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.
Austin trio Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol today announce even more US tour dates to close out 2024, adding December shows with King Buffalo. The band continues domestic dates this Fall supporting their new album BIG DUMB RIFFS ahead of their performances at Austin City Limits‘ prestigious ACL Fest and Levitation 2024 with The Sword and Pentagram. See all dates below.
Ticket pre-sales start tomorrow, August 7th at 10am local time (password: MAMMOTH) All tickets on sale Friday, August 9th HERE.
The band has also recently joined the roster of Doomstar Bookings for EU & UK touring beginning in Spring 2025.
BIG DUMB RIFFS is available on digital, LP and cassette, released May 10th, 2024. Order/stream the album on all formats HERE.
The band-curated second annual Rickshaw Billie’s BIG DUMB FEST in Austin, TX on June 1st SOLD OUT at Mohawk Austin. This follows a string of sold out dates throughout Texas, Denver, Los Angeles, Brooklyn and more.
“Our catalog has never been short on big dumb riffs, but the idea on this record was to really turn the screw,” says RBBP bassist Aaron Metzdorf. On Big Dumb Riffs, that screw is cranked incredibly tight.
“We just wanted ‘the part’: The opening of Pantera’s ‘Primal Concrete Sledge’, the breakdown in Primus‘ ‘Pudding Time’ — the shit that makes you move and lose your mind. Just that part the whole time.”
Across 11 concise, taut songs — most clocking in around 2 minutes or less — Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol demonstrates their skillful ability to blend the merciless low end of Leo Lydon’s 8-string guitar, Aaron Metzdorf’s masterful chordwork on the bass, and Sean St.Germain’s driving drumming.
Hot on the heels of their breakout 5th studio release Doom Wop (2023), Rickshaw Billie’s Burger Patrol returns with Big Dumb Riffs: A whole new variant of the fuzzed out, overdriven, melodic, groovy music they have been making since 2016. While Big Dumb Riffs is decidedly more aggressive and rhythmic, it still retains the overtly melodic feel of Doom Wop. But Leo Lydon’s vocals are considerably more angry and negative (song titles like “1-800-EAT-SHIT” and “Body Bag” should be a clue).
“The whole writing process was, ‘what if we just played two notes the whole song’,” Metzdorf says. “‘What if we tuned down to almost unusable string tension?’, ‘what if we write a record that will make everyone say ‘wow that is dumb’? Leo and I really move around on stage a lot. Being a dingus is crucial to the groove. All these riffs were designed to allow us to act bigger and dumber on stage.”
Big Dumb Riffs is available on vinyl LP, cassette, download and streaming, released on May 10, 2024. Orders are available HERE.
New-York based band A Place To Bury Strangers release the new single/video, “You Got Me,” from their forthcoming seventh album, Synthesizer, out October 4th via Dedstrange. Following lead single “Disgust,” which “sounds as pleasurable and danceable as it does revolting and mangled,” (Paste), “You Got Me” continues to follow suit. The earworm is representative of a photograph from a perfect summer of love, lust, breaking out from the pack, and getting lost in the night. In the middle of the track, a field recording from one of those kinds of days on the beach can be heard as a 747 barrels through the sky overhead. Play it loud, and play it now.
Synthesizer is the title of the album, but it is also a physical entity, a synthesizer made specifically for A Place to Bury Strangers’ seventh album (a synthesizer that you too, can own (in part), if you buy the record on vinyl). In an era of making music where so little is DIY and so much is left up to AI, never setting foot in a practice room or a home studio, making something that feels deliberately chaotic, messy, and human, is entirely the point. Synthesizer is a record that celebrates sounds that are spontaneous and natural, the kind of music that can only come from collaboration and community.
The writing sessions for Synthesizer started in the band’s Queens studio, shortly after the release of 2022’s See Through You. The band re-formed with a new lineup, Ackermann still at the helm, now featuring friends John and Sandra Fedowitz. This new iteration of the band was inspiring for Ackermann, “It felt like a fresh new thing,” he says, “I wanted to write songs everyone was excited about playing.” Indeed, the sense of connectivity is everywhere on the record. Synthesizer very much feels like a record of reinvention, of taking a carefully honed aesthetic and sound and cracking it wide open, gutting it, reimagining it. And of course, to ever so slightly reinvent one’s sound, one must also build a new instrument, thus again the synth in question. The resulting record is one that is romantic, colorful, loud as hell, and one of A Place to Bury Strangers’ most live sounding records to date.
GLARE is an alternative rock/shoegaze five-piece from the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. Since their inception in 2017, the band has wasted no time making a name for themselves with the release of heaps of singles and an abundance of touring and high-profile festival appearances.
