Foreground: Ben Hinz. Background: wood paneling.

Unless an iconic musician or significant portion of a band’s members die tragically (2Pac, Lynard Skynard, Elvis, etc.), it’s not often that they release an album years after disbanding. But such is the case with The Ronald Raygun.

The band has been defunct for three years, yet released a follow-up album in September for free download on the internet. 

The Ronald Raygun started as a quartet, but by the time of its debut album had become a power trio comprised of drummer Matt Haapala, keyboardist Greg Hirsch (now of Yam Cannon), and guitarist Ben Hinz, best known for his guitar pedal venture Dwarf Craft Devices.

    The band is hard to confine to a label, Hinz said, but was once favorably labeled “Heavy Modern Psych,” which he preferred to his description: “Psychedelic Death Sex.”

Riddled with firings, technological mishaps, and mental breakdowns, their first record, Preventing Murder Through Music, took most of 2006 to produce and get released.

“The whole Ronald Raygun: Mach One was difficult for everybody. The circumstances were stacked against us,” Hinz said. “By the time of the CD release show, I felt ‘I’m done with this.’”

The quartet-turned power trio became a duet quickly after the release, and even quicker became nothing. But Ben and Matt stayed together for three other short-lived bands, ensuring that they’d continue making music and unknowingly keeping Raygun alive.

“I kind of felt like our first album was going to be our swan song,” Hinz said. But, as fate would have it, they kept playing together, on and off, yielding about five hours of recorded content that they whittled down for a follow-up album.

The freshly released second record, Two, is titled as such for the number of years its content spans (2007 and 2008), and the number of people involved. Hinz said it’s also conveniently twice as “far out” as their first record, using the example of one track in which Ben plays guitar and Matt walks around the room with the mic playing whatever is laying around.

“I really like the outcome. I view Two as a snapshot. A kind of time capsule,” he added.

Though Hinz knows the band is still not active, he also knows that they managed to put together an album while broken up. “So in a couple of years, you never know. Never say never with The Ronald Raygun.”

    Check out the albums and Hinz’s pedals at http://www.dwarfcraft.com