Influential post-hardcore band Big Ups released a remix of their track Grin by Sad13. This song, first put out in 2014, is about ignoring the symptoms of a sick world in order to function in daily life. The lyric, “They’re assembling caskets down the street,” is taken from a real-life experience – singer Joe Galarraga used to live a block away from a workshop that built coffins.
About the remix of the song, Big Ups say: “Sadie’s reimagining of this song really takes us back in time to the early 2010s when we were playing this song ad nauseum across north Brooklyn. Something about the synths on this track make it feel very “indie sleaze”. Thanks, Sadie!”
The remix comes ahead of the band’s limited-edition, tin-coloured vinyl reissue of, ‘Eighteen Hours Of Static,’ out via Dead Labour on September 20th, 2024. Along with the reissue, the band will put out a full remix album on cassette, bringing together artists like This Is Lorelei and Sad13 to reimagine the band’s songs ten years after they were first released back in 2014. Stream the Grin remix by Sad13 via YouTube below.
Big Ups have also announced a reunion show at Brooklyn venue Market Hotel on October 26th with Washer and more acts tba. See below for details.
More about ‘Eighteen Hours of Static’
Here is what 2014 felt like: The cold, rushed walk from the Montrose Avenue L to the downstairs entrance of 20 Meadow Street, an address you could never quite remember. The careful steep climb to the top of the nondescript building, where Titus Andronicus’s Patrick Stickles was waiting to take your balled-up cash and stamp the inside of your wrist. Standing beneath that jagged cardboard punk bunting, draped with tangled twinkle lights, while Joe Galarraga, frontman of Big Ups, slowly, menacingly, wound a microphone cable around his fist. Then a barbed F-sharp sprang forward from Amar Lal’s guitar, shaking the entirety of Shea Stadium to life.
For much of that time period, ten years now behind us, it would be easy to say, man, you just had to be there. You had to be there when Death By Audio closed. You had to be there when the Apple store opened on Bedford Ave. If you weren’t there when a small, specific subculture of New York City took over its abandoned lofts and grimy basements and squatted itself into community, that’s okay — it might be too clunky and myopic to explain now. Only certain relics from the mid-2010s can do it justice, painting DIY punk warehouse culture and all of its spirit, grime, determination, and glue into one enormous rowdy portrait. You’d do no better than revisiting Big Ups’ 28-minute debut post-punk album, the searing ‘Eighteen Hours of Static,’ if you want to remember, or maybe learn for the first time, what it all felt like. All of it, the good, the ugly, the sum of its parts.
Released in January 2014 to Dead Labour in the US and Tough Love Records in the UK, ‘Eighteen Hours of Static’ stands even now as a triumphant representation of what Big Ups did so well over the course of their nine-year run as a band. Brendan Finn on stylish, curt drums; Amar Lal with his icy guitar-as-knife; Carlos Salguero Jr.’s thrumming, beating heart bass; and the theatrical, pained, transcendent performance style of vocalist Joe Galarraga. The band met in a music technology program at NYU, then went on to release three full-length albums, tour Europe a handful of times, play to crowds both enormous and charmingly local, and round it out with a goodbye show at Bowery Ballroom in January 2019 that left all in attendance only wanting more. Now, with the re-release of Big Ups’ killer debut full-length, those who didn’t get to experience all this the first time around will get a shot at living as if it’s the glory days again.
With thirteen succinct songs that cover a broad range of emotions and political pushback, expressed in a balance of caterwauling shrieks and plaintive spoken word by Galarraga, ‘Eighteen Hours’ is the rare kind of punk album that delivers both in its quality of sound and in its heart. Clearly masterminded by a group of in-tune and skilled musicians, Eighteen Hours is the kind of record that makes you remember what synchronicity and synergy felt like before they were terms coopted by tech bosses — it may not be in vogue to celebrate the perfect mixing on the album, but with the component parts, everything on Eighteen Hours has its right place. Loud and sharp, wistful and wailing, it’s a record that captures a period in time while also feeling of the moment, right here, right now.
As a rose-coloured sheen has spread over everything — subcultures became mainstream, mainstream culture knocked down smokescreens to reveal an Oz-like branded content museum with a fifteen-hundred-dollar entry fee — it’s an even greater testament to the timelessness of ‘Eighteen Hours’ that it continues to endure. The sound produced on it is unlike anything we’ve heard since. Volatile, angry, and determined, but with a soft self-awareness and tender heart pulsing beneath every grimy lick and clash. “If I had just one wish, I’d wish for this, I’d wish for justice,” Galaragga sings on . It could be today that Eighteen Hours is releasing into the world for the first time — and aren’t we so lucky that we get to play through it again.
– by Dayna Evans
Eighteen Hours Of Static (Reissue + Remixes) track list
1. Body Parts
2. Goes Black
3. Justice
4. Grin
5. Wool
6. TMI
7. Little Kid
8. Atheist Self-Help
9. Disposer
10. Fresh Meat
11. Fine Line
Listen to ‘Eighteen Hours Of Static’ via Bandcamp.
https://bigups.bandcamp.com/album/eighteen-hours-of-static
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