If you need a blast of frenetic garage rock, look no further than Dion Lunadon‘s newest EP, Memory Burn. Lunadon specializes in this kind of wild, near-panicked rock and roll that’s designed to make you stomp your boots or shake you out of them.
“Goodtimes”(a song about how too much of a good time usually becomes a bad time) starts with growling bass, then kicks in hammering drums, sand-blaster guitars, and fuzzy freak-out vocals. “New York” could’ve been a New York Dolls song in a previous life, and Lunadon’s love of that glam-garage band is evident throughout the track.
“Out in My World” practically throttles you from the first note as Lunadon claims that he’s “livin’ in a scam” while the guitars around him either sound like they’re on fire or being played with hand mixer. Lunadon rails about communication, or the lack thereof, on “Get Back to You,” which has some of the rowdiest riffs on the whole record.
Whereas that track might be the rowdiest, “Hollywood Blues” is the grimiest with Lunadon claiming “I lost my halo.” The EP closes with “Zenith Forever,” a raucous burner that barely leaves anything left behind when it’s over.
The whole EP is about fifteen minutes in length and feels like a high intensity aerobic workout by the time it’s done. It will burn your memory and calories.
Today Guelph, Ontario hell-raisers Bonnie Trash announce details of their new album, ‘Mourning You’, which is set for release on February 28th on Hand Drawn Dracula. Along with the announcement they have shared the first single and video from the album, entitled “Veil of Greed”.
‘Mourning You’ is, put bluntly, an album about death. Not death in the macabre, violent, or outrageous sense, but death as you or I might know it. A spectre lurking around the corner. Capricious, indiscriminate, and unexpected. Ordinary and all the more terrifying for it. Real. Fear in the eyes of a loved one about to die, and the fear in your eyes – staring back.
Bonnie Trash is the horrorgaze project of twin sisters Emmalia & Sarafina Bortolon-Vettor, wedding post-punk’s steely-eyed austerity to goth rock’s brooding grandeur.
‘Mourning You’ finds Bonnie Trash embracing a newfound sense of urgency. A lifelong project christened in 2017 with the release of ‘Ezzelini’s Dead’, the band’s debut EP which found the pair mining the Trevisan dialect and archaic Italian folklore of their heritage to grisly effect. Where their first full length, ‘Malocchio’ (2022), shrouded Bonnie Trash’s nightmares in dusky dreamlike reverb, ‘Mourning You’ is vivid and immediate. Emboldened by the addition of Emma Howarth-Withers on bass and Dana Bellamy on drums – whose thunderous rhythms sharpened 2024’s ‘My Love Remains the Same’ EP into a fine-edged blade – ‘Mourning You’ is less a post-mortem fantasia than a sudden, swift dagger to the heart. This is sorrow not as a lingering bruise, but a gushing wound.
Bonnie Trash unveil their new project with this first single “Veil of Greed”. Emmalia’s gripping and unyielding guitar riff with all the icy malice of Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine introduces the urgency of the uncomfortably ordinary horror story that unfurls across the record. The song’s gruesome imagery – feasting on hearts with rotten teeth – finds Sarafina worshipping at the altar of her agony. “I bow down before you and I know / You feed.”
“When you lose the one you love so dearly, it’s a cut that’s so deep, it rips your heart out of your chest. You try to continue on, but you suffer and you bleed” the twins comment. “Grief is like an open wound that will never fully heal. It can consume you if you let it. Sometimes, it’s best to let it feed, allowing the pain to exist with the beautiful memories you hold close to your heart.”
Sarafina, the band’s singer and lyricist, has described the album as being about “losing someone you love. It’s about the horrors of grief, haunting you every day.” Inspired, largely, by the passing of Nonna Maria – who provided interstitial narration across the band’s early work – it’s these intimate details which render the songs on ‘Mourning You’ so devastating. The record explores love and grief as kindred spirits. Grief as love with nowhere to go. Love determined by the fear of its loss. A blood pact. A life for a life. The gnarled claw of remorse gripping you in twilight’s terror.
