Equipment

Throughout Alt. Account (2023), we're faced with Nick Zander's many insecurities and flaws––Equipment is, after all, a band formed around his songwriting, and brought to new heights with the addition of guitarist Jacob Scott, bassist Ellie Hart, and drummer Jake Pachasa. Similar to some of his inspirations like Jeff Rosenstock, Rivers Cuomo, or Dan Campbell of The Wonder Years, Nick looks at his peers in high-paying jobs and wonders if he made the right decision chasing his music dream instead. He spends the majority of Alt. Account playfully poking at this imbalance and its many nuances, constantly flowing between being a mental health hot mess and a cool, calm, and collected sort of chaos.

At various points on Alt. Account, a 12-year-old Zander can also be heard talking about LEGO stop-motions and the Sega Genesis; these are samples taken from his childhood YouTube gaming channel that he started in 2008, before the platform truly took off. It speaks to the many versions of ourselves we can be in our lifetimes, our own alt accounts––a concept that Equipment's bold new record embraces head-on.

During the album's writing process, Zander was diagnosed with bipolar II; his first medication is seen on the cover of Alt. Account, and the insomnia it gave him led to the creation of the majority of this album. Today he views the resulting album as a celebration of the fact that he's now tamed the instability of his initial diagnosis, a sign of hope for those in the thick of figuring their own patterns out.