Therapy?

Therapy? are a rock band from Northern Ireland. The band was formed in 1989 by guitarist-vocalist Andy Cairns and drummer-vocalist Fyfe Ewing. The band is best to be described somewhere along the line of having a sound between Metallica's decibel-heavy repertoire and Nirvana's gloomy existentialism. Therapy? released career-defining albums like Troublegum, Infernal Love, and Semi-Detached while constantly challenging themselves and their listeners.

A bit of Punk-rock History.

Much has been made over the years of the unusual question mark suffix to the band's name. In early interviews the band said that the name was "really deep" and intended to raise the question "do you need therapy?", but in a 1992 interview guitarist Andy Cairns admitted that it was a chance design when he was working on the band's first record sleeve. Working with Letraset transfers, a dry rub-down transfer technique that was commonly used by the punk movement because of its ease of manipulation, its low price and the quality of the rendered layout. These values were aligned with the Do it yourself value of this movement by allowing the margin subcultures of that time to be independent from printers and publishers. Cairns misaligned the band's name, and used the "?" icon to fill the space to the right. "And then we thought, well maybe we can bluff our way through when people start reading into it."