New Waver released this concept album about the psychopathology of status in 1999 in Melbourne, where it received four stars in Australian Rolling Stone, before being released soon after by the Endearing label in North America, where it became something of a college-radio hit (see reviews below). The album is constructed from samples of speech from psychiatry teaching-tapes, documentaries, talkback radio and television, set to original music.

Ten years have passed since the release of The Defeated. The cds have mostly been sold (go to endearing.com if you'd like one of the remaining copies), and a lot has happened in the intervening period. This creates the opportunity to reconsider the album, remaster it using modern techniques, and place it on the Internet for general use.

Part of the intention of The Defeated was to support an argument made by authors as diverse as R. D. Laing and Randolphe Nesse that negative emotions are caused not by disease or chemical imbalance but by harmful social processes. Therefore victimhood can be better understood through social and evolutionary science than through a medical model, and the symptoms of victimhood are better tackled through counterbalancing social processes than through drugs. This was an unorthodox view in the Prozac-loving 90s - the kind of thing you could only say on an indie record. However in the ten years since the album's release this view has come to be more broadly accepted, due to the growing influence of evolutionary writers and a growing suspicion of pharmaceuticals, while the concept of "social defeat" has gained ground within academic and clinical psychology as a way of understanding the etiology of depression, anxiety and psychosis.

The album artwork consisted of clippings from Australian newspaper and magazine articles about people whose lives had gone wrong. The title alluded to Louis Nowra's classic 1979 collage-book on social disadvantage, "The Cheated".

This redux is released under the Creative Commons licence: you may download and play this music without restriction, but may not use it for commercial gain. The BandCamp website allows you to play either the whole album or individual songs, and if you're interested, to read notes about each song, which were written for the 2010 release.

Reviews for the 2000 release of The Defeated:

"an exquisitely claustrophobic album in which you find yourself masochistically trapped, and from which, paradoxically, you do not want to emerge unscathed. these australians are innovative, brave and congenial, weaving a musical path through paranoia and anxiety" - Losing Today

"On this CD, New Waver paints pictures ranging in emotional color from resignation to intense despair by exploring the fears and psychoses of mentally disturbed people. ... Think of 'The Defeated' the way you do of 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...' for example, compelling but not pleasant." - Splendid eZine

Ho-lee! This album really depressed me and made me laugh at the same time. No mean feat... - Punk Planet