DECIDER began as a collaboration between Eric Wood and Jake Israel, built around a shared love of music, storytelling, and the simple ambition of making a record we genuinely wanted to hear.
What followed was three years of writing, recording, producing, revisiting, refining, and occasionally starting over. In May 2024, that work became Decider, our independently released, self-titled debut album.
Across the record, the songs explore hope, despair, redemption, reverie, relationships, and the wonderfully complicated business of being human. Different stories, different perspectives, connected by the things we experience, carry with us, and occasionally manage to leave behind.
The album was mastered by Noah Mintz at Lacquer Channel, bringing the final polish to a record that moves freely through rock, alternative, and progressive influences without feeling particularly obligated to choose between them.
Along the way, Decider grew beyond the two people who started it. Drummer Mat Oddleifson and bassist Jeff Buck joined the project, bringing their own musicianship, energy, and perspective to the final project.
We made the record we set out to make.
And it’s still here to be heard.
TRACK 01 // UNDERWRITER
There’s a considerable distance between who you are and who you used to be. Underwriter lives somewhere in between – among identity, isolation, buried pain, and the very human desire to simply fit in.
The video was named one of The Tinnitist’s Top 24 Music Videos of 2024.
Not a bad place to land.
TRACK 09 // MINE TO LOSE
TRACK 03 // TEMPTED
Four musicians, several cameras, and enough photographic evidence to prove that this actually happened.
Photography By: Justin Lawrence and Julien O’Malley
Have a project, an idea, a question, or an interesting problem that refuses to behave? Something that needs making, fixing, rethinking, photographing, designing, or otherwise coalescing into existence? Make contact. I can’t promise to say yes, but I can promise to have an opinion.