Though inspired by the shocking iconography of horrorshows, slasher flicks, and psychological thrillers, Bonnie Trash turns cinematic tropes on their head. Rather than fashioning nightmares into reality, the band paints reality as a nightmare, rife with pain, suffering, and gothic theatre. Bonnie Trash understands that everyday atrocities haunt the periphery of our lives. A black cloud looming on the edge of our vision. Curses abound. You can’t ward them off. You’d best make an unholy racket.
‘Mourning You’ is out February 28, 2025 on Hand Drawn Dracula. In mourning, all is lost.
The sound of What Is Success, Open Head’s second album and debut for Wharf Cat Records (out Jan 24), started with an argument in the practice space. The members of the heaviest band in Kingston, NY, and perhaps the entire world, were tired of their instruments. The post-punk they’d been playing together for the previous five years or so was beginning to feel like a sort of prison—the opposite of the freedom they initially got together to pursue.
“Nothing sounded good,” remembers Jared Ashdown, one of the band’s two guitarist-vocalists. “It was, ‘I hate my guitar,’ ‘I hate my bass,’ Alright, then let’s stop playing them.”
Something clicked. Bassist Jonathan McCarthy gravitated toward synthesizer, playing low notes like idling hovercraft. Ashdown picked up a sampler loaded with industrial field recordings made by drummer Daniel Scwhartz, running them through a bevy of effects pedals and using them as uncanny percussion instruments. Schwartz himself began incorporating rhythms drawn from Open Head’s mutual love of left-field electronic dance music. Rather than actually putting down their guitars, Brandon Minnervini and Ashdown delved further into their ongoing exploration of extended techniques, turning their instruments into celestial chimes or electric motors, sometimes vast and textural and other times pinprick-precise.
This new approach has paid dividends for Open Head, who have been attracting more and more attention of late. Recent underground favorites, who have shared stages with bands like, Geese, Dummy, Show Me The Body, Cola, and Water From Your Eyes over the past couple of years, the band’s newest material has come in for critical praise as well, with early singles “Catacomb” and “House” attracting attention from Pitchfork,Stereogum, Consequence, BrooklynVegan and Post-Trash who described “House” as “a pummeling, ruinous single that draws deep from the well of NYC avant-garde.”
Today, the band are back with a new preview of their LP, a track called “N.Y. Frills” that is premiering with FLOOD.
Open Head say of the track:
In a sort of homage to New York No-Wave, N.Y. Frills is an encounter with the monotone Goliath that is Manhattan. Our guitarist Brandon Minnervini sings the song, and together with bassist Jon McCarthy he wrote it while working for a fabrication business in Kingston, sanding designer aluminum shelving. Every so often, Brandon would be tasked with delivering the products to ultra-wealthy patrons in New York City.
A drive that started at a dusty Kingston warehouse would end in the alien opulence of a Manhattan penthouse, or a private AI sports betting clubs, or a ‘development workshop’ full of untouched fabrication machines occupying prime manhattan real-estate, and then back again. Brandon brushed up against the type of wealth most never see. The song is a meditation on contact with those who live with such extravagance, and their detachment from those who make it possible on physical and material level. From a similar perspective the song describes Open Head’s relationship with New York City in general–one of both proximity and distance, where the city is always within reach, yet the band is always a visitor, an outsider to its tempo, its density and its size.
Lyrically, the song is the return journey from a brush with the extravagant. It begins in the high-rise, amidst the luxury class, and with each verse drops “lower still,” until the narrator sinks to become the ground itself—no different than the physical earth that supports the weight of the city. “Heaven’s gate, sink and wait, object love, interest rates.”
Today, DITZ share new single ‘Taxi Man’ taken from their recently announced new album Never Exhale out 24th January 2025 via Republic Of Music and Domino Publishing. They also announce a string of intimate in-store performances at some of the UK’s best record stores.
Never Exhale is the sound of a band that hasn’t stopped for a breath. DITZ have toured relentlessly since the release of their first record The Great Regression and the songs that form their newest offering were written across Europe, often on off days and in borrowed rehearsal rooms just to break up the long drives – it’s album that reflects the sound of the road.
