Stand And Be Recognized

Stand and Be Recognized is the first album by The Nude, a four-piece from Brooklyn. The band say the four of them, a South African, a New Yorker, a Frenchman and a Michigander, first met in a rehearsal studio on 24 March 2023. Singer Luke Bergstedt traces it to a question he asked himself in the pandemic: was he still a musician? Back in New York from 2022 he found bassist Nick Cageao again, met guitarist Henry Ott through Brooklyn jams, and took on drummer Derrick Duemler, who answered an advertisement. Bergstedt wrote the music and words alone; Cageao recorded and mixed the album. They work without autotune or a styled image, and keep metal, funk, punk and blues in the same room. The band lay a sequence across the eight tracks: hope, then fear, then courage, then defeat, and at the end the choice the title names. Devilicious appeared on 24 November 2023, eight months to the day after that rehearsal, and Medicating on 14 March 2024. The album arrived on 18 November 2024, and Epictronic put it out worldwide on 8 August 2025. Epictronic Japan issue it in Japan on 30 September 2026 as a direct import with Japanese packaging, catalogue BITX1485. Eight songs, about thirty-six minutes.