Tag: Bloodshot Bill

Top 25 albums of 2025: #’s 15 – 11

We’re now halfway through my list of favorite albums from last year. Who’s here? Read on!

#15: Lammping – Never Never

Take a trip-hop duo (Lammping) and combine them with a Canadian rockabilly one-man-band who was described by John Waters as “Roy Orbison with a head injury” (Bloodshot Bill), and you get the neat Never Never EP. It sounds like something you’d find in a dusty record bin among “2000s Music – Misc.”, and is well-worth seeking out. It’s the first of four EPs from Lammping, so they’re off to a good start.

#14: King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard – Phantom Island

Would it be a “best of” year list without a King Gizz album by now, since they release at least one album a year? Phantom Island combines the Aussie psych-rock / thrash metal / rave music giants with an orchestra because…why not? It’s a lush album with as much mystery as its cover.

#13: pôt-pot – Warsaw 480km

Here’s a post-punk band that emerged from seemingly nowhere to knock me back into my chair. “Damn, that’s good,” was my first thought after hearing it. I’m delighted that so many good post-punk bands are still appearing, and this is one of them.

#12: John Also Bennett – Ston Elaióna

This is a lovely ambient record mostly made of synths and field recordings John Also Bennett made around Greece. One song is inspired by the oldest known written song found on a stone pillar.

#11: Paddang – Lost in Lizardland

It’s a French psych-rock concept album about a future world dominated by evil lizard people and a lone heroine in the wasteland trying to defeat them. What more do you need to know?

Come back tomorrow to see who made the top ten!

Keep your mind open.

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Lammping return with title track from upcoming album “Never Never” featuring Bloodshot Bill.

Photo Credit: Adrian Cvitkovic

Toronto psych-rock experimentalists LAMMPING return with “Never Never,” a full-tilt collaboration with Montreal rockabilly legend Bloodshot Bill, out May 6 via We Are Busy Bodies. The track supports their upcoming album Never Never, set for release on June 27, which marks the first installment of an ambitious four-album journey that will span genres, collaborations, and sonic time-travel over the next year.

After remixing Badge Époque Ensemble’s Clouds Of Joy album, Lammping’s Mikhail Galkin found himself re-immersed in the kind of sample-heavy hip-hop production he’d explored years earlier under the name DJ Alibi. Drawing on a style rooted in early ’90s East Coast rap but layered with live instrumentation and offbeat textures—somewhere between Pete Rock and The Avalanches—Galkin began blending those techniques into Lammping’s heavy psych-rock foundation.

The spark for Never Never came when the band reached out to Montreal rockabilly legend Bloodshot Bill, whose voice—gritty, elastic, and totally distinctive—felt like the perfect wildcard. The two had crossed paths over a decade earlier, and when Bill came to Toronto for a show, they booked a quick session. One track turned into three, and the album took shape around Jay Anderson’s breakbeat-style drumming, live jams, and flipped samples.

“‘Never Never’ was the first song that came out of this series of sessions, and it felt like a reset,” says Lammping producer Mikhail Galkin. “I was getting back into sampling, digging through records, pulling loops, then flipping them into songs. There are certain voices that always stood out to me. I always liked Bloodshot Bill’s voice and how he manipulates it and felt it would be a really cool instrument, so to speak, to feature on our stuff. It’s pretty harsh at times, but then he can drop it super low when needed. It generally has this animated feel.”

Originally built around a saxophone loop unearthed by bandmate Jay, the song became a springboard for collaboration. “I think the loop was kinda mischievous and rhythmically interesting, and it was recorded quite hot so it had a little bit of distortion. BB gravitated to it and used it as a springboard to write the song. He also shares a love of ’80s rap—when we were driving in his car, he had LL Cool J, Run DMC and Ultramagnetic MCs playing and all that, so it made sense that this project happened.”

Layer by layer, guitars, drums, and other samples were stirred into the mix, resulting in a gritty, genre-bending track that feels both chaotic and strangely cohesive. “I feel like BB is almost rapping on it,” Galkin adds, “but it still doesn’t become a hip-hop track. How weird the result became is what I love about the songs—I never get tired of it.” 

Paired with a hallucinatory video directed and edited by Galkin himself, “Never Never” acts as a portal into the first chapter of Lammping’s upcoming 4 part series—a celebration of psychedelic music, hip-hop, the DIY punk aesthetic, and unfiltered creativity. It’s a record that doesn’t just reference influences, it inhabits them with total sincerity.

Keep your mind open.

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[Thanks to Jenn at No Rules PR!]