The Drones - A Lysergic Art-Rock Apocalypse from Australia

Active since the mid-'90s, Gareth Liddiard is a central figure in the Australian alternative rock scene. Together with the woman who would become, and remains, his partner, Fiona Kitschin, Liddiard has fronted two essential bands of the Aussie underground of the last two decades: Drones, active from 1997 to 2014, and Tropical Fuck Storm, whose still-ongoing adventure began in 2017.

The core of both bands is Liddiard's psychotic, chaotic and highly expressive songwriting, his howls often submerged beneath blues guitars corrupted by the gospel of noise. In both cases the result is immersive and abrasive, psych-rock built to burrow into the most inscrutable and dangerous recesses of the human psyche.

In 2021 the guitarist also joined forces with Dirty Three drummer Jim White and The Necks pianist Chris Abrahams to form the post-rock trio Springtime, with whom he recorded a self-titled album that same year.

Drones

Founded in Perth in 1997, Drones initially consisted of Warren Hall (drums), Gareth Liddiard (vocals and guitar), James McCann (guitar) and Rui Pereira (bass). At the time all four musicians were part of singer Maurice Flavel's Gutterville Splendour Six, and formed Drones as an outlet for Liddiard's lyrics, as he was just beginning to develop his ambitions as a songwriter and frontman. This lineup, however, lasted only briefly and recorded just one Ep that was never released.

In 2000, in fact, Liddiard and Pereira moved to Melbourne. There they met Brendon Humphries, also a former member of the GSS, who took over on bass so that Pereira could switch to lead guitar. Command of the thunderous drums instead fell to former Stunt Car Drivers member Christian Strybosch. Shortly afterwards, though, Humphries too returned to Perth, and so Pereira and Liddiard finally invited a musician they'd worked with before, Fiona Kitschin, to take over on bass.

After about two years the band was finally ready to release its raw but electrifying debut album: Here Come The Lies (Spooky Records, 2002).

All it takes is one violent opening touch from Pereira's guitar and "The Cockeyed Low Life Of The Eye" hurls us straight into a nervous breakdown. The guitars chase each other barking, the rhythm section is pure hell, and Liddiard strains his voice so hard he often sounds on the verge of collapse. Across the rest of the record, as would often happen throughout Liddiard's entire future output, this highly expressive vocal style - mangling and swallowing words amid his own shrieks - becomes a genuine trademark.

"Dekalb Blues" moves at a less frantic pace, but the ill temper oozing from the vocals is no less explosive - it simply finds a different way in, slipping through the gaps left open by guitars that crawl along to a narcotic blues rhythm. Blues also forms the backbone of the following "The Downbound Train", a Chuck Berry cover in which the rhythm section and guitars, dry as a desert, dart about in a kind of frenzied jam session; while the anguished "I'd Been Told" reveals just how central the influence of Neil Young - in both the guitar work and vocal delivery - is to the world of Liddiard and Kitschin.

Another fundamental influence on Drones is instead entirely Australian: that of Nick Cave, which hovers over the record in various forms. The feverish alternative rock of early Bad Seeds infects a long ride like "I Walked Across The Dam", while the unhinged fury of Birthday Party animates the garage-flavoured cover of Blind Willie Johnson's "Motherless Children".

Recorded almost entirely live and partly made up of covers (besides the two mentioned above, there's a version of the Cramps' "New Kind Of Kick"), Here Come The Lies is a rough, raw album - Liddiard himself would later partly disown it, describing it as "horrible, depressing noise". Yet the record's power is undeniable, as is the fact that it already contains the seeds of everything Drones would go on to achieve, soon becoming one of the most important Australian bands of the new millennium. Just consider the four minutes of "The Scrap Iron Sky", where layers of obsessive, distorted guitars wrap around the unsettling postmodern scenarios Liddiard sketches with blood-chilling lyrics.