Formed in late 2015, DITZ came together after vocalist C.A. Francis, guitarist Anton Mocock, and bassist Caleb Remnant, went to watch METZ and Lightning Bolt at Concorde 2 in Brighton, turning to each other and saying “let’s do that”, with guitarist Jack Looker and drummer Sam Evans later joining.
Singer C.A. Francis said of the track, “We’ve been talking playing most of this new album live for a year now. Out of all the tracks, Taxi Man has been the most requested.
We wrote it across a couple of days in Cologne, in a disused air raid bunker. We properly fell out while we were writing it. There was nothing coming for so long until we stumbled into Taxi Man. The whole song came together pretty quickly and is now collectively our favourite track to play live. It’s one of those moments you hope to recreate again sometime but can’t really imagine the scenario.”
It could be said that the band treat recording and release of music as an afterthought. Often playing songs live years before their release, tweaking them as they go. Sonically the album has its roots in the usual DITZ influences, classic noise rock such as The Jesus Lizard or Shellac, or the obtuse post punk of the Fall, but also brings in fresh influences. It’s political, but ultimately personal, and the album themes reveal themselves more on further listens.
Never Exhale was largely recorded at Holy Mountain studios in London during a freezing cold January. The process was fraught with obstacles, as the original plan to record in Rhode Island was abandoned when DITZ were offered a support tour with IDLES. Although the album was still mixed by the originally intended engineer, Seth Manchester (Model/Actriz, Lingua Ignota, Big Brave). The result is a record hardened by the pressure of its own making. Laboured but not loved.
Overall the album is a clear development from their first effort. A sign of things to come.
DITZ are:
C.A. Francis (Vocals) – they/them Anton Mocock (Guitar) – he/him Sam Evans (Drums) – he/him Jack Looker (Guitar) – he/him Caleb Remnant (Bass) – he/him
30th Nov 24 – Nos Reves Font Du Bruit – Troyes, France 7th Dec 24 – Zeitgeist Festival – Nijmegen, Netherlands
13th Dec 24 – Post Punk Strikes Back Again – Porto, Portugal
24th Jan 25 – Resident – Brighton, UK 25th Jan 25 – Banquet – Kingston, UK
26th Jan 24 – Vinilo – Southampton, UK (Matinee) 26th Jan 25 – Rough Trade East – London, UK (Evening) 27th Jan 25 – Rough Trade – Bristol, UK 28th Jan 25 – Jacaranda – Liverpool, UK 29th Jan 25 – Vinyl Whistle – Leeds, UK
20th Jan 25 – Staggeringly Good Brewery – Southsea, UK
5th Feb 25 – Music Box – Lisbon, Portugal 6th Feb 25 – Sala El Sol – Madrid, Spain 7th Feb 25 – Sala Upload – Barcelona, Spain 10th Feb 25 – Lido – Berlin, Germany 12th Feb – Hus – Stockholm, Sweden 13th Feb 25 – Huset-KBH – Copenhagen, Denmark 14th Feb 25 – Kent Club – Hamburg, Germany 15th Feb 25 – UT Connewitz – Leipzig, Germany 17th Feb 25 – Chumury – Warsaw, Poland 18th Feb 25 – Cafe V Lese – Prague, Czech 19th Feb 25 – Rhiz – Vienna, Austria 20th Feb 25 – Kranhalle – Munich, Germany 22nd Feb 25 – Bogen F – Zurich, Switzerland 23rd Feb 25 – Arci Belleza – Milan, Italy 25th Feb 25 – Club Transbo – Lyon, France 26th Feb 25 – Astrolabe – Orleans, France 27th Feb 25 – Antipode – Rennes, France 1st Mar 25 – La Maroquinerie – Paris, France 2nd Mar 25 – Witloof – Brussels, Belgium 3rd Mar 25 – Rowtown – Rotterdam, Netherlands 4th Mar 25 – Gebaude 9 – Cologne, Germany 5th Mar 25 – Rockhal – Esch-zur-Alzette, Luxembourg 6th Mar 25 – Paradiso THT – Amsterdam, Netherlands 7th Mar 25 – Vera – Gronigen, Netherlands 8th Mar 25 – L’Aeronef – Lille, France
