Today, Real Estate celebrate the 10th Anniversary of their breakout album, Days, with a special tribute to the Television song that helped inspire its sound, style and title.
Originally released on October 18th, 2011, Days was Real Estate’s second album; a suburban-bred coming-of-age story that changed their trajectory, and cemented songs like “It’s Real,” “Green Aisles” and “Easy” into the canon of indie rock music. “Its coherence sounds remarkably effortless,” Pitchfork praised, when granting Days the designation of Best New Music. “As if stringing together catchy gems is as easy as, in the words of one song, ‘floating on an inner tube in the sun.’” While critics initially drew comparisons to the likes of The Beach Boys, Byrds, R.E.M., Fleetwood Mac and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, it was an overlooked Television track that even devout fans might be surprised to learn held the most influence on the band.
Real Estate bassist and founding member Alex Bleeker explains, “The shrewd, completist bootlegger will always remember 6/30/2011 as the day that we debuted the album Days live in its entirety at 285 Kent in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Back then Domino Park, across the street, was still a dilapidated sugar warehouse, and our unreleased sophomore album didn't yet have a name. Real heads (or as we like to call them, ‘agents’) might also recall that this show was a release party for the new 33 1/3 book recounting the history of Television's Marquee Moon. Somewhere in the introduction to that volume author Bryan Waterman declared that even though the song ‘Days’ was on Television's often overlooked second record, it provided a blueprint for all of the melodic guitar-based indie rock that would soon follow in its wake.
We were of course huge fans of that tune, this was in fact our second record, and we saw ourselves humbly as the torchbearers of that tradition. So the story goes like this - we were on tour, sitting in our fire engine red Dodge Ram 2500 somewhere along the I-95 when someone in the band read that sentence aloud, and said, ‘why don't we call the album Days?’ As I recall, nobody loved it, but more importantly, nobody hated it and it stuck. It's true, this now decade-old album is named after this fantastic, underappreciated Television tune, which was a joy for us to cover and record for you after all these years.”
In the absence of touring, Real Estate have explored new ways of working together on recent releases like 2021’s Half a Human EP, which has brought the band into its next era following 2020 album The Main Thing. Both records were produced by longtime collaborator Kevin McMahon, whose work with Real Estate dates back to the five patient months they spent together in a New Paltz barn, recording what would become Days.
