2026, sending them to each other, excited to hear what the other would add.

“No part of making this record ever felt like it was difficult; it just felt extremely natural,” Champion says, especially when they invited Sera Cahoone and Sarah Standard to join them at Hall of Justice Studio in Seattle. “It just felt like exactly what we were supposed to be doing.”

“If you listen close,” Brooke says, “You can hear the creaky guestroom in my house where I recorded my guitar and vocal parts.”  In May, they continued the traditions of Carissa’s Wierd and met up at The Hall of Justice Studio in Seattle, Washington, to finish the album. “We were in the studio for 5 days total and recorded all the violin, all the drums, and mixed the album,” Champion says. “We kept saying, ‘Don’t overthink it, it’s good.’”

The project has remained precious to them, and they didn’t want to make anything that didn’t feel honest and true. Brooke stresses that this music exists in its own artistic and conceptual vacuum. “We wanted this to sound like an old Carissa’s Wierd album, to the point that I dove into old journals and physical photo albums to achieve the right mindset.”

“We felt invited by the world to come back,” Brooke says. “And we are happy to be here.”