Atlanta’s garage punk saviours Black Lips return with a brand-new studio album, ‘Season Of The Peach’, on 19th September, a 40-minute rock and roll odyssey, tripping through DIY genres where garage rock meets new wave pop, and disgruntled country shakes hands with epic western soundtracks.
Black Lips bring the intensity on their latest single ‘So Far Gone’, a timeless fuzzy garage rock anthem. Its dense layers of driving, grunge-soaked guitars propelling us through its three minute duration. Drifting between moments of shimmering percussion and knotty, charged guitar lines, Black Lips offer a single which is simultaneously detailed and faithful to their raw, distinct rock-and-roll influence.
Released alongside their new album ‘Season Of The Peach’, ‘Bebop Armageddon (Detours & Offcuts from Season Of The Peach)’ is a wild companion piece: a collection of demos, alternate versions, and sonic misadventures dragged from the edges of the Lips’ recent sessions and committed to wax for the super fans. Limited to 1000 copies on vinyl. If ‘Season Of The Peach’ is the full-colour hallucination – part garage rock fantasia, part scorched-earth Americana – ‘Bebop Armageddon’ is its ragged magnetic shadow. This is the chaos underneath the polish – the cuts that wouldn’t behave.
‘Season Of The Peach’ is the 14-track album captures the energy and spirit of early Black Lips while simultaneously applying new approaches to songwriting.
For the recording sessions of ‘Season Of The Peach’, they holed up in the bucolic surroundings of drummer Oakley’s new Sound At Manor studio in the Catskills (the first album recorded there since Oakley built the studio in 2020). In this idyllic setting, the band disconnected from city life and committed their music to analogue tape, part of their quest to embrace spontaneity and capture the energy of a live Black Lips show on record.
They also looked towards the fringes of outsider music for inspiration. “The real outliers don’t say that they’re outliers,” says Oakley. “My favourite outliers in music are those people who are trying to be normal.” Jared adds, “I always had an affinity for people who were naive in thinking they could crack into the mainstream, but weren’t aware of how off-kilter they were”. The music on ‘Season Of The Peach’ embraces that very same tension – a mania simmering just beneath the surface of pop melodies, like in the timeless, fuzzy garage rock of their latest single, ‘So Far Gone’.
The album is a musical merry-go-round, a journey featuring road-weary tales from the underbelly of a lights-out America. It’s bookended by ‘The Illusion’ parts one and two: a barroom quest for hope, fear, and hate, thwarted at each turn by a sense of resignation, “you reach for the sky / but it’s an illusion.”
Elsewhere, ‘Wild One’ plays out like a Morricone romp through another day in Hell. A mantra for the hungover, a skin-crawling lament in praise of the wild at heart.
Recent single ‘Tippy Tongue’ sees Black Lips take on 60s girl group soul, like The Shangri-Las and Ronettes infiltrated by Jayne/Wayne County, paying homage to Buddha Records. Meanwhile, ‘Kassandra’ has a guitar sound scrubbed clean for a Sunday, chiming its way through ever-spiralling salvos like The Chocolate Watchband with Zappa on vocals. ‘Zulu Saints’ is an upbeat country honk, a good-time brush with bravado.
All in all, the band has a noble aim. “Our message has always been simple,” says Jared. “We’re just trying to rock and have a good time.” Oakley adds, “Hopefully there’s some room left for that in the world, as fucked up as it is.”
“Simply masters in their field” NME
‘Season Of The Peach’ is out 19th September. Available for pre-order in Limited Edition Solar Bleached Peach LP, Limited Edition Cream LP and CD. Released along with ‘Bebop Armageddon (Detours & Offcuts From Season Of The Peach)’ available for pre-order in Limited Edition Black LP.
Live Dates
04 Sep: Eureka, Zwolle, Netherlands
05 Sep: Patronaat, Haarlem, Netherlands
06 Sep: Misty Fields Festival, Heusden Gem Asten, Netherlands
09 Sep: Bi Nuu, Berlin, Germany
10 Sep: VoxHall, Aarhus, Denmark
11 Sep: Slaktkyrkan, Stockholm, Sweden
12 Sep: John Dee, Oslo, Norway
13 Sep: Plan B (Warehouse), Malmö, Sweden
14 Sep: Leffingeleuren Festival, Ostend, Belgium
17 Sep: Blind, İstanbul, Turkey
18 Sep: Gazarte, Athens, Greece
20 Sep: Eightball Club, Thessaloniki, Greece
22 Sep: 100 Club, London, UK
23 Sep: 100 Club, London, UK
31 Oct: Levitation, Austin, TX, US **
**w/ Viagra Boys
