Meet Bad Stuff: True Widow’s Dan Phillips and Dallas art rock collide on ‘Invisible Man’

Dallas has been quietly cooking up something heavy, hazy, and hypnotic — and Bad Stuff is finally ready to let you hear it. The supergroup-of-sorts, featuring True Widow’s Dan Phillips and Nicole Estill alongside Dallas art rock veterans Jackie Dunn Smith, Gabriel Spatz, and Laura Hartman Pearl, have dropped their second single Invisible Man ahead of their self-titled debut, ‘Bad Stuff’, arriving June 5 via Relapse Records.

If you were already nodding along to lead single Summer Girls with its circular rhythms and low-end drone, Invisible Man pulls you even deeper into the band’s blown-out, slow-burning world. Post-punk atmosphere, garage rock grit, and a whole lot of cool-headedness — this is a band that knows exactly what it’s doing and isn’t in any rush to prove it.

Phillips breaks down how the track came together:

“The song that would later become Invisible Man was one of the first songs I wrote specifically for Bad Stuff. I made a drum machine demo on my ADAT machine and sent it to Gabe with a gibberish vocal track so he could hear the melody and phrasing I had in mind, but when I got it back, he had sung over a part I had not intended to have vocals on. I started to tell him ‘eyo, don’t sing on this part,’ but immediately changed my mind because it was actually way cool. Now I can’t imagine the song without that part. One-take Gabe needs no editing.“

And Spatz on his end of the story:

“Yeah, I’m glad that part stayed in the song. Some of my favourite lines are in there; lines that kind of expand the meaning of the song for me. I remember singing it into my phone in the bathroom and on the roof of my building and having to retake it over and over again because I kept getting interrupted by the sound of horns and barking dogs.”

That kind of organic, happy-accident energy runs through the whole Bad Stuff origin story. The band grew out of two separate projects: Phillips and Estill’s instrumental outfit Latent Print, which started as a residency band at a Dallas lounge with a true crime aesthetic, and Dunn Smith’s synth-and-drum-machine project Concord Kill, built on a four-track during the COVID lockdown. When Phillips started adding guitar to Dunn Smith’s material and the two began fusing it with the Latent Print songs, something clicked.

“So these songs from our two bands are sitting there, one set that I wrote for Latent Print and another set that Jackie wrote on a four-track recorder, and one day we decided that maybe we’d try to put it all together and see if it worked,” recalls Phillips. “And it did. When we were doing the sequence for the record, that ‘switching the dial’ thing became apparent — there’s not just one sound or one style. It really makes the pacing of the record work and sort of showcases each of the songs.“

That restless, dial-switching energy is reflected in the tracklist for ‘Bad Stuff’:

1. Sullen
2. Gruesome
3. Summer Girls
4. Invisible Man
5. Creator
6. Hush 1
7. Nepenthe
8. Hush 2
9. Human Crush
10. Work of Art

‘Bad Stuff’ is available now for pre-order and pre-save on vinyl, CD, and digitally via Relapse Records.

Bad Stuff is: Dan Phillips (Guitar), Jackie Dunn Smith (Vocals, Synth), Nicole Estill (Vocals, Drums), Gabriel Spatz (Vocals, Maracas), Laura Hartman Pearl (Bass)

Follow the band: @realbadstuff