N.E.R.D. 244

N.E.R.D. (officially stylized as NER*D, as seen on their covers) is a backronym that stands for No-One Ever Really Dies.

N.E.R.D. is a hip-hop and rock band whose members include Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, also known as The Neptunes, and Shae Haley. The band was formed as a side project by the Neptunes in 1999. Williams and Hugo had known each other since 1985 when they were 12, and they met Shae Haley a few years later in high school. Hugo and Williams signed a deal when they graduated high school in 1992 and eventually, Hailey joined them when N.E.R.D. was formed.

In September 2001 the band released their first album, In Search Of in Europe. They used digital production for the project but when they prepared for the worldwide release a year later they opted to re-record the album with a live funk rock band known as Spymob. Two years later in March of 2004, they released their second album, Fly or Die. Unfortunately, the two albums didn’t have nearly as much success as The Neptunes production work—collectively the two albums barely broke a million copies sold. In 2005 the group supposedly disbanded because of a dispute with Virgin Records, but Pharrell contradicted this claim in an April 2008 interview:

Well, we never really went away. We were still touring […] We just said that because we didn’t want to deal with the company we were signed to at that time.

In 2008, after touring with Kanye West, the band released their third album, Seeing Sounds. Their single, “Spaz”, was featured on a Microsoft Zune Commercial that same year.

Still inspired by their fans and the music they went on to release their fourth album, Nothing, a year later in the UK. In 2013, Pharrell said that N.E.R.D. was back in the studio cooking up yet another album. However, no album surfaced, but they did do a song called “Squeeze Me” for The Spongebob Movie: Sponge Out of Water in 2014.

After over three years of silence, N.E.R.D. debuted a new album, NO ONE EVER REALLY DIES, at the 2017 ComplexCon.