New Music From Jeffrey Runnings (For Against)

Independent Project Records (IPR) has announced the upcoming release of the posthumous, final solo album from Jeffrey Runnings, Piqued, on Friday July 11, 2025 on vinyl, CD, and digital formats. All formats will include four bonus tracks of rare recordings from the late Eighties. The first singles from Piqued, “Batman Forever” and “Heretofore,” are at radio now. Runnings – the creative force and guiding light behind Nebraska post-punk pioneers For Against – died on Monday, March 3 due to stage 4 cancer as reported in Pitchfork.

Some forty years after a fan letter from Nebraska resulted in Independent Project Records commencing a decades-long collaboration with post-punk cult favorites turned dream pop visionaries For Against, Piqued is the last album from For Against chief songwriter, lead singer, bass player and only constant member Jeffrey Runnings. Piqued is a celebration of the artist’s lifelong quest for a sound that, stripped to the bones, is all the more powerful and cathartic for its restraint. Recorded by Runnings at home on an old 8-track cassette machine, the album plays just like a late ‘80s mixtape, lovingly compiled to showcase the beautiful emptiness of post-punk’s more eloquently quiet peaks. With “Heretofore,” the newest single release, it only takes the first few seconds of drum machine and guitar to feel like we’ve been transported back in time – more precisely, sometime between the tail end of the ‘70s and the dawn of the ‘80s, a time when post-punk was discovering new pensive sides to itself via angular rhythms and grey-toned visions. “Heretofore” has all the murky, abstract-yet-stripped-down allure of lifelong Runnings favorites like Section 25 and the Comsa­t Angels.

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Label: Independent Project Records

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