‘Horrorble’ is a full-length dub reinterpretation of Mekons’ acclaimed 2025 album Horror, created in collaboration with Tony Maimone (Pere Ubu). Transforming familiar material into immersive, echo-laden soundscapes that emphasise tension and depth. Songs from Horror are pulled apart and reshaped into a drifting dub landscape where basslines stretch and dissolve, rhythms echo into open space and tracks are dismantled and reassembled into versions that drift, jar and unravel. This new release – out 5th June – will be available on white vinyl and a double CD featuring both albums. Following Mekons recent US tour with a stop off at NPR for a Tiny Desk live session, they continue to tour late spring/early summer in support of the release.
Lead single ‘Mudcrawlers feat. Benji Webbe’ (out March 9th) sees lead singer of UK Dancehall Metal legends Skindred and resident of Pill – a village down by the docks in Newport, South Wales revisit the original.
Whilst the original Horror album confronted climate catastrophe, economic violence and political decay through rock and roll, punk and melody – Horrorble reveals its shadow counterpart. Working with Maimone, this record treats dub as subtraction, space and echo rather than simple revision, revealing hidden textures and new emotional weight within the original recordings.
“We first met Tony Maimone when we opened for Cleveland’s darkest art rockers Pere Ubu on a long, weird tour of the UK tour in 1988. By 1991 he was somehow playing bass for a newly fractured Mekons on a longer weirder tour of Europe bashing out songs from the Curse album which never saw the light of day in the US. In 2015 Tony unleashed the Studio G mobile to record ‘Existentialism’ the Mekons’ instant live album featuring brand new songs. Recorded in one night at a tiny theater in Brooklyn while mixing and editing the batch of tunes that became Horror, we had a feeling they might have some sort of secret double life. So much potential and split decisions that could’ve gone either way. Tony was the man to get his tools out and see what lurked beneath to make it truly Horrorble.”
A Mekonic tactic for songwriting might be to think of a title for a song, in this case “Private Defense Contractor”, agree on it and then sit up very late the night before heading into the recording studio, in this case Elefante Estudios in Valencia, Spain, exploring what such a song might actually consist of. Memories of lies justifying war loom large – the owl of Minerva flies at dusk.
Asteroids are falling in between the blows of the policeman’s truncheon. “Before the Ice Age” is the opening track of Horrorble, Tony Maimone’s reimagining of the Mekons’ horror album and features a brutally honest commentary on the current state of human affairs whispered into your ear by Mekons vocalist Sally Timms.
Formed in Leeds in the late 1970s, Mekons have always operated as a collective, working outside trends and expectations. Guided by the belief that the political and personal remain inseparable, they continue to create on their own terms, combining experimentation with a call to organise and resist.
The Mekons are Jon Langford, Sally Timms, Tom Greenhalgh, Dave Trumfio, Susie Honeyman, Rico Bell, Steve Goulding, and Lu Edmonds.
“There’s just boatloads of beautiful Mekons, once you commit yourself to it, you’ll never be the same” Will Oldham
“Routinely brilliant” Rolling Stone
Available on Limited Edition White LP & Limited Edition Double CD (Includes Bonus Disc ‘Horror’).
TOUR DATES
12-18 Mar: SXSW, Austin, TX, US (Jon Langford)
15 Mar: SXSW, Hotel Vegas, Austin, TX, US (Jon Langford)
30 May: Hideout, Chicago, IL, US
31 May: Space, Evanston, IL, US
02 Jun: Bell’s Eccentric Cafe, Kalamazoo, MI, US
03 Jun: Music Box Supper Club, Cleveland, OH, US
04 Jun: Ottobar, Baltimore, MD, US
05 Jun: Latvian Society, Philadelphia, PA, US
06 Jun: Mercury Lounge, New York, NY, US
07 Jun: Old Franklin Schoolhouse, Metuchen, NJ, US
09 Jun: Bearsville Theater, Woodstock, NY, US
10 Jun: Iron Horse Music Hall, Northampton, MA, US
11 Jun: SPACE, Portland, ME, US
12 Jun: Sinclair, Cambridge, MA, US
