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Parts & Labor Return in Full Force With “Haunted Limbs”
Parts & Labor are back with “Haunted Limbs,” a sharp, hard-hitting single from Set Of All Sets, their first album in 15 years. The reunited noise-rock band sounds urgent, loud, and unmistakably like itself.
There was a stretch in the late 2000s when Parts & Labor felt like the rare noise-rock band that could level a room and still leave you humming the hook on the train home. The New York trio built songs out of blown-out synth tones, punishing drums, and shout-along choruses that somehow cut through all the distortion.
After calling it quits and playing a final show in 2012, they’re active again—and sounding like themselves in the best way. Last month, the band announced Set Of All Sets, a 79-minute record and their first album in 15 years, alongside a short run of reunion dates on both coasts. They introduced the LP with “Endless Cycle,” a four-part, 20-minute statement piece that made it clear they weren’t easing back in.
Now they’ve shared “Haunted Limbs,” a tighter and more immediate track that works as a cleaner entry point without sanding off the band’s edge. Christopher Weingarten, long a force behind the kit in Parts & Labor, is joined on the new album by Joe Wong, and the two-drummer setup hits hard here. Even with all the serrated synth blasts, “Haunted Limbs” lands as a direct, fists-up rock song.
Dan Friel frames the song as both thematic and personal, tying it to the album’s broader ideas while acknowledging the reality of restarting a band after a decade and a half away. As he puts it:
Expanding on the album’s theme of Utopia, “Haunted Limbs” blurs the line between the challenges of building a better world and some straightforward shit about restarting a band after 15 years. The lyric “It haunts us like a limb we haven’t grown yet” pretty much sums it all up. The song comes out sounding more like vintage Parts & Labor than a lot of the record but pushes things forward in a way that is impossible to miss from the minute you press play.
That balance is exactly what makes “Haunted Limbs” hit: it nods to classic Parts & Labor while refusing to turn reunion energy into nostalgia. Set Of All Sets arrives July 10 via Ernest Jenning.