After yet another lineup change, with Mike Noga taking over the drums from Christian Strybosch - a position he would hold until 2014 - Drones returned to the studio three years later. Produced once again by Spooky Records, 2005's Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By is the band's second album, and certainly one of Drones' masterpieces.

Thanks in part to Loki Loockwood's production, the band set to work on the new material with greater organisation and sharper ideas. From the very first chords of the opening track, Drones' sophomore effort reveals itself to be a far more disciplined record than its predecessor, yet here fewer rough edges and less fury don't translate into less expressive power. If anything, the band's newfound precision better channelled the ferocity and urgency of Liddiard's writing, as untamed and visceral as ever. Naturally, a greater leaning towards melody and more structured songs allowed the band to reach a wider audience, earning them a solid cult following.

Inspired by Gareth’s loss of his mother and the death of an old flame, “Shark Fin Blues” is a pain-drenched opener, carried however by a riff and a chorus that, though rough-edged, are immediate enough to become the most recognizable of an entire career. Just as immediate is the guitar attack that opens the following “Baby”, a track that also boasts a decidedly catchy chorus, at least compared to anything the Drones had let us hear up to that point. We're in a territory ruled by a restless, granite-hard alternative rock, to which the band also returns on “You Really Don’t Care”, complete with a wild, bluesy guitar solo à-la Jon Spencer.

The masterful one-two punch of “The Best You Can Believe In” and “Locust” is cut from an entirely different cloth. The first has an explosive, liberating chorus, but after the blast it sinks into a creeping little melody of old psychedelic keyboards: and just as that melody has us in its grip, a relentless cosmic wind kicks in and, bit by bit, swallows everything else to become the backdrop of the next track. Amid these insistent gusts we hear an old piano stumbling along, and then Liddiard’s words. They won’t last long: a deafening burst of noise and dissonance devours them, dragging them along with the tolling of a rusty banjo and the shrieking of violins. Pure, magical noise expressionism.

The long title track, by contrast, is a more traditional blues, at least structurally, since the singer’s delivery is as over-the-top as ever. Hints of vintage keyboards lend the atmosphere a psychedelic tinge, while a female backing choir lightens the pain radiating from the frontman’s screams and the howls of the guitars, once again tortured at the very bottom of the neck.

It’s only the beginning of a second half of the record that matches the first in memorable moments and blind fury. Further on we find blues filtered through the punk discontent of X, Birthday Party and Gun Club on “Another Rousing Chorus You Idiots!!!!”, but also another heart-in-throat moment like “The Freedom In The Loot”, where Liddiard delivers his own uniquely unhealthy take on the most classic of rock'n'roll “nananana” hooks.

Already by their second album, thanks to greater control and formidable songwriting, the Drones recorded what should probably be considered their masterpiece. Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By is a record able to channel the frontman's furious expressiveness and the multitude of influences the band drew on, ranging from Sonic Youth to Neil Young, in an alternative rock formula as original as it is already capable of sounding like a self-aware classic.

Riding the wave of success granted by the press and the local audience, the Drones released, in the same year, a collection of B-sides from their first two albums, titled The Miller’s Daughter. The band’s next two records, Gala Mill (ATP, 2006) and Havilah (ATP, 2008), saw the band lingering on the sound and the winning formula tested on the previous record. The results are certainly not as astonishing as those of the album that spawned them, but they remain more than good, at times excellent and dazzling. The group's consistent quality in songwriting and recording made it a name abroad too, earning them appearances at major alternative music festivals across the United States and Europe, including the 2007 edition of All Tomorrow's Parties in London, curated by fellow countrymen Dirty Three.

A constant bouncing and imploding of electricity, laced with an obsessive, unhealthy guitar figure. That's how Gala Mill, the Drones' third album, opens, with the excellent “Jezebel”, still suspended between aussie-rock tradition, Nick Cave's "murder ballads", and a certain dusty, singer-songwriter America. An anger that's not desperate but self-assured, proud of its own clamor, finds in the voice a vehicle of sure impact, backed by a rhythm section (bassist Fiona Kitchin and drummer Mike Noga) tough enough for the job and embellished by a minimalistically searing guitar style (Rui Pereira).

