Bio

Before Dead Poet Society carved its place as one of modern rock’s most distinctive voices, it began as an obsessive study in emotional contrast, and that spirit courses through 2026’s Monarch.

Across songs like “Hollywood On Fire,” “Roach,” “Sinner Systems,” “Lost In My Head,” and “Art Of Suffering,” the album takes listeners on a cinematic journey through deconstruction, fury, and resolve. For Dead Poet Society, true connection begins where thought yields to feeling.

Monarch captures Dead Poet Society at their most distilled and dangerous, a band stripping away assumptions until only instinct remains. Anger and sadness collide. Melody flickers in the dark. Dead Poet Society carves out its own territory, and Monarch marks the moment they fully inhabit it.

Their third album is the inevitable culmination of the driving alt-rock promise of Dead Poet Society anthems found on their first two albums, songs that balance vulnerability and confidence. 

Jack Underkofler (vocals/guitar), Will Goodroad (drums), Jack Collins (guitar), and Dylan Brenner (bass) build the band around feeling rather than formula.  Since their formation in 2013 and the release of a handful of EPs, that pursuit has propelled Dead Poet Society past 200 million streams, produced several Top 10 rock radio singles, and led to vibrant performances at major international festivals, including Reading & Leeds, Welcome To Rockville, Sonic Temple, Graspop, and 2000Trees.

The band’s 2021 breakthrough debut for Spinefarm, -!- (commonly known as The Exclamation Album), set the stage for 2024’s adventurous FISSION. Kerrang! called the sophomore set “a record that breaks apart what it means to be an adult today and examines the tumultuous life events that change who we are: break-ups, addictions, loss, and the constant search for purpose and identity.” 

“I think the best art — the art that I admire and the art that we try to write as a band — creates this narrow straight between what you’re feeling in your head [and] what the person on the other end feels in their head when they hear it,” Underkofler explained to Loudwire in 2024. “The best artists make that line so clear that no information is lost when you play that song or you sing that song.” 

Making FISSION left Underkofler convinced the band had more creative catharsis to ponder and discover. “What are you, when you strip back what you think you are versus what you feel you are?” he wondered. For album number three, the goal wasn’t so much reinvention as personal excavation. 

“We wanted to carve out our own piece of territory,” he says. “I just wanted to swing for the fences with this one. All the things I felt made us, I wanted to see how much deeper I could go with them and try to boil down the essence of the feeling that makes Dead Poet Society who we are.” 

Produced by Mutemath frontman Paul Meany (Twenty One Pilots, Pierce The Veil, Yungblud) and mixed by GRAMMY Award-winning Adam Hawkins (Turnstile, Twenty One Pilots, mgk), MONARCH pulls Dead Poet Society back toward that dangerous instinct. Meany did not arrive to smooth the band into shape, instead working as a “professional listener” to guide DPS closer to themselves. “He masterfully adapted to who we are as a band,” Underkofler says. Meany’s patience proved essential for four hyper-opinionated musicians whose creative push-and-pull is essential. 

Reeling from personal loss and painful betrayals, Underkofler watched a central theme unfold as they wrote: resentment. That feeling is more than a passing shadow across Monarch. It is the record’s central pressure point, the force beneath its grief, and the anger against manipulation and exploitation. 

“We like to think of ourselves as thinking creatures that feel,” Underkofler says, citing a favorite idea from neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor. “But biology tells us we’re feeling creatures that think.”

That philosophy governs the record and the band. The songs are heavy yet not predictable, melodic without surrendering their edge, and emotionally articulate without explaining away the mystery.