VR SEX, originally the project of Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty who made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle into a fully collaborative five-piece band, have released their new album ‘Hard Copy’ via Dais Records.
Made up of 10 new tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies, chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales, the band have shared a new video for album standout track In Great Detail. Watch the clip via YouTube below.
Following 2022’s ‘Rough Dimension’ LP, Noel Skum made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR SEX into a fully collaborative five-piece band.
To christen the new group’s camaraderie of becoming a five-piece band, VR SEX booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments.
Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel– an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground– the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud-quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.”
Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” ‘Hard Copy’ embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”
Hard Copy track listing:
1. Dictionary Talk
2. Hush Money Millionaire
3. Inanimate Love
4. Squid Row
5. Real Doll Time
6. Runaway Runaway
7. Space Invasion
8. Jenny Killer Glue
9. In Great Detail
10. Medication or Meditation
Grab a copy of ‘Hard Copy’ here.
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