In 2018, The Breeders released All Nerve, their first album in ten years. It arrived on March 2, 2018, through the independent label 4AD and followed the band’s 2008 album Mountain Battles.
All Nerve was especially notable because it reunited the classic Breeders lineup: Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim Macpherson. That same lineup had made the band’s best-known album, Last Splash, in 1993. Last Splash included “Cannonball,” the hit single that established The Breeders as one of alternative rock’s defining bands of the 1990s.
The long gap did not mean the members had stopped making music. Kim Deal continued working with the Pixies and on other projects, while The Breeders performed reunion shows and toured around the twentieth anniversary of Last Splash. The band’s return was therefore both a new-record release and a major lineup reunion. All Nerve contains songs such as “Wait in the Car,” “Nervous Mary,” and its title track, combining the group’s noisy guitars with Deal’s characteristically melodic vocals.