I'm speechless. Over the past few months, our community has raised more than $40,000 through @Artizen . That money funded a new September Mourning comic, the creation of our new record, Volume V, and the repairs needed to get our tour bus back on the road. Three enormous pieces of our next chapter were made possible by the people who actually want to experience them. That distinction means everything to me. This wasn’t a corporate conglomerate funding a product because it calculated how much money it could make from us. This was our community saying, “We want another record. We want another comic. We want to see September Mourning onstage again.” As we were approached with the possibility of another deal, we took a minute to think about what just happened. The advance attached to our last deal was less than what our fans have raised for us over these past few months, and we get to keep our masters. That isn’t to say the label chapter of our career was entirely negative. I appreciate all three of them for certain things, and that system gave us opportunities. But September Mourning entered the label world when the band was first starting out, and we remained inside that structure for approximately ten years. Independence was always what I originally wanted for this project. For a long time, though, the label system appeared to be the only realistic way to scale. NFTs and Web3 changed the way I thought about that. They showed me that artists can build differently. We can connect directly with the people who care about the work, fund ideas together, and create our own infrastructure instead of waiting for an institution to decide whether our vision is commercially safe enough to support. Scaling independently is still difficult. You simply have to discover new ways to do it ... and that is exactly what we are doing now. After our last tour, we intentionally took a hiatus. We needed to reset, repair what had broken, work on the larger September Mourning IP behind the scenes, and decide what this next era should sound and feel like. Now, we’re pushing forward with the music again. For years, we were continually encouraged to write songs designed for terrestrial rock radio. We did that successfully. September Mourning has been played extensively on SiriusXM Octane and terrestrial stations, and I will always be proud of those accomplishments. (In fact, even independently, "You Oughta Know" is currently being played on radio right now) Charting on radio is incredible, but it doesn’t compare to standing in a room with someone who tells you that one of your songs helped save their life, made them feel less alone, or gave them the courage to make a decision they had been afraid to make. That kind of connection matters more to me now than writing another song simply because someone believes it fits a radio format. If it does both, great, but it's not a necessity. With Volume V, we want to explore places musically and creatively that we weren’t always encouraged to explore within the label system. We want to reinvent pieces of the sound, follow the emotion wherever it leads, and make something that connects deeply with actual human beings. Because of you, we now have the freedom to do that. Any additional money raised through Artizen will help us carry this record into the world through music videos, radio promotion, digital advertising, content, publicity, and all the other pieces a traditional record label would normally fund. Until Thursday, every dollar contributed becomes three dollars while matching funds remain. We still have funding available to unlock, so if you want to help us take Volume V further and place it in front of more people than ever before, this is the moment. But this isn’t me saying you haven’t already done enough. You have done more for us than I can adequately explain. You didn’t merely fund three projects. You reminded us that there is another way forward. You became the label. Now, let’s make this our biggest record ever. artizen.fund/index/p/septemb…