25th Mar 25 – Hug & Pint – Glasgow, UK 26th Mar 25 – Brudenell Social Club – Leeds, UK 27th Mar 25 – Bodega – Nottingham, UK 28th Mar 25 – Yellow Arch – Sheffield, UK 29th Mar 25 – Voodoo Daddy’s, Norwich, UK 1st Apr 25 – YES Pink Room – Manchester, UK 2nd Apr 25 – Hare & Hounds – Birmingham, UK 3rd Apr 25 – The Garage – London, UK 4th Apr 25 – Chalk – Brighton, UK 7th Apr 25 – Control Club – Bucharest, Romania 8th Apr 25 – Pave Club – Sofia, Bulgaria 9th Apr 25 – Rover Bar – Thessaloniki, Greece 10th Apr 25 – Arch Club – Athens, Greece 11th Apr 25 – Zō Centro Culture Contemporanee – Catania, Italy 12th Apr 25 – Wishlist, Roma, Italy
Lambrini Girls, the Brighton-based duo of Phoebe Lunny (vocals/guitar) and Lilly Macieira (bass), have spent the last few years on a tear in more ways than one, and now share news of their debut album Who Let The Dogs Out released 10th January 2025 via City Slang alongside single ‘Big D*** Energy’ (censored spelling).
Speaking on the new single, Lambrini Girls explain, “Man comes in many forms, from world leaders to tech CEOs and humble softboys. But what unites them? Society has celebrated their supposed massive figurative and literal dicks, which they constantly flaunt. Why? Toxic masculinity.”
They add, “Fuelling their sense of entitlement and insecurities leads to harmful behaviours. Which when left unchecked, means we have to deal with the fallout. The definition of ‘Big Dick Energy’ is a confidence that doesn’t need proving. Which begs the question, how big is that dick in reality? If you haven’t figured this out by now, it’s not that big.”
Who Let The Dogs Out was recorded with Gilla Band’s Daniel Fox with mixing by Seth Manchester (Mdou Moctar / Battles / Model/Actriz), and the record bottles everything wrong with the modern world and shakes it up. If peppering political songs with humour is like sticking a sparkler in some bread, then Who Let The Dogs Out is like a fireworks display in the factory itself: strange, dangerous, exciting.
The album rips through a laundry list of social ills. Sirens blare over a heavy distorted bass and a live drum breakbeat, dancing between upbeat pop punk, dirty grunge tones and discordant post-punk. There’s even some noise-pop cheer for putting yourself first, whether it’s having an autistic meltdown or doing a poo at your mate’s house.
With instrumentals that inhale you like a Level 5 tornado and sentiments that make you want to kick the nearest door through, it’s a take-no-prisoners debut from one of the UK’s most fun and fearless bands.
“You know how Fleetwood Mac almost dedicated Rumours to their cocaine dealer? I think we should dedicate this album to all the booze we bought at Tesco.”
Since releasing debut EP You’re Welcome in 2023, there’s also been a slew of accolades along the way, including a nomination for the Rising Star at the Rolling Stone UK Awards, a Kerrang! cover feature with Sleater-Kinney, and a score of international festival appearances from Glastonbury to Iceland Airwaves. Making a reputation for themselves as one of the best live bands to come out of the UK this side of Idles, their combination of blunt-force punk, scathing social commentary and barbed humour has garnered comparisons to Bikini Kill and Huggy Bear, and seen them share bills with Gilla Band, Shame, Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, Iggy Pop and more.
The weather stayed nice for us on Day Two of Levitation Austin. There was no rain, and it was overcast – which meant that the sun wasn’t beating down on us at this place.
There is no parking.
We spent most of our day here. It was a first time for both of us at the place, and the Austin Psych Fest in the spring is held here. You have to take the bus or use a ride-share service to get here because it’s on a busy road and there’s no where to park for miles. That being said, it’s a nice place big enough to hold two outdoor stages and multiple vendor booths. I would’ve enjoyed more food truck options other than pizza (which looked delicious, by the way), and we’ll bring a blanket next time, but the place reminded me of the La Chabada venue at Levitation France. You can easily hop back and forth between stages at both places.
