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Sebadoh performing, a guitarist at a microphone under red stage light.
parttimemusic, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

COVER STORY

The Missing P

Sebadoh's Harmacy turns thirty on November 20 with sixteen extra tracks and a zine drawn by Lou Barlow, who has called the record a heartbreaker. A band that began on home-made cassettes got a Sub Pop budget, a studio and, by Barlow's account, a drummer problem. What is an album worth to the person who made it?

format
Review
volume
10
date
Oct 10, 2026
author
CJ Archer
places
Seattle, Cashel
artists
Sebadoh, Lou Barlow
words
936 words · 4 min
photo
Photo: parttimemusic, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

On November 20, Sub Pop will put out Harmacy again, thirty years after the Seattle label first did. The expanded edition runs to 35 tracks across two LPs or two CDs, or as a download, and sixteen of them are new to the record: alternate takes of “Willing to Wait,” “Worst Thing,” “Beauty of the Ride” and “Too Pure,” the B-side “Real Deal,” sessions for BBC Radio 1 and John Peel, an acoustic demo of “Open Ended,” and live recordings. JJ Golden at Golden Mastering has retouched and remastered the lot. An alternate “Beauty of the Ride” is already streaming.

The LP also comes with a twelve-page zine called Lou's Harmacy Timeline, written and illustrated by Lou Barlow. That is the part worth sitting with, because Barlow has been on the record, more than once, about how he feels about this album.

The cassette kid gets a studio

Sebadoh started as a place for Barlow's songs to go while he was playing bass in Dinosaur Jr. Weed Forestin', a 1987 cassette of songs he recorded at home under the name Sentridoh, was reissued under the Sebadoh name by Homestead in 1990. The Freed Man, a cassette he made with drummer Eric Gaffney in 1988, followed on Homestead the next year. Barlow was fired from Dinosaur Jr. in 1989, and from then on the tape-deck project was the band. Sebadoh is usually counted, alongside Pavement, Beat Happening and Guided by Voices, among the acts that built a style out of four-track cassettes.

By 1996 the home-taper had a sixth album, a Sub Pop contract, and a steadier lineup of Barlow, Jason Loewenstein and drummer Bob Fay. Barlow's side project, the Folk Implosion, had also happened to the radio: “Natural One,” released in November 1995 on the soundtrack to Kids, went to No. 4 on Billboard's Modern Rock chart and No. 29 on the Hot 100. Wikipedia credits Harmacy with becoming Sebadoh's first charting album in the U.S. in the wake of it.

The sleeve is a photograph Loewenstein took of a pharmacy in Cashel, Ireland, while the band was on tour, with the “P” gone from the sign. The title is what was left. It is a very Sebadoh way to name a record: find the typo on the side of a building and keep it.

The triumphant follow-up

Sub Pop's announcement calls Harmacy the band's breakout album and says Rolling Stone, The Village Voice and NME named it one of the best of 1996. Barlow remembers it differently. “It was meant to be the triumphant follow-up to Bakesale,” he told Stereogum in 2012, “but in reality Sub Pop put an enormous amount of money into that record and they put us in a studio and immediately the guy we were working with was like, 'You've got to fire your drummer.'” Harmacy was Fay's second and last album with the band.

Stereogum also reported him calling it “a real heartbreaker,” and asked about a reissue in 2012 he said he did not know how the record could be improved “unless we included the B-sides from that time.” Speaking to Consequence that year he said he didn't see the need to reissue a record that had been a cutout everywhere and was not hard to find. He was, in other words, not asking for this.

The 2026 edition includes the B-sides.

A zine for the record he didn't want

It would be easy to read the new edition as a late apology, and nothing in the announcement says it is. What it is, plainly, is a catalogue anniversary: a label with a famous record, a remaster, coloured vinyl for the retailers who want it. Sub Pop is listing a limited “Loser” pressing on Sky Blue and Opaque Red Sparkle vinyl through selected shops, and preorders are open.

The zine is what does not fit that picture. A reissue usually hands the album back to its public, and the people who made it get a liner-note paragraph and a fresh photo. Here the author of the record he has described as a heartbreaker is given twelve pages to annotate it himself, in his own writing and his own drawings, in the one format he started out in. For a man who began on tapes dubbed at home, a zine is about the most Sebadoh way available to go back through a record that came out of a proper studio.

We are a zine ourselves, and we can't pretend not to have an opinion about which format is the honest one.

A sign with a letter missing, a band handed a studio it hadn't asked for, a drummer on his final album, a hit single from the side project, and now a timeline in the sleeve. Thirty years on, Harmacy finally gets the thing the studio could not give it, which is the author's own pen.

Sources

Endtroducing Deep Sleep Vol. 10

CJ Archer