Gala Mill (named after a remote farm in eastern Tasmania where it was recorded) is a geographically honest, genuine record, even when it reabsorbs other influences, perhaps seemingly unorthodox ones, like the Neil Young who, having crossed the ocean, is reawakened to new life in "Dog Eared", with a docilely electrified grandeur that casts, in passing, glances toward boundless, imaginary landscapes. Fatalism and melancholy: everything wrapped in an emotional haze that's at times almost overwhelming, yet never bothersome, because the band shows character and maturity, even when the arrangements stretch out, moving like slow processions of suffering.

Hence meditations torn between resignation and sudden flare-ups, like that of "I'm Here Now" (a non-place somewhere between the earliest, cursed Toiling Midgets and Cave's most devious demons) build a sea of unease with truly enviable class. It's the play of light and shadow applied to the soul, that soul which, even in the worst of cases, always carries oblique glimmers hinting at a greatness that may be unsuspected but is never entirely forgotten, even when facing the most terrible of crimes ("Words From The Executioner To Alexander Pearce", in memory of an executed cannibal). Fiona's voice rides, in slow motion, the subdued ballad of "Work For Me" (in which a violin also makes an appearance), while "I Looked Down The Line And I Wondered", with its streaks of fury and sly cadence, finds a perfect balance between roots-rock and "murder" ballad.

Amid all this tamed fury, the "arcadian" dreaminess of "Are You Leaving For The Country" and the punk ardor of "I Don't Ever Want To Change" could easily have come across as a tonal misstep, yet it's a pleasure to feel, on every listen, the same sense of cohesion, the same linear tension that, from the very first listen, manifests itself immediately, without the slightest hesitation. Ultimately, these are moments to be savored with a smile, before the long, aching "Sixteen Straws", narrated more than sung by Liddiard, reminds us of suicides, guilt, and hopeless prisoners, in an atmosphere that's almost unreal, magical, timeless.

Havilah is the Drones' fourth studio record. Shortly before recording, Gareth Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin, by this point a couple, bought a cottage where the album was conceived and partly recorded. Noga still sits behind the drums, while on guitar we find Pereira and newcomer Dan Luscombe.

Having partly set aside the aggression that characterized much of their early work, the album stands as the most Waits-like work in their discography. There's still a strong whiff of Bad Seeds and Crazy Horse in the air, but now Liddiard and co. try to broaden their palette to avoid repeating themselves, adding hefty doses of anguished, urban singer-songwriter craft that closely recalls the author of "Swordfishtrombones" (Island, 1983) and "Rain Dogs" (Island, 1985).

The experiment works perfectly, and Havilah can be considered the most accessible record in the Drones' catalog, with qualities that make it easier to approach even for those unaccustomed to sounds outside the mainstream. This is helped along by at least a couple of easily digestible tracks: "The Minotaur", with an intro that won't disappoint fans of Queens Of The Stone Age and an outro as dissonantly Pixies-like as it gets, and a gem built on alt-rock simplicity titled "Oh My".

The opening "Nail It Down" (already released a few months earlier as an EP, alongside the aforementioned "The Minotaur") is a long, at times gut-wrenching ride, somewhere between the most electric Nick Cave and the most damned Tom Waits, and placed as it is at the opening, it sets the tone for the whole album.

"I Am The Supercargo" has a dry, epic drive, one of those songs only true stars are capable of building, further enriched by two solos (one in the middle, one at the close) dissonant in just the right measure, without ever overdoing it. That same sense of balance is missing, however, on "Luck In Odd Numbers", nearly nine minutes of swinging rock (though still with the right sonic openings) that drags on a touch too long.

Even when the scene looks superficially calm, underneath there's a pulsing heart producing dark, intense electroacoustic blues. And when the guitars launch into caustic solos, everything remains clearly under control, naturally balancing the record's different tones. It's striking how well the frontman's pained, aching voice blends with the acoustic, vaguely unsettling textures of "Penumbra" or the sinuous slides seasoning "The Drifting Housewife".