Now, GLARE have teamed up with Deathwish Inc. + Sunday Drive to release a new song, “Mourning Haze.” Guitarist Toni Ordaz comments, “‘Mourning Haze’ had been with us for awhile, written around the time we were doing ‘Void in Blue’ and developing what would later become ‘Heavenly’. Immediately, we knew it sounded way different from what we did before and decided early on that it was going to be a part of what would become the album. The lyrics didn’t come much later until the recording sessions, but I think they are very much a reflection of what we were all going through at the time.” Toni continues, “‘Mourning Haze’ is about grief, and how dreams play a role in processing it.”
GLARE will release their new LP sometime in spring 2025 via Deathwish Inc. / Sunday Drive. In the meantime, catch the band on tour this fall with Turnover, Panchiko, and more on select dates. Also see GLARE at Desert Daze and Levitation Fests:
GLARE, live:
Sep 5 San Antonio, TX – Paper Tiger # [7inch release show] Sep 6 McAllen, TX – El Cine # [7inch release show] Sep 27 Albuquerque, NM – Sister Bar ^ Sep 29 Salt Lake City, UT – Church & State ^ Sep 30 Boise, ID – Treefort Music Hall $ Oct 02 Ft. Collins, CO – The Coast $ Oct 03 Colorado Springs, CO – Black Sheep $ Oct 04 Omaha, NE – Slowdown $ Oct 05 Columbia, MO – Blue Note $ Oct 06 Indianapolis, IN – The Vogue $ Oct 07 Huntington, WV – The Loud $ Oct 08 Louisville, KY – Mag Bar ^ Oct 09 Little Rock, AR – Stickyz ^ Oct 10 Oklahoma City, OK – Resonant Head ^ Oct 10-13 Lake Perris, CA – Desert Daze Oct 14 San Diego, CA – Voodoo Room ^ Oct 15 Tucson, AZ – Club Congress ^ Nov 03 Austin, TX – Levitation, Far Out Lounge % Nov 15 Baltimore, MD – Rams Head Live! ~ Nov 17 Asheville, NC – The Orange Peel ~ Nov 19 St. Petersburg, FL – Jannus Live ~ Nov 20 Orlando, FL @ The Beacham ~ Nov 21 Atlanta, GA – The Masquerade, Heaven ~ Nov 23 Houston, TX – House of Blues ~ Nov 24 Dallas, TX – The Factory in Deep Ellum ~
Chastity is for the skids, the headbangers, the freaks. Chastity is for everyone who has suffered and survived the lethal combination of suburban overculture and mental distress. Chastity is especially for everyone who didn’t survive—the ones who didn’t get out. Brandon Williams did, luckily, and his work with Chastity has been to collect people like him, who got out by the skin of their teeth.
Chastity’s first three full-length records—2018’s Death Lust, 2019’s Home Made Satan, and 2022’s Suffer Summer—formed a trilogy that defined a 4 year arc of the band’s contribution to outsider music. Each record was informed by Williams’ life, but each was also conceptual and interpretive, refracting his experiences through a level of remove. On Chastity’s upcoming, self-titled fourth record, there is no such distance: Williams decided to write a fully non-fiction work. Incoming September 13, 2024 on Deathwish Inc. (US), Dine Alone (Canada), and Big Scary Monsters (UK/E) Chastity is a 13-track record about the things that have always run through the band’s records—struggle, death, despair, redemption, darkness, and light—but this time, the songs ascend to new depths of intensity and desperation, new heights of resolution and power. “It’s really about the first nosedive that I did as a young person,” says Williams. “It’s a record about struggle, about the missing years. It’s also a thank you to some people in my life.”
Today, Chastity album opener “Jaw Locked” premieres. Williams continues, “For a few years we’ve closed our live show with the same song, but we’ve never really had a song that opens our live show totally right. I am so excited that we’ve found that in this song ‘Jaw Locked’, and that we can open the self-titled album with this song as well.”
Chastity hurtles through melodic hardcore, shoegaze, and emo, all magnificently and enormously rendered thanks to slick work from John Paul Peters (Propagandhi, Comeback Kid), who engineered and mixed the record. Recorded at Peters’ Private Ear Recording in Winnipeg in March 2024, Chastity’s guitars have never sounded so immediate and towering, sometimes exploding into a sputtering, ripped-speaker chaos. And there are perhaps the most ferocious bass and drums sounds of the year on Chastity, splitting the difference between gnarly-as-fuck generator-show tones and vividly textured, hi-fi chest-beaters.
