Tom Shear
Assemblage 23
Tom got hooked on synths as a kid the first time he heard Gary Numan's "Cars." He mowed lawns every summer until he could afford a Korg Poly-800, added a drum machine and a four-track, and spent years making instrumentals because he was too shy to sing. Then in 1988 he went to see Depeche Mode, heard the DJ spinning industrial dance music between sets, and that was it. The project he'd been calling Man on a Stage became Assemblage 23.
Through college at Syracuse and after, Tom mailed cassettes to every college station, zine, and label he could find. The demos got airplay and the people who heard them loved them, but the labels passed or ignored him completely, and he kept writing songs anyway. A side project called Nerve Filter caught the ear of 21st Circuitry, a few A23 tracks landed on compilations, and in 1998 Canada's Gashed! Records finally signed him.
He moved to Metropolis Records, which included Defiance in 2002, Storm in 2004 with "Let the Wind Erase Me" and "Ground," Meta in 2007 with "Binary" debuting on a Billboard singles chart, then Compass, Bruise, Endure, and 2020's Mourn.
Null came out last November as album number ten, and it ended up on a long list of best-of-2025 roundups. The live side has been as busy as it's ever been, with a UK and Germany run last fall, sold-out German shows this past July, another round of dates in Germany and Sweden, and Toronto already on the books for February. An exclusive Inhalt remix of "Believe" drops October 2, two days before the show.
Outside of A23 there's Surveillance, his old-school EBM project that hit its crowdfunding goal in about 24 hours, Helix with his wife, vocalist Mari Kattman, a steady stream of remixes for other artists, and free multisampled patches from his own synths that he's been giving away on the A23 Instagram. He's also been one of the most outspoken artists in the scene about talking directly with fans, and he credits exactly those early fans with keeping him going through the years when no label would.
Whether you've been dancing to "Disappoint" since the Gashed! days, caught A23 at one of those sold-out German shows this summer or you're meeting Tom for the first time, this is a conversation with someone who has been in inspiration for so many of us!
What they get into
- Ten years of rejection, and what kept him writing songs nobody was signing yet
- Being the entire band in the studio, and what happens on the days you're stuck and there's nobody to hand it off to
- Pairing bright synth hooks with dark lyrics, and what Fad Gadget and early Human League taught him about contrast
- Selling out shows in Germany, and how an American act builds and keeps a European audience
- Crowdfunding Surveillance in a day, and why he'd only use it as a glorified pre-order next time
- Why talking directly with your fans might be the most underrated thing an independent artist can do