The intimate, relaxed moments are certainly more numerous than in the past, and tracks like "Cold And Sober" and "Careful As You Go" shift the record's center of gravity toward a greater overall serenity. Then, just when things seem settled, the closing "Your Acting's Like The End Of The World" blooms like a flower in the desert, an unexpected, superb uptempo pop number that earns Havilah extra points and opens up some very interesting future scenarios for the Australian band.

Yet five long years would pass before the Perth outfit decided to follow up on the novelties staged in the closing stretch of Havilah. The Drones' last two albums, I See Seaweed (MGM) and Feelin Kinda Free (Tropical Fuck Storm), date respectively from 2013 and 2016 (with the former edging out the latter - perhaps only for the novelty effect). These two records, which close out the first chapter of the Liddiard-Kitschin duo's career, stand as their finest work since Wait Long.

I See Seaweed is the perfect confirmation of this band's greatness and its ability to weigh and dose its music with care and effectiveness, consistently operating at the highest level even twelve years on from their self-titled debut demo. The title track has a pulsing heart of electric guitar and a piano that glides, now light, now lashing, across every track, but it's Liddiard's inebriated voice (somewhere between Cave and Waits) that remains the central core holding up the whole structure, also revealing extremely intimate and spiritual passages. In the first part of the long track (roughly eight and a half minutes), crooked notes and the faintest vibrations of Noga's drums accompany a litany that almost seems to evoke the diabolical, occult, visionary prayers of David Tibet. Before long the music swells into a distorted blues, bringing out one of the band's key reference points: fellow countryman Cave, recalled here in his declamatory delivery, veering between spoken-word and a stumbling kind of recitation. In the second and final part, the music takes on even more body and the guitars hint at the psychedelia of Pink Floyd (and of the sixties in general), echoes we'll encounter again later.

The less experimental tracks ("How To See Through Fog") are equally full of pathos, dominated by electric blues set to mellow, deep rhythms. The presence of the most transcendental Cave ("The Grey Leader", "Laika") is undeniable, but the eccentric vocal timbre and the guitar backing - which at times verges on American folk territory ("They'll Kill You") and at others spills into an ancient, deep-rooted psychedelia (helped along by the piano), plus a rhythm section that's never heavy-handed, along with choral and noise inserts - manage to turn these various references into mere starting points from which to develop thoroughly unusual paths.

The most energetic moment comes with "A Moat You Can Stand In", when the psychic blues turns into a New York Dolls-school glam-punk-rock, complete with cutting guitars, driving rhythms, manic piano, screams and vocals charged with positive tension. All that punk-blues drive, the lysergic explorations and the vocal empathy are tinged with a faintly gothic, dark black patina, thanks to Steve Hesketh's piano, which becomes essential in some particularly ascetic passages ("Why Write A Letter That You'll Never Send", "The Grey Leader", "I See Seaweed") and, after repeated listens, emerges as an unmistakable connecting thread running through the whole album, like a cackling joker propping things up in moments of weakness, lending the Drones' music even more mystery and assurance.

The path forged on the long opening track is picked up again on "Nine Eyes", where the vocals are partly shared with Fiona, who in fact appears elsewhere too, with varying degrees of presence. Here there are also inspired shifts in style within the same track, along with a rhythmic and emotional crescendo fuelled by the obsessiveness of both the lyrics and the music - though that's a trait running through all of I See Seaweed. The closing track itself, "Why Write a Letter That You'll Never Send", built around piano and voice, returns to this formula of fervent emotional evolution, in a way that's almost reminiscent of Robert Wyatt's progressive suites typical of the 1970s.

On Feelin Kinda Free the departure from the ideas that launched the Australian band's career is even more apparent. With hindsight, it's easy to see that Gareth and Fiona were on the verge of ending this venture and diving into an entirely new one.

