At this point in Dead Anyway Month (new? see here) you can guess where this is going. Their new record is called Tough, Listen and is officially out on Friday October 25, but a technical whoopsie meant that it dropped on Bandcamp several days early.
Dead Anyway is Kate Arnold and Marc Symonds. They’re a prolific duo, putting out enough material to support a Greatest Hits-ish collection in music and printed form. That aside, they’ve released five albums and four EPs since 2020.
With that amount of material, it would be easy to think they’ve settled into a groove — and while Tough, Listen would never be confused for another artist’s work, the duo is still pushing in new directions.
The production is cinematic, layered and varied as always — Symonds moves so effortlessly between genres – industrial, EDM and triphop, boom-bap, and straight-ahead rock sounds all make appearances, and a hallucinatory, blown-out-amp guitar jam accompanies the lost-in-the-desert narrative of “My Camel Hates Me”.
The lead track “The Hollow” is an introduction that unfolds like a one-act play, or like the soundtrack to one of Erik Ferguson’s creations, with steadily escalating intensity that sets a sinister tone for the record. Here it is:
The first single, “Does Anybody Know Who I Can Hand These Things Into?” is one of the surprises here. It’s almost structured like a proper song (almost!) — including a killer bassline, and something close to a standard verse/chorus/verse structure and actual vocal harmonies, and Arnold’s lyrics are as opaquely sinister as ever. It’s surprisingly fun and catchy, two adjectives I’ve never attached to their music before:
A couple of songs sound like proper band performances, or at least as close to those as the band gets. “My Camel Hates Me” has a deliberately lazy fuzzed-up guitar sound that could have been the outro on any number of ’90s grunge records. “This” is as radio-friendly as anything the band has recorded – a warm guitar alt-rock sound, with Arnold sounding resigned, assuming the persona of a hippie finding comfort in being ordinary:
The last three tracks on the record, “Lost Body”, “Paper Cutters” and “Oral Graffiti” are an excellent showcase of their range: layered production with a sinister edge, executed in three very different styles. “Lost Body” is powered by a boom-bap beat and driving synth bed, full of ideas from Clive Barker films: “the one dragging leg, and the on-backwards head” and “that maggoty-bandaged jaw”. “Paper Cutters” puts sparse production — one bass note and a simple percussion loop — against Arnold’s gently ominous narration.
The closer, “Oral Graffiti” is classic Dead Anyway — the music and lyrics bringing a surprising number of twists for a sub-2 minute runtime.
Every play of this record reveals a new musical detail or clever lyric. Tough, Listen is a record that feels alive and vital despite its often grim subject matter.
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