Deep States

• Track Listing

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical F*** Storm over this past year

and a half. Even for a band that's made a career out of crafting songs attuned

to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air for Tropical F***

Storm, what the band calls "give-a-f*** fatigue." The third album from the

avant-punk quad-aptly titled Deep States-mines familiar ground as well as

new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of

contemporary panic.

While not quite a protest album, Deep States comes complete with Q drops,

nods to the January 6th Capitol Riot, a riff on pizzagate, MAGAs squaring off

with Antifas, waterboarded Martians, dangerous cults from Heaven's Gate to

The Shining Path and, not to be outdone, Romeo agents who bed us at night

only to betray us by morning. We live in a world in which the bizarre has

become the normative, and Tropical F*** Storm plumbs that paradox. That

said, the band is far too wary of the self-importance attached to songs in the

didactic mode. "We make pop records," frontman Gareth Liddiard says, "that

don't deny we're all in a bit of trouble here."

What makes Tropical F*** Storm so great is the intersection between their

dark but satiric storytelling and musical arrangements intent on perverting

received canons and wisdoms. These are songs as experiment, advancing

and retreating at their own idiosyncratic, deeply unsettling pace. They hang

on the slant beat and slide into jazzy, distortion-packed jams so tumultuous

they'd make Charlie Mingus proud. Musically, Deep States goes wherever it

wants, riffing on pop, R&B, Talking Heads-style new wave, Delta blues, Tom

Waits, and some of the band's hip-hop favorites such as Woo-Tang Clan and

Missy Elliot. Barriers aren't just broken, they seem to have completely fallen

away.

In this present moment, parts of the world are opening up, or trying to. But

Tropical F*** Storm is here to remind us that many of our most urgent

political and social problems have been around a long time now. Same as it

ever was, as another genre bending band once sang. As the signs of the

latest crisis subside, and the dull ache of awareness with it, Deep States is

here to remind us that there is no foreseeable end to human folly, nor,

fortunately, to the creativity that resists it. Over the past few years we've all

heard the noise in our own heads - Tropical F*** Storm has made music of

it.

Credits