The Drones' sixth album shows a firm decision to break away from the garage-psych imagery of their early work and from their proximity to the band every alt-rock group from down under has always had to reckon with: Birthday Party.

Once again, the Drones' sideways shift works, both lyrically and musically, thanks to bold architectures capable of marrying guitars, electronics and experimentation (they pull this off particularly well on the opening one-two punch of "Private Investigation" and "Taman Shud").

With almost all traces of the "Ink King" stripped away (though unmistakable remnants surface on the pained "To Think That I Once Loved You") and the Waitsian drunkenness gone too (though the closing "Shut Down SETI" really does sound like a long-lost Tom Waits apocryphon), and with Young-inspired electric charges set aside, the 2016 Drones hit hardest when they slow the pace down and turn claustrophobic ("Tailwind").

Liddiard and co. even seek out connections with hip-hop rhythms ("Boredom") and marriages with drum'n'bass and nu-R&B, almost as if trying to build a hypothetical missing link between Massive Attack and Fka Twigs ("Sometimes", sung by the bassist).

For at least half its length, Feelin Kinda Free is a pleasantly surprising record, pushing the Drones' sound into new territory; for the other half, it preserves and modernizes past blueprints, betting on the avant-garde while still managing to strike right at the heart with an oblique perfect alternative ballad: "Then They Came For Me".

Tropical Fuck Storm

Active since 1997, the Drones from Perth have thus been one of the most interesting and vital forces on the Australian alt-rock scene. Starting out from the punk-blues sketches of 2002's Here Come The Lies, their dirty, vicious rock never stopped evolving, brushing up against both psychedelia and noise, often tilting toward a schizoid, deconstructed art-rock formula that didn't shy away from poppier detours or electronic touches either. In late 2016, after a date on the tour supporting Feelin Kinda Free, the Australian band - apparently following serious friction among its members - announced an indefinite hiatus.

From the ashes of Drones, Tropical Fuck Storm soon emerged, the new outfit led by the man who had founded Drones in the first place: Gareth Liddiard. After announcing the split, the singer and guitarist wasted no time. Bringing along, as usual, the talented and striking Drones bassist and his partner Fiona Kitschin, he picked a suitably unhinged name and put together a new band whose line-up, rounded out by Lauren Hammel on drums and Erica Dunn on guitar and keyboards, left Liddiard as the only man in the room.

Having relocated to Melbourne, Tropical Fuck Storm began releasing singles as early as 2017, starting to trace an intriguing aesthetic and musical thread. Still, listening to some of the tracks that would end up on the debut alongside softer material, not to mention an improbable cover of "Stayin Alive", there was no way to guess just how cohesive the end result would turn out to be.

On the garish, toxic cover of A Laughing Death In Meatspace (Mistletone, 2018) we find: a pope vomiting confetti while riding a snail, a wolf biting into a balloon, death astride a dog dressed as a hornet, a frog with blue hair, a pig disguised as a clown, and a giant purple-furred creature that looks a bit like a Muppet and a bit like the reassuring flying beast from "Die unendliche Geschichte". All these improbable characters are animated by a demonic fury, by a euphoric energy somewhere between Apocalypse and carnival, and they're heading straight for us.

The record sounds exactly like its cover: insane. Mournful blues guitar lines alternate with sudden blasts of feedback, howling solos pop up out of nowhere, keyboards mimic the uncontrollable chaos of a city in the middle of a coup. The lyrics are structured like a frantic man-woman dialogue, answering the injustices of modernity with an unmanageable hysteria. At least for its long first half, the album plays out as a single deranged, bruising mass, and trying to tell one track from another barely makes sense, especially since each one keeps changing shape and direction multiple times. "Shellfish Toxin", by contrast, sounds like a kind of methadone waltz, stripping away the words and sweeping away the debris of the pandemonium that's come before. It's out of this apparent calm that the title track rises, a mournful, building blues with voices stretching upward in unison toward the Moon, leading into the album's dramatic finale.

