Trans Am

After Trans Am's last album, Liberation - a bleak portrayal of life in a security-obsessed imperial capital, Trans Am changed their dynamics significantly and abandoned Washington, D.C. for three different continents. This period found Nathan Means in Auckland, New Zealand, Phil Manley in San Francisco, and Sebastian Thomson splitting time between London and New York. Internal contact was primarily electronic, except for a few live shows.

With two years' separation fueling them, the band ended this programmed isolation and began reconvening briefly to work on their new album. They reunited at MAINZ, a recording school in New Zealand, with a few songs and almost no musical equipment, in Brooklyn at the Okropolis, headquarters of Oneida, and in London and Los Angeles; the album was mixed at Tiny Telephone Studios in San Francisco. As opposed to previous Trans Am albums that took months to complete, Sex Change was conceived, written, recorded and mixed in only three weeks.