Enter the wonderful world of the amazing TROPICAL FUCK STORM!

Submersive Behaviour is our favorite Australian art-punk combo’s take on the tried and true “covers record” concept. Over the course of 36 minutes, TFS puts their deranged spin on classics by Jimi Hendrix, Middle Aged in the Middle East in the Middle Ages, Men Men Menstration, Compliments to the Chef, and The Stooges.

Guest starring their old kangaroo mates and collaborators Dan Kelly, the Bard of Beenleigh and Aaron Cupples, the Earl of East Gippsland on octopus like strings-man-ship, falsetto and apocalyptic vibes.

Cover art by acclaimed illustrator Plastic Crimewave.

Follow up to 2022’s Satanic Slumber Party collaboration with King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard.

TRACK LISTING

1. 1983 (A Merman I Should Turn To Be)
2. Moonburn
3. The Golden Ratio
4. Aspirin (Slight Return)
5. Ann

Recommended If You Like: The Slits, Amyl & the Sniffers, Sonic Youth, Lightning Bolt, Captain Beefheart, The Drones / Gareth Lidiard, black midi, The Birthday Party / Rowland S. Howard, Bad Brains.

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air for Tropical Fuck Storm, what the band calls “give-a-fuck fatigue.” The third album from the avant-punk quadaptly titled Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic.

While not quite a protest album, Deep States comes complete with Q drops, nods to the January 6th Capitol Riot, a riff on pizzagate, MAGAs squaring off with Antifas, waterboarded Martians, dangerous cults from Heaven’s Gate to The Shining Path and, not to be outdone, Romeo agents who bed us at night only to betray us by morning. We live in a world in which the bizarre has become the normative, and Tropical Fuck Storm plumbs that paradox. That said, the band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the didactic mode.

“We make pop records,” frontman Gareth Liddiard says, “that don’t deny we’re all in a bit of trouble here.” What makes Tropical Fuck Storm so great is the intersection between their dark but satiric storytelling and musical arrangements intent on perverting received canons and wisdoms. These are songs as experiment, advancing and retreating at their own idiosyncratic, deeply unsettling pace. They hang on the slant beat and slide into jazzy, distortion-packed jams so tumultuous they’d make Charlie Mingus proud. Musically, Deep States goes wherever it wants, riffing on pop, R&B, Talking Heads-style new wave, Delta blues, Tom Waits, and some of the band’s hip-hop favorites such as Wu-Tang Clan and Missy Elliot. Barriers aren’t just broken, they seem to have completely fallen away.

In this present moment, parts of the world are opening up, or trying to. But Tropical Fuck Storm is here to remind us that many of our most urgent political and social problems have been around a long time now. Same as it ever was, as another genre bending band once sang. As the signs of the latest crisis subside, and the dull ache of awareness with it, Deep States is here to remind us that there is no foreseeable end to human folly, nor, fortunately, to the creativity that resists it. Over the past few years we’ve all heard the noise in our own heads. Tropical Fuck Storm has made music of it.

TRACK LISTING

The Greatest Story Ever Told
G.A.F.F.
Blue Beam Baby
Suburbiopia
Bumma Sanger
The Donkey
Reporting Of A Failed Campaign
New Romeo Agent
Legal Ghost
The Confinement Of The Quarks

Highly anticipated second album, 1.5 years after their critically acclaimed debut LP. Featuring members of the now-defunct band The Drones. RIYL: King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Nick Cave, The Slits, Protomartyr, The Drones, Gang of Four, IDLES.

“I've invented fake news as a genre of music,” Gareth Liddiard observes with a laugh. He's talking about “Maria 63”, the closing track on Tropical Fuck Storm's sophomore LP ‘Braindrops’. The song takes aim at the once-marginalized alt-right conspiracy theories that now seem to be a driving force behind the rise of fascism in global politics. “It may be the most stupid song ever written,” Liddiard jokes. He's wrong, “Maria 63” is emblematic of Tropical Fuck Storm's keen ability to mine the extreme edge of pop culture's periphery for potent musical and conceptual spice.

Tropical Fuck Storm were formed around 2017 in the city of Melbourne, Victoria along Australia's south-eastern coast. The band released their debut long-player A Laughing Death in Meatspace on Joyful Noise Recordings in 2018. Each of the band's four members bring considerable experience to the group. Liddiard and Fiona Kitschin were part of the long-running and critically-acclaimed act The Drones, while Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel have performed in a variety of well-received projects. Perhaps it's that wealth of rock and roll experience that allows Tropical Fuck Storm to so expertly deconstruct and distort the genre's norms.

“Everything we do, we try to do it in a weird way. The whole album is full of weird beats, and just weird shit everywhere,” Liddiard explains. He cites Doc at the Radar Station-era Captain Beefheart as a key sonic touchstone, and Braindrops certainly shares the Captain's penchant for pounding abstract grooves. Tropical Fuck Storm have achieved a uniquely off-kilter sound on Braindrops Liddiard partly credits this to the group's use of unconventional equipment, “We use lots of techno gear to make rock and roll because rock and roll gear is boring, and all sounds like Led Zeppelin.”

Liddiard's own description of Tropical Fuck Storm's sound is nearly as interesting and evocative as the music itself. He describes the LP's title track as “Fela Kuti in a car crash,” and talks of creating a sonic atmosphere that “sounds like chloroform smells” for “Maria 62”. A recurring theme on Braindrops concerns the various ways the human brain can be manipulated and controlled for exploitative gain. The bracing “The Planet of Straw Men” is a study of human behavior inside the social media comments section, a place where otherwise reasonable people are seen gleefully engaging in psychotic chest-thumping rhetoric. Listening to Braindrops is a jarring and exhilarating experience, full of pulsating grooves, dissonant experimentation, and unsettling dystopian plot-lines. Braindrops is an unrelenting work, from an unrelenting musical ensemble. “Tropical Fuck Storm is a full on thing,” Liddiard offers. “Everything we do, we do it to death.”

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A completely nuts, clashing collection of fragmented melodies and post-punk spirit, encompassing psychedelic freeform, spoken word vitriol and arty noise into a confounding but strangely addictive listen.

TRACK LISTING

1. Paradise
2. The Planet Of Straw Men
3. Who’s My Eugene?
4. The Happiest Guy Around
5. Maria 62
6. Braindrops
7. Aspirin
8. Desert Sands Of Venus
9. Maria 63