If we want to nitpick, the first half is a bit chaotic and occasionally seems to lose its aim – hardly surprising given how much it's got cooking at once – but it introduces a wild, fascinating musical creature that seems to have everything it takes to distract us from the demise of Drones.

2019 brings us to the second album Braindrops (Joyful Noise), a restless, untameable creature. The quartet returns with a gripping, ragged psych-art-rock record, a sort of danse macabre over our broken, corrupted world, in which the relationship with nature is utterly destroyed and the bowels of the earth release the frequencies of an apocalypse. It's probably the band's most accessible album, the most straightforward one can get while still talking about Tropical Fuck Storm's music in those terms.

The band crafts a work that's less explosive and dynamic than its predecessor, but extremely consistent and persuasive in burrowing into your head with sinuous grooves and hypnotic guitar arpeggios that lead us, tightrope-walking, toward the abyss. It opens with the perfect fusion, on "Paradise", of Neil Young's fuzz-rock guitar charges and the schizophrenic unease of Isaac Brock's guitar on the early Modest Mouse albums, before moving into the corrosive blend of blues, Afrobeat and noise on "The Planet Of Straw Men". If "Desert Sound Of Venus" feels like rewinding and replaying Jeff Buckley's hallucinations on "Dream Brother" at half speed, "The Happiest Guy Around" comes across as a grotesque sermon delivered alongside Butthole Surfers.

The Australians show us the flip side of the indie "vitalism" of bands like Arcade Fire or Broken Social Scene, lopsidedly retracing their stylistic tics on a track like "Who's The Eugene?", with Fiona singing in images like a nouvelle dark Régine or Feist: “You didn’t drown in the water/ Or in the moron rhyme/ Or in the paint that’s flakin’ off/ The Hollywood sign”. References keep surfacing and vanishing – because nothing can stay afloat on quicksand – but among them, traces are left by Pere Ubu, Pop Group, Birthday Party, Captain Beefheart, Dirty Three and Timber Timbre.

With Braindrops, Tropical Fuck Storm craft a powerful, evocative musical narrative, only seemingly calmer than before. The album closes with the desert blues of "Maria 63" and its gospel choirs somewhere between Bonnie "Prince" Billy and Low, dissolved into frayed, Jim White-style drum patterns and sent off by Warren Ellis-style strings. Amid invocations and feedback, the voices bring this purification rite to its conclusion, one that may lead to no salvation at all: “Oh, Maria/ My work will set you free/ It’s like a gift from you to me/ By way of deception/ And you can run/ But you’ll never get away/ The time is now or never”.

2021 marks their return to recording with Deep States (Joyful Noise/Tropical Fuck Storm), heavily shaped by the pandemic context, out of which – as we'll see further on – the Springtime project would also emerge. Tropical Fuck Storm can't bring themselves to pretend everything's fine and go back to being well-rounded, or angry, or dreamy. Nor can they pretend to be happy playing live while cooped up in Australia under a government-ordered national self-embargo meant to deal with the emergency. Their music mirrors a grotesqueness lurking beneath everyday life that would make even Luigi Pirandello explode: an endless series of micro-fractures made of lopsided, barely-in-tune notes, aggressive sounds and constantly broken rhythms. Their songs are always urgent, always the expression of something that can't be held back and needs to be heard – and deserves to be, given the constant compositional and performative acrobatics the Melbourne quartet, a lethal live act, is capable of pulling off.

Moving ever closer to the poetics of the anomalous embraced by bands like Pop Group and Pere Ubu, between psychedelic fits and dub mutterings ("G.A.F.F."), Deep States – their third studio record – goes beyond the alarmism, crisis and anxiety that underpinned the previous albums: it's deformed, shapeshifting matter that declares its own refusal to be molded ("Bumma Sanger"), it's skin-deep shivers and notes played almost by reflex ("Blues Beam Baby"), radio excerpts and interference amid a dense media landscape ("The Greatest Story Ever Told"), it's a blues defeat steeped in punk unease ("Suburbiopia").