Up first were Meatbodies, whom I’d recently seen in Chicago. They were the first band of the day and had a good crowd for a 4:30 slot. They had fun and set the table for everyone else to follow with a night of garage-psych, electro, cosmic rock, and post-punk.
They had to cut their set a bit short, as the second band of the day was in the process of unleashing fierce dance-punk on the main stage. Special Interest came out ready to fight and / or fuck. “Fierce” is how my girlfriend described their wild set.
We could hear parts of Fat Dog‘s set, which was described by one of the sound engineers as “Like Fontaines D.C., but hornier.” We decided to get close for Gang of Four, who are on their final tour, and were the big draw of the day for me. They didn’t disappoint, playing a lot of classics and destroying a microwave in the process. Jon King‘s manic energy made my girlfriend wonder if he might have a heart attack on stage, but one look through his unbuttoned shirt showed how ripped he is.
We hung out in the same area for Dry Cleaning, who somehow had to follow Gang of Four. Lead singer Florence Shaw (whom my girlfriend described as “fucking weird”) spoke, a bit nervously, about all the great bands playing that day. She and her bandmates didn’t have to worry, however, as they put down a great post-punk set. I love the addition of their saxophonist on this tour. The echoing horn is a sharp touch.
We heard part of Pissed Jeans‘ set, which sounded crazy, and they had a lot of fans at the Far Out. I saw plenty of their band shirts on people in the crowd (“Excuse me, are those Pissed Jeans you’re wearing?”), and then headed over to see Slift, who were once again wrapping up their U.S. tour at Levitation. They wasted no time, using every bit of gas left in the tank. Crowd surfers were abundant during their set and they practically blasted the east fence off the place. “I think Slift stole the show,” my girlfriend said.
We wrapped up the night at Kingdom in downtown Austin, a venue that’s the opposite of the Far Out. It’s pretty much a rave warehouse that you can only access through a door in an alley. We hit the dance floor during MJ Nebreda and Doss‘ sets, which were full of so much bass that we were both buzzing by the end of the night. It was fun to hang out with a crowd of ravers (many of whom still in costume a night after Halloween) after hanging out with rockers for several hours.
Up next, night three of Osees‘ four-night residency at Hotel Vegas.
I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to see The The live. The band’s leader, frontman, and songwriter, Matt Johnson, had seemingly retired many years ago to make film scores and write other non-musical projects. Then, in 2018, he did a reunion tour through the United Kingdom. I thought that would’ve been great to see (and video recordings of the shows bear me out), but guessed that my only chance was gone.
Then he released Ensoulment, his first new album in almost thirty years and announced a world tour that was stopping in Chicago. I signed up for pre-sale tickets and snagged a pair as soon as possible. My friend, Brian, and I went, both of us having been fans since 1986’s Infected album.
There was no opening band. The The played two sets. The first was Ensoulment in its entirety, and this was the first time I’d heard more than the first three singles from it. The first half is almost a jazz album, and Johnson’s sharp lyrics and jabs at the political establishment (i.e., “Kissing the Ring of the POTUS”) on both sides of the pond still hit like a gold medal fencer.
Following a 15-minute intermission, the band came back out for a “time traveler’s set” of material from their previous albums, opening with a slightly stripped-down, but no less funky version of “Infected.” “Armageddon Days Are Here (Again)” and “Heartland” were big hits with the crowd. “Love Is Stronger Than Death” was a beautiful addition to the set, and Johnson declared “This Is the Day” as a song of hope that was just as important now as when he wrote it decades earlier.
All of his songs still resonate. “Lonely Planet” prompted a “Fuck yeah!” shout from a guy a couple rows ahead of us when Johnson announced it to close the second set. The encore was two songs from Soul Mining, which had been released forty-one years prior (“I wasn’t even born then,” Johnson said.). “Uncertain Smile” and “Giant” rounded out the show, leaving a lot of people happy and buzzing. The whole crowd was in the same boat as Brian and I. We all thought we might not get to hear these songs live, and were all thankful that it happened.
