Russian Baths share new song ‘Tracks’

Russian Baths press photo

Brooklyn-based band Russian Baths have shared their new single, Tracks. Listen to this beautiful yet pummelling, heavy track via Soundcloud below.

Russian Baths said about the song, “If a friend takes something very personal, very private from you, do you forgive them? If you see someone’s worst self, how do you react? Would you choose yourself to be yourself? Is self respect something you feel because you’re good or does self-respect make you good?”

Russian Baths fuses the abrasive sounds of New York the eighties, the angular outbursts of DC hardcore, shoegaze’s torrents of noise and the suffocating anxiety of the Information Age. Their operation goes deep. One part horror movie soundtrack, and one part personal confession, the band’s music is at once imposing and intimate. As with their namesake, Russian Baths’ work is a place where hidden things happen, sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic, always obscured, but calling to be explored.

Russian Baths’ forthcoming album takes their art of juxtaposition to its extreme. Feedback and dissonance swallow softly whispered harmonies. Granular synths and 808s rest besides guitar shrieks and pounding, live drums. Caustic fits are punctuated by moments of relief, tortured the next second. Surgical imagery, themes of personal regret and cultural guilt, reflections on systems in collapse and the accompanying anomie populate the soundscape, sung by voices sometimes so close, they’re in the room besides you, sometimes from an impossible distance. Unlike their dissonant peers, rarely do the proceedings lead to a scream. 

Recorded and assembled over the course of two of years and meticulously mixed by Ben Greenberg, the record is dense, dark and finely crafted.

Russian Baths is Jess Rees (guitar, vocals) and Luke Koz (guitar, vocals), joined live by Kyle Garvey (bass) and Steven Levine (drums) from Brooklyn, NY.