The vocal interplay between Liddiard, Kitschin and Dunn remains as compelling as ever, especially on the most quintessentially Tropical Fuck Storm tracks like "New Romeo Agent" and "Legal Ghost". Emblematic of the natural and human catastrophe we're living through, instead, is the hallucinated ballad "The Donkey", a harrowing track that emerges from the magma of mutterings and slaps coming from every direction: it's an almost melancholy, oddly familiar interlude, one that gets swept away by the finale and the arrival of "Reporting Of A Failed Campaign". In an instant the album closes with the bizarre, futuristic little march "The Confinement Of The Quark", which curls back ideally onto the opening "The Greatest Story Ever Told" like an ouroboros.

Deep States isn't an enjoyable listen; you revisit it reluctantly because it spits the unspeakable right at you. As much as the tracks on the previous Braindrops captivated – even lacking the originality that defines these ones – these ten tracks of panic, moral panic included, are just as disorienting. Thank goodness some musicians still throw us a bit of comfort and remind us that art isn't meant to be conciliatory.

Besides the Springtime trio, in which Liddiard also takes part, the band also works on the visuals and music for "Goody Goody Gumdrops" (Tropical Fuck Storm and Joyful Noise), a film-documentary-performance made up of previously released material, shot by the band themselves on Liddiard and Kitschin's country ranch – a project that bears more than a passing resemblance to Alex Winter's "Bar-B-Que Movie" (1988), a DIY short filmed in Austin centered on Butthole Surfers, a band spiritually close to Tropical Fuck Storm.

In 2022 they release a handful of EPs on Joyful Noise, including the split with King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Satanic Slumber Party, and Moonburn, which lead them into a deeper exploration of psychedelia, while early 2023 brings Submersive Behavior, released following the band's announcement of Kitschin's serious illness, which forced the cancellation of their dates outside Australia. The album is essentially made up of a collection of tracks mostly already released on Moonburn. One could say the band members' side projects benefited their artistic path, even though the dense Deep States had already made full use of the anxious, chaotic months of the pandemic, laying the groundwork for the boldest, most corrosive flashes found on this fourth record.

It all starts by flipping the script right away: opening with a sprawling cover running nearly 18 minutes, which becomes an emblematic statement of their neurotic, lysergic experimentalism, something you can also savor during their live shows. Jimi Hendrix's “1983 (A Merman I Should Turn Be)” thus overturns the logic of a record's structure, for a band that marks itself out, right from the cover art, as positioned against the establishment. And within this belly, psych-rock, Pink Floyd, Throbbing Gristle and the Pop Group all stir together, revealing, beneath the surface, the reality that the protagonist of “They Live” (John Carpenter, 1988) is able to see the moment he puts on the glasses that unveil the message hidden beyond the surface of things. “Moonburm” wriggles through a dynamic in which the pulse fades away, eventually ferrying us into the neurotic beats and raucous riffs of “The Golden Radio”, almost mocking the post-(post)-post punk revival of so many bands today.

The lopsided ballad “Aspirin-Slight Return” works like a painkiller taken right before diving back into Detroit chaos with the Stooges' “Ann”, which closes the album, where Fiona Kitschin's enchanting voice leads us over the edge, into a sonic magma made of shards of electricity and madness, caught between solidity and detonation.

Tropical Fuck Storm have the ability to be hybrid creatures in a world apparently made of opposites, seducing you and punching you in the teeth at once, to reveal their utterly personal, unique, uncompromising vision of the present (and the future).

In 2025 comes their fifth album, Fairyland Codex, released on Fire Records. Still sarcastic, at times cryptic, and prone to dissonant sonic inventions, the psychedelic captains Gaz (Gareth Liddiard) and FiFi (Fiona Kitschin) this time seem to be feeling the weight of these hard, hope-starved times, delivering a record that's often pained and distinctly melancholy. Starting right from the title track: eight aching minutes, groaning guitars and ominous imagery, with psychedelia and epic scope only allowed to flare up toward the end. More ironic and surrealist in tone, “Stepping On A Rake” drips with the same despondency, giving it the shape of a slow, tearful blues.