It was the second of two sold-out shows for Osees in what’s become an annual autumn tradition at Chicago’s Thalia Hall. The crowd was buzzing at the outset, and everyone knew a good, wild time was coming.
The party started with Iguana Death Cult, all the way from The Netherlands. I hadn’t heard of them until this night, and at first wasn’t sure what to make of them. Were they punk, funk, post-punk, post-funk, post-psych, pre-psych? I’m still not sure if I know, but I do know that they were a lot of fun, the songs were wild, and each one was better than the last.
The crowd was behind them all the way, and had a fun mosh pit going by the end of their set. I chatted with their lead singer, Jeron Reek, after the show, and he told me they’d played South by Southwest twice, and other clubs and events across the U.S. a few times, “but this was the best.”
Osees came out to a happy crowd and soon got underway with a no-frills, no muss, no fuss set of wild garage-psych that began with “I Come from the Mountain” and barely let up to give the mosh pit time to catch a breath.
No backdrop, no projections…just simple lights and heavy shredding.
As always, the band had enough energy to power a Formula 1 race car through 500 laps with double drummers Paul Quattrone and Dan Rincon leading the charge. “A Foul Form,” “Toe Cutter – Thumb Buster,” and “Animated Violence” had the front half of the crowd in a wild frenzy.
Lead singer and guitarist John Dwyer announced “Tidal Wave” as “an old one,” but everyone reacted like it was a brand new gift. He introduced “The Dream” as “Here’s a new one that nobody likes,” and the crowd proceeded to go bonkers.
“Warm Slime” was a great addition, and the night ended with two long psychedelic tracks, “C” and “Minotaur.” I love Osees’ longer psych-rock cuts, so I was digging it. I must, as always, give mention to Tom Dolas on keyboards and Tim Hellman on bass, who always keep the whole band grounded. Dolas is like a magician in the background putting in tones and sounds that would make the songs feel weird without them, and Hellman is one of the sturdiest bass workhorses in all rock music. That guy is solid all the time and never stumbles.
Both bands will be performing at Levitation Music Festival, with Osees doing a four-night residency at Hotel Vegas no less. Don’t miss either of them.
Tense guitar passages, latin inspired drum grooves and melancholic basslines lay the foundation for test plan’s latest single ‘It’s Not Enough’.
Bassist Rory Dickinson takes lead vocal duties for the first time, delivering a subdued performance that builds towards an explosive belt of cinematic catharsis, haunted bya repetitive mantra sung throughout the song. Dickinson’s lyrics delve into the scene of mourning, regret and self-reflection, mirroring cynical patterns in the wake of anxiety and self-defeat. One of test plan’s oldest songs, ‘It’s Not Enough’ explores the darker tones of the band’s sonic palette. The frenetic rhythms wash over the track leading to a kraut-rock infused instrumental passage before feedback and chaos descends again towards test plan’s loudest crescendo yet – an eruption of intensifying noise.
Accompanying the song, the surreal horror-infused music video directed by drummer and vocalist Max Mason explores a masked character urgently trying to find water, but unable to satisfy their thirst. Their hypnotic and disturbing journey is indicative of the music’s exploration of desperation and the disquieted sensation that bubbles under the surface of test plan’s music.
Teaming up once again with engineer and producer Darren Jones (Fat Dog, Gorillaz) from the band’s own north-London rehearsal studio, the production pushes the most intense parts of the band’s sound to the forefront. Layers of visceral distortion and experimental flourishes punctuate through, capturing the claustrophobia of the gentle moments and the raw electricity in the midst of the carnage.
‘It’s Not Enough’ will be self-released on 20th August with their headline single launch show on 24th August at Paper Dress Vintage, London with Rampressue and Joshua Zero.
