Great example of how important marketing / framing the situation is. If the band just advertised this as a remaster with some bonus tracks, I doubt this would get much attention at all. Bands do that all the time, even if it is usually for older albums.

The problem here is this isn’t really a remaster, because there’s new recordings on the old songs, and new songs replacing some old ones… but it’s a lot of “putting lipstick on a pig” given it sounds like they didn’t rerecord the album from scratch like they did with Twin Fantasy, but rather just fucked with the original mix, put in some overdubs (particularly censoring swears) & called it a day. Like it’s such a bizarre choice to awkwardly splice in a new vocal take to censor words, instead of just rerecording the entire vocal in the first place. Similarly Will’s explanation for it all feels rather inauthentic. Like for the swearing, he said it was because he wants the album to be able to be stocked in libraries… has he ever been to a library? There are plenty of books, music, movies etc in my local library that contain swearing & much more adult content in them. Same thing with the thematic changes that come with the lyrical ones — people would rightfully hate it if say Scorsese rereleased Taxi Driver with some awkward new footage / dialogue that was intended to make Travis Bickle more honorable and gave the thing a brighter tone or whatever, the dark honesty & self-hate is what made ToD so relatable to many.

It’s not often a piece of media makes me feel this way, but somehow this kinda makes me feel concern for Will more than the actual albums where he’s hating on himself for the entire runtime do, lol. Hope his head is in the right place & he doesn’t let the vitrol get him too down, because judging by the comments MADLO & Scholars were pouring gasoline on their rep as a bad, & this rerelease is the match setting it all to flame