Between the alienating march of “Goon Show”, with its compressed, synthetic guitar tone, and the gothic folk of “Bye Bye Snake Eyes”, with its dramatic string-laden finale, there are also moments where rhythms and tones loosen up, with a few bass or guitar touches that seem almost spellbound by the end (“Stepping On A Rake”), or the acoustic arpeggios of a ballad à la Bonnie Prince Billy, occasionally broken up by Australian racket (“Fairyland Codex”). When Fiona Kitschin takes the helm on vocals, alongside the usual jagged, splintered guitar lines, “Fairyland Codex” takes on its poppiest shapes, like the playful tribalism of “Bloodsport” and the winking indie-rock of “Teeth Marché”. True to form, it's Liddiard instead who unleashes the band's usual dose of punk and garage with the braying vocal performances on the powerful “Irukandji Syndrome” and the delirious “Dunning Kruger's Loser Cruiser”.

Springtime

During the pandemic, drummer Jim White (Dirty Three, Xylouris White) found himself stuck within Australia's borders, unable to make it back to his home in Brooklyn, New York. During those months of isolation he started playing with Liddiard on guitar and Chris Abrahams (The Necks, Benders, Laughing Clowns) on piano. The self-titled debut album (Joyful Noise and Tropical Fuck Storm) has improvisation at its core, born out of rehearsal-room sessions between Liddiard and White, later joined by Abrahams. Springtime gathers two weeks of recording in an isolated house in the state of Victoria, where almost the entire album was captured live in the room, with only a few rare overdubs. A lean, impassioned art-rock-jazz summa, drawing breath from the anguish felt by the three musicians during those months, among the most sensitive and attentive figures on today's art-experimental-jazz-rock scene.

The grotesque dance of “Will To Power”, in a Tropical Fuck Storm vein, is interrupted by the jazz ballad “The Viaduct Love Suicide”, which instead falls more into the aching territory explored by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, while “She Moved Through The Fair” has the slow, floating gait of one of Dirty Three's “Ocean Song(s)” (1997).

It's on tracks like “Jeanie In A Bottle” that the trio expresses a deeply personal songwriting voice, buoyed by the performative tension between the musicians that gets captured live on record. The song moves obliquely, stumbling at times, before being drenched in organ, altered notes and hallucinated falsetto harmonies aided by the voice of Kitschin, with whom Liddiard shares his main musical projects, while the lyrics are penned by poet Ian Duhig.

Springtime carry their characters beyond the pillars of Hercules, recounting a torment that can find no peace in a now-broken world, which finds only the barest comfort in music. Standout moments include the crooked, minimal blues of “The Island” and the live cover of Will Oldham/Bonnie “Prince” Billy's “West Palm Beach”, while the album closes with the anti-epic drama of “The Killing Of The Village Idiot”, a fierce critique of the Australian army's actions in Afghanistan, amid psychedelic ruptures and jazzy flashes in which the piano guides us toward catharsis.

The band's dynamic undoubtedly carries a performative spirit that's hard to capture in songs lasting just a few minutes, and it's certainly truer to those free studio sessions and their habit of playing live, which, blending their different approaches, becomes explosive as a trio. Proof of this is the excellent EP Night Raver (Joyful Noise), released in 2022, a dense flow that mixes Liddiard's vocal theatrics with the intense ferocity of the three instruments pushed to the point of sonic detonation, between experimental jazz and psych-rock, where it's White's presence that acts as the glue holding together the various worlds that make up forty minutes of maximalist poetry, between screams and spoken-poetry.

Contributions by Claudio Lancia (“Havilah” and “Feelin Kinda Free”), Silvio Pizzica (“I See Seaweed”) and Francesco Nunziata (“Gala Mill”)

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