attention weirdos, freaks, mutants, oddballs, spudboys, twerps, tweakers, fuzzheads, fuckwits, geeks, and greaseballs:
today is your day
your time to shine
your time to cut loose
get ready to rock
get ready to take all the drugs
get ready to rip off your shirt
get ready to run loose in the streets
get ready to spew gibberish
get ready to puke on passersby
get ready to fuck up shit
get ready to be tased by the cops
get ready
you like post-punk?
you’ll like this
you like garage-rock
you’ll like this
you like the stooges?
you’ll dig this
you like tom waits in skronkland?
you’ll grok this
you like lcd soundsystem dancing with dustbunnies?
you’ll love this
you like the fall in a knife fight?
you’ll fucking love this
you love the stranglers on hgh?
you need this
you love devo getting shock therapy?
you want this
you like the idea of amyl & the sniffers singing a john prine cover?
you gotta get this
you like a whopbopblaggedyblargablargablarga?
you goddamn well know you do
so just get this already
saxophones have no right to rock this goddamn much
you have no right to rock this goddamn much
get ready
it’s time
go
THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “We wrote these songs at a time when I had been in a long-term relationship, taking drugs every day, and being an asshole,” Viagra Boys’ American-born frontman Sebastian Murphy explains. “I didn’t really realise what an asshole I was until it was too late, and a lot of the record has to do with coming to terms with the fact that I’d set the wrong goals for myself … I kept having this recurring nightmare where my mom was crying and my friends were all pissed off at me.”
The band’s new album, Welfare Jazz, doesn’t bargain with the anxiety in that defeated feeling, but rather a boiling certainty that nothing and no one is absolute. To a greater degree than ever before, Welfare Jazz lays bare the band’s increasing concern with urgent contemporary issues; among them racism, classism, toxic masculinity and misogyny. While Girls and Boys takes us on a surreal, saxophone-smattered tour of outdated gender roles, Creatures uses squared-off synths and Mark E. Smith-inspired spoken-word social commentary to evoke images of sub-aquatic apocalypse. On this album, with their trademark snarls and ferocious contempt, Viagra Boys succeed in rendering the personal political and the mundane absurd.
Since their founding in 2015, Swedish post-punk band Viagra Boys have made a name for themselves burning up stages around the world. There’s a little Iggy Pop spit and seethe, a David Yow drunken stumble, and a bite of Nick Cave’s haunted bark. Add a dash of motorik groove, a pinch of post-punk grime, and a dose of no wave howl.
For every gruff and gritty croak in the outfit’s catalog, they come back with a pair of bongos, squared-off synths, and a squonky saxophone, with songs that deftly lay waste to society’s normalization of toxic masculinity, racism, misogyny, classism, and self-obsession.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, and things are just a lot more interesting when you admit that you’re not always going to be nice, you’re not always going to pick the right words in a fist-fight. So why not keep moving forward, swaying and strutting into the night.”
