announced a hiatus

The Matches announced a hiatus on July 9, 2009. On August 12, they released their fourth album, The Matches Album 4, Unreleased; Graphics? Title? Or Not Needed? , recorded at Talking House Productions studios and produced by John Paulsen, with two tracks produced by Miles Hurwitz. The album comprised previously unreleased songs, previously released B-sides and bonus tracks, and the band’s most recent demos, and was described in the release notes as “the final original recordings from the Matches prior to their hiatus.” The title was the subject line of an email from Hurwitz asking about the proposed album. “The album name is basically making fun of our manager’s verbose e-mails”, said Harris; “[The title] was just the subject header [of his e-mail], and it had all these semicolons and like a four-way conjunction, so we just sent back the shortest e-mail saying, ‘That’s the title.’ He tried to get us to change it a number of times, but we were like, ‘Nope. That’s it. ‘ ” The band played a pair of sold-out farewell shows on August 22 at the Troubadour in West Hollywood and August 23 at the Fillmore in San Francisco . Harris said of the latter that “the final show was I think the Matches’ best show. We sold out the Fillmore which is where I used to make nachos as a kid—it was one of my first jobs. It was a really weird, full-circle vindication of a dream. It was a really nice goodbye.”