Black Lips "Season of the Peach"

Black Lips return with a brand-new studio album, Season Of The Peach, a 40-minute rock and roll odyssey, tripping through DIY genres where garage rock meets new wave pop, and disgruntled country shakes hands with epic western soundtracks. The 14-track album captures the energy and spirit of early Black Lips while simultaneously applying new approaches to songwriting.

The album is a musical merry-go-round, a journey featuring road-weary tales from the underbelly of a lights-out America. It’s bookended by “The Illusion” parts one and two: a barroom quest for hope, fear, and hate, thwarted at each turn by a sense of resignation, “you reach for the sky / but it’s an illusion.” Elsewhere, “Wild One” plays out like a Morricone romp through another day in Hell. A mantra for the hungover, a skin-crawling lament in praise of the wild at heart.

“Tippy Tongue” sees Black Lips take on 60s girl group soul, like The Shangri-Las and Ronettes infiltrated by Jayne/Wayne County, paying homage to Buddha Records. Meanwhile, “Kassandra” has a guitar sound scrubbed clean for a Sunday, chiming its way through ever-spiralling salvos like The Chocolate Watchband with Zappa on vocals. “Zulu Saints” is an upbeat country honk, a good-time brush with bravado, peppered with Cole on an incredulous radio phone-in show, looking for black-eyed peas and winning big on the slot machines.

For the recording sessions they holed up in the bucolic surroundings of drummer Oakley’s new Sound At Manor studio in the Catskills (the first album recorded there since Oakley built the studio in 2020). In this idyllic setting, the band disconnected from city life and committed their music to analogue tape, part of their quest to embrace spontaneity and capture the energy of a live Black Lips show on record.