Minus The Bear – Hooray (Demo)

Suicide Squeeze Records

If you guys know one thing about me, I want it to be that I love Minus The Bear. They were the band I saw most throughout high school and college, usually catching them in Portland at the second-to-last stop of whatever tour they were on before they made it back up to their hometown in Seattle. I saw the group what felt like countless times, each tour coming out to dance and jump around to these mathy indie rock songs that captured something special about life in the Pacific Northwest. 

When the band decided to call it quits in 2018, I was saddened but not distraught. I had seen them live so many times, and a nearly two-decade run from 2001 onward felt pretty impressive for a rock band of their stature. Back in 2020 (before all that bad stuff), I ranked Minus The Bear’s discography, a move that allowed me to wax poetic about every moment in their body of work that meant so much to me. When the group released the career-spanning live album Farewell near the end of 2021, it felt like a perfect capstone to a seventeen-year-long run of rocking out and guitar tapping. 

I never really expected Minus The Bear to get back together, but when they started posting cryptic teases earlier this year, I mentally prepared myself. At first, it was just for some festival appearances, then a nationwide anniversary tour playing their breakthrough sophomore album Menos El Oso in full. Today, after even more teases, the band has blessed us with some new (old) music in the form of a previously unreleased demo version of “Hooray.” 

It’s charming to hear the snowy love letter to Seattle in a more mellow state before the band punched it up for the album. It’s a little more laid-back and smoothed out, with lead singer Jake Snider settling into a comforting hum that fits the song well. By the end of the song, however, Snider reaches a near-scream as the guitars shred beneath him – a beautiful escalation that adds a nice bite to this early incarnation of the track. Aside from the original album version, this demo also stands in contrast to the lush acoustic rendition the group put out in 2013 as part of Acoustics II. 

Luckily for freaks like me, this demo of “Hooray” is merely the first in this year’s festivities. To celebrate two decades of Menos El Oso, the group is releasing a 20th-anniversary deluxe edition of the album this August, including four more demos, a 24-page archive photo journal, and an etching on the D-side by bassist Cory Murchy. Turns out 2025 is a great year to be a Minus The Bear fan, and I never would have expected that, but god knows I’m here for it.