Being Dead — the Austin, TX-based duo consisting of Falcon Bitch and Shmoofy — announces its new album, EELS, out September 27th on Bayonet, lead single/video “Firefighters,” and a fall headline tour. Being Dead’s records are mosaics, technicolor incantations, each song its own self-contained little universe. And while the dreamlike EELS probes further into the depths of the duo Being Dead’s psyche, it is, most importantly, a 16-track record that is genuinely unpredictable from one track to the next. It’s a joyous and unexpected trip helmed by two true-blue freak bitch besties holed up in a lil’ house in the heart of Austin, Texas.
When Horses Would Run, Being Dead’s “glorious and timeless” (Gorilla vs. Bear) debut record released in 2023, took years to release. The final product was excellent and expertly polished, at odds with the live rowdiness they’d cultivated a reputation for throughout Austin and beyond across seven years of being a band. For the next one, they knew they’d have to do things differently. They decamped to Los Angeles for two weeks to record with GRAMMY-winning producer John Congleton, writing songs for the record until days before they left. The radical shift in process was welcome – a good balance and a challenge, Congleton helping them find new ways to work and helping peel back the layers on the core of their songwriting. Being Dead has grown from a duo to a trio live, including bassist Nicole Roman-Johnston who also co-wrote and recorded bass and vocals on several album tracks.
The resulting EELS is a darker record, tapped more into the devilishness within. It’s a more raucous, rougher ride sonically. There’s heartbreak, excitement, enchantment, dancing – we move through it all at a high-octane pace. Falcon Bitch and Smoofy never want to do the same thing twice on any song, and they don’t. This is never more apparent than on lead single, “Firefighters,” which might be the first of its kind told from the perspective of a Dalmatian who is overworked at their fire station. The pummeling, distorted garage rock ripper’s accompanying video by director URZULKA “came together through a group hallucination.” The band adds, “We love marbles and outdoor play and decided to get it on video for y’all. Making this was like creating an intricate handshake with all your buddies—riddled with inside jokes and giggles.”
There are a number of different origin stories for Being Dead floating around on the internet, most of which are immortalized in various press pieces they’ve done across the last seven years of being a band, and there will likely be more. Falcon Bitch and Smoofy deliver each story with a wink, inviting you in on the joke. Maybe they were actually born from a giant egg left in a meteoric crater, or they’re undercover on earth from an alien universe. Something about their music suggests it’s a dispatch from both the future and the past – vocal harmonies that sound like they’re reverberating in a medieval church to surfy guitar lines, weirdo-punky cacophonies erupting into chaos. There’s the sense that these are two people who are strangers to all that is banal – there is always fun to be had, a little mischievous magic waiting around the corner, if you know how to find or make it.
EELS Tracklist: 1. Godzilla Rises 2. Van Goes 3. Blanket of my Bone 4. Problems 5. Firefighters 6. Dragons II 7. Nightvision 8. Gazing At Footwear 9. Big Bovine 10. Storybook Bay 11. Ballerina 12. Rock n’ Roll Hurts 13. Love Machine 14. I Was A Tunnel 15. Goodnight 16. Lilypad Lane
Being Dead Tour Dates: Tue. Aug. 13 – Austin, TX @ Sagebrush Fri. Sept. 27 – Austin, TX @ Radio East Sat. Oct. 12 – Austin, TX @ Austin City Limits Mon. Oct. 14 – Atlanta, GA @ 529 Club Tue. Oct. 15 – Richmond, VA @ The Camel Wed. Oct. 16 – Washington, DC @ Comet Ping Pong Fri. Oct. 18 – Brooklyn, NY @ Brooklyn Made Sat. Oct. 19 – Philadelphia, PA @ PhilaMOCA Mon. Oct. 21 – Boston, MA @ The Rockwell Tue. Oct. 22 – Montreal, QC @ L’Esco Wed. Oct. 23 – Toronto, ON @ The Baby G Fri. Oct. 25 – Chicago, IL @ Empty Bottle Sun. Oct. 27 – Cincinnati, OH @ MOTR Pub Tue. Oct. 29 – Louisville, KY @ The Whirling Tiger Thu. Oct. 31 – Nashville, TN @ The Blue Room at Third Man Records Sat. Nov. 2 – Dallas, TX @ Club Dada
