THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “After two pandemically conditioned ‘reaction’ albums — Yay! (2023) and Neigh!! (2024) — a few non-album singles and a compilation album, a downsized and sleek Motorpsycho are back where we all know and love them, with an epic, sprawling double album, filled to the brim with inventive, organic and ecstatic rock-based music.
This eponymously titled 11-song work has as much variety and diversity, accord and discord, as one expects from a band that has released a few albums, and that these days must be regarded as an institution in European rock. From concise three-minute pop-rockers to 20-minute progressive epics, from acoustic intimacies to psychedelic wigouts, this is concentrated Motorpsychosis: Countdown initiated. Ever closer. Ever sharper…
Since the traditional rock band seems to be a dying breed these days, and since MP always were a band in flux anyway, a new era has begun in the Psychoverse. The band have, in what one might call alchemical terms, been ‘dissolved and purified’, and are now again reduced to the core founding members: Bent Sæther and Hans Magnus Ryan. This is nothing new; it has happened a few times before. But these days they are also the owners of the record company NFGS, which is now the hub of all recorded band activity. With this, Motorpsycho have severed ties to other labels for the first time in 35 years. If ‘freedom is free of the need to be free,’ this is it. Yikes!
The minimalist title of the album is then not just easy to remember, it’s also a statement: A new era has begun in the Psychoverse, a state of affairs reflected in execution and details as well as title, if not perhaps, in ambition or size: Senex psittacus negligit ferulam (An old parrot doesn’t mind the stick).
This is a time of new beginnings for a band that spent two years consolidating and reseting before charging ahead anew on a new path, trumpets blaring (and trumpets don’t come much more blaring in the Psychoverse than with this grandiloquent hyperbole. Good fun!). It is a new day rising indeed.
The core duo were adroitly helped by a gaggle of greats from all over the Scandinavian musical landscape on these recordings: Drummers Ingvald Vassbø and Olaf Olsen, string arranger/violinist Mari Persen, vocalist Thea Grant, and — as usual — honorary member, brother Reine Fiske, were all fellow travellers on this musical journey. Motorpsycho was co-produced by the band and Deathprod, and mixed by Andrew Scheps.
Motorpsycho are not the best at what they do, they’re the only ones that do what they do.”
