Thalia Zedek and Chris Brokaw have spent the past three decades building the kind of careers that make genre labels feel inadequate. Their first major convergence came with Come, the early-’90s Boston outfit whose bruised, slow-burn intensity landed them on a murderers’ row of indie imprints—Matador, Sub Pop, Beggars Banquet, Domino—and on stages where their mix of catharsis and control felt like a weather system rolling in. Zedek, already a force from Uzi, Live Skull, and Dangerous Birds, brought a voice that could sandblast or console; Brokaw, whose résumé runs from Codeine to the New Year, supplied the kind of guitar logic that turns restraint into revelation.
After Come dissolved, both kept moving—solo records, collaborations, film scores, side projects, the long road. What endures is their instinct for songs that feel lived-in: heavy without melodrama, emotionally direct without sentimentality. Tubby’s is just the latest stop in a lifelong tour of doing the work.
