It's likely that Threatin, the band fronted by Jered Threatin, will go down in history for all the wrong reasons. Back in 2018, a chaotic UK tour made headlines after no one showed up to his shows. It transpired that Threatin had faked a significant online presence to encourage promoters to book his band, and the venues, quite naturally, weren't happy.
His band members quit, there was legal activity and plenty of mud-slinging, but instead of apologising, Jered turned the situation on its head by insisting the whole thing had been an elaborate set-up – and that the 'joke' was actually on us.
“What is Fake News?" he tweeted. "I turned an empty room into an international headline. If you are reading this, you are part of the illusion."
A year after the cancellations, Threatin returned to London to play a poorly attended and somewhat shambolic show at the Underworld, then ceased activity until the release of Die Young in early 2025. The single and its rather grim video documented Threatin's experience undergoing emergency open-heart surgery following a series of heart attacks.
Now, it appears that Jered Threatin is on the mend, with a new single, The Shadow Box, out now. The instrumentation has something of the flavour of Ennio Morricone's The Ecstasy of Gold, so perhaps it's no surprise that the video appears to show Jered lying dead inside some kind of desert burial box before riding to safety atop a goods train.
The Shadow Box was mastered at Abbey Road in London, and comes from Threatin's upcoming second album, the appropriately titled The Meaning of It All. No release date has been confirmed.
