Hello all of you beautiful people on the innerweb!

Today is a great day for White Light Riot, because we can FINALLY break the silence and explain to all our friends and fans just what the hell happened to us over the last year.  It has been a long, uphill battle with our former record label, 50 Records, but we have finally broken free from their grasp, and we are working on our brand new album completely independently!!  Not only are we excited to be able to do something completely ourselves, but we are also confident that this record will sound better than anything we have done thus far.  There have been a lot of changes for us over the past year, and it has been really hard not to tell everyone what was going on, but our attorney advised us to stay quiet until the last stone was laid.  Either way, let me tell you just what the hell has gone on since our hiatus last year.

Our relationship with our former label had started to go south even before we released our first album with them, Atomism, but we had hoped that things would turn around once we put it out.  For a while, it seemed like it was.  We were touring, and we started getting our music onto commercial radio stations.  Things were starting to get on the right track.  Unfortunately, this optimism didn't last long as things started to come to a halt time and time again, and we started to get back into the mentality, "It's Us vs. Them,"  a pitfall every band that signs with a label hopes to avoid.  The fun was being replaced with frustration, and the relationship had soured.

Late last year, we really came to grips with the fact that neither us nor our label was going to get anywhere if we continued working together, and we put a plan in motion to get out of our record contract.  Once you get attorneys involved, though, you can't publicly air your dirty laundry because it could come back and bite you in the ass.  Hence our longstanding hiatus.  We could have still played a few shows, but we unfortunately had another set back as well, one that's been bittersweet.

Our friend and comrade, Joe Christenson, decided it was in his best interest to leave the band early 2009, and for good reason.  We weren't doing shit but sit on our thumbs until we could work something out with the label, and Joe was getting a bit antsy.  He left a scholarship at Macalester College to give everything to the band, and we will always love him for that.  But with the dramatic drop-off in touring and our dwindling relationship with the label, he saw leaving the band to go back and pursue his education as his best move, one that we respect and understand.  So it's extremely bitter to say that we lost an excellent guitarist, but sweet to know Macalester upped its average GPA with his return, and we wish him the best. 

We had been demoing stuff with Joe for a future album for most of 2008, but with his departure, Mark, Dan, and myself decided to scrap nearly everything and start fresh.  We needed to just start over and get our bearings.  We quickly realized that the tunes we were creating were like treating a headache with Vicoden, a sweet fucking relief, and we were finally having fun with music again.  We couldn't wait to get started recording the project.  Unfortunately, the time it has taken to finally terminate our record contract put us back a few months, but we now have the freedom and ability to get this shit done and out to everyone.  We are hoping to release it in January or February.

We will soon be introducing a few new members into the mix so keep your eyes peeled for that.  We will be back playing our first show at Sauce in Uptown on November 7th for the We Became Actors CD Release party!  After that we plan on hitting it hard again, and slowly introducing the new tracks to you all leading up to our CD release.   

We want to apologize to everyone for keeping silent about all this shit, but we hope you understand and can now get excited for what's to come!  We are stoked as hell to get these new tunes out and we think you all will be too.

I have to end this all with a huge shout out and much love to our good friend, Adam Gislason (So It Goes), for working his ass off for us as our attorney and adviser through this long and arduous process of leaving our label.  WE FUCKING DID IT BUDDY! THANKS FOR EVERYTHING!

We will be putting out news very frequently now, and expect to see some changes on our website, Myspace page, and Facebook page over the next few months.   


Thank you to all our friends and fans,

Mike