The new record arrives on the heels of a whirlwind six years for Chastity. Williams founded the project in Whitby Ontario and from the start, it’s been a project of absolution via community connection. There weren’t any venues for independent punk music in the suburban town, so Williams and his friends started throwing punk shows in a barn on Whitby’s rural outskirts. People took notice: Before long, Ontario punk stalwarts like PUP and Metz were making the pilgrimage to the barn to headline gigs, and profits from the shows went to a regional youth mental health services. Chastity spent the next years touring North America including shows with Sunny Day Real Estate, Alexisonfire, and Deafheaven, culminating in their spring 2024 headline run, with a set that synced to an original feature film projected behind the stage.
Now, Chastity will tour alongside Fucked Up in support of Chastity and will close out the year with a highly anticipated set at The Fest in Gainesville, FL. Pre-order / pre-save Chastityhere ahead of its September 13 release date and look for more news soon.
Chastity, on tour: September 12 Oshawa, ON @ The Biltmore Theatre ^ September 13 Montreal, QC @ Foufounes Electriques ^ September 14 Ottawa, ON @ The 27 Club ^ September 17 Winnipeg, MB @ The Park Theatre ^ September 18 Saskatoon, SK @ Capitol Music Club ^ September 19 Edmonton, AB @ The Buckingham ^ September 20 Calgary, AB @ Modern Love ^ September 21 Kelowna, BC @ Reverly ^ September 23 Victoria, BC @ Capital Ballroom ^ September 24 Nanaimo, BC @ The Queen’s ^ September 25 Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl ^ October 25 Gainesville, FL @ The Fest [Heartwood Soundstage]
Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile have returned with their follow up to 2022’s breakout album God’s Country with Cool World, the new 10-song LP set for release on October 11th via The Flenser [pre-order].
Besides being the name of a largely forgotten (and panned) 90s film, Cool World makes for an apt title of Chat Pile’s sophomore full-length record. In the context of a Chat Pile record, the words are steeped in a grim double entendre that not only evokes imagery of a dying planet but a progression from the band’s previous work, moving the scope of its depiction of modern malaise from just “God’s Country” to the entirety of humankind. “’Cool World‘ covers similar themes to our last album, except now exploded from a micro to macro scale, with thoughts specifically about disasters abroad, at home, and how they affect one another,” says vocalist Raygun Busch. “If I had to describe the album in one sentence,” Busch continues, “It’s hard not to borrow from Voltaire, so I won’t resist – ‘Cool World‘ is about the price at which we eat sugar in America.”
Today, album opener “I Am Dog Now” arrives with a music video directed by Will Mecca. Stin (bass, Chat Pile) says, “Will’s vision captures the essence of ‘I Am Dog Now’ by channeling his specific style of low-fi, exploitation cinema aesthetic into a dusty, religious bad-trip exclusive to the southern plains of America. Eagle eyed viewers may actually notice shots of the literal chat piles from which we take our name.”
Like the towering mounds of toxic waste, the music of Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift – a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems.
Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence.
Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks. “While we wanted our follow-up to ‘God’s Country’ to still capture the immediate, uncompromising essence of Chat Pile, we also knew that with ‘Cool World,’ we’d want to stretch the definition of our ‘sound’ to reflect our tastes beyond just noise rock territory,” reflects bassist Stin. “Now that we had some form of creative comfort zones in place after hitting that milestone of putting out a full-length record, album #2 felt like the perfect opportunity to challenge those limits.” Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg of Uniform (Algiers, Drab Majesty, Metz) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge.
The proverbial thread tying all of the experimentation on Cool World together is the depth to which Chat Pile dissects the album’s theme of violence, and the record itself is apocalyptically bleak. Sure, Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”; what Chat Pile depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence.
Cool World will be released via The Flenser on October 11, 2024. See Chat Pile on the road this November with label mates Agriculture and Mamaleek in select markets – tickets are available at chatpile.net/shows.
Chat Pile, on tour:
November 1 Oklahoma City, OK – 89th Street % November 2 Columbia, MO – The Blue Note % November 3 Omaha, NE – The Waiting Room % November 5 Chicago, IL – Thalia Hall % November 6 Minneapolis, MN – Fine Line % November 8 Lakewood, OH – Mahall’s % November 9 Detroit, MI – The Majestic Theatre % November 11 Toronto, ON – The Concert Hall % November 12 Montreal, QC – Théâtre Fairmount % November 14 Burlington, VT – Showcase Lounge @ Higher Ground ^ November 15 Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church ^ November 16 New York, NY – (Le) Poisson Rouge ^ November 17 Boston, MA – The Sinclair ^ November 19 Baltimore, MD – Metro Gallery * November 20 Richmond, VA – The Broadberry * November 21 Greensboro, NC – Hangar 1819 * November 22 Nashville, TN – The End *
% with Agriculture, Porcelain ^ with Mamaleek, Traindodge * with Mamaleek, thirdface
