Description
Adulkt Life, made of Huggy Bears Chris Rowley, Male Bondings John Arthur Webb and Kevin Hendrick, and drummer Sonny Barrett, announce their debut album, Book Of Curses, out November 6th on Whats Your Rupture? Today, they offer two new singles, Stevie K and Taking Hits, which follows the previously-released song County Pride.
Huggy Bear led the UKs answer to riot grrrl, inspired by the seismic shock of witnessing a Nation of Ulysses performance together and galvanized by Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vails germinal riot grrrl zine Jigsaw. In the 25 years since Chris Rowley played with iconic Huggy Bear, starting a new band hasnt felt right. But after John Arthur Webb (Male Bonding), who Rowley met while picking up records at a Rough Trade shop, asked if he wanted to play music together it suddenly it felt super exciting. Within a year, Webb and Rowley befriended drummer Sonny Barrett, who worked at a different Rough Trade location and later offered to drum in Adulkt life. The Adulkt Life lineup was finalized when Webb enlisted his best friend and longtime collaborator, Kevin Hendrick (Middex) on bass.
For Rowley, Adulkt Life felt like it could carry the weight of all the things I would want to culturally load into a band without having to compromise any of it. That meant these songsecstatic buzzsaw guitars, blown-out poetry, the improvisatory energy of torrential art-punk drumming that reveals Sonnys free-jazz interestshould reflect the conditions of his life as an older person. In 2020, Rowley is a 55-year-old father and longtime employee of a childrens charity. You have to create a question and interrogate yourself, he says, and so he poses inexhaustible ones: What is it to parent in a crumbling world? What does it mean to stay political as Earth burns, to keep loving music? How best to communicate the excitement and charge of possibility from a whole different set of paradigms? Adulkt Life inquires but offers no easy answers, instead instigating punks eternal invitation to see: Wow, I should do somethingmake something, start a political party, just do something rather than not do something.
The cut-and-paste word collages Rowley once shouted in Huggy Bear are as cool and thrilling as ever on Book Of Curseswith chiseled noise hooks expertly mixed by Webb and mastered by Total Controls Mikey Young, fitting the cold war bubblegum aesthetic called out in the lyricsbut charged by the high-stakes of adulthood. Taking Hits is a rallying cry for those unable to cry. The explosive Stevie K is a mythic hero/ine song inspired by Nation of Ulysses guitarist Steve Kroner. In the 1990s, after Rowley and the other members of Huggy Bear saw Nation of Ulysses, You couldnt be a band and want to be anything less than the impact that had on us [] We wanted to shake everybody up. Adulkt Life honors these impulses. Rowley expands on Taking Hits and Stevie K:
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.