“Yeah, the whole world’s at death’s door now / And they’re pickin’ at the lock!”
Gareth Liddiard snarls wearily about a quarter of the way through the nearly 9-minute title track of Tropical Fuck Storm’s new album, the band’s fourth. It’s familiar territory for the Australian quartet, who’ve been celebrating catastrophe and embracing disaster since they formed in 2017. (The name of their 2024 live record: Tropical Fuck Storm’s Inflatable Graveyard). But Fairyland Codex (June 20) carries a new undertone: sadness.
Sure, there’s still plenty of the twisty, degraded guitar squall that drenched the band’s 2018 debut, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, whose Maurice-Sendak-meets-Peter-Max cover art Fairyland Codex mirrors. And Liddiard still sounds like a cross between the Big Bad Wolf and Mad Max, his gleefully malevolent musk balanced out by tart harmonies from bassist Fiona Kitschin and guitarist/keyboardist Erica Dunn, as opener “Irukandji Syndrome” amply demonstrates. But starting with the second track, “Goon Show,” in which Liddiard channels Nick Cave over a stomping bass line and drum-machine ricochets, Tropical Fuck Storm move away from freaky glandular decadence and toward something harder and stranger. “Goon Show” may start off dark and streamlined, but it warps and melts midway through, before ending in an eerie shuffle, with Liddiard assessing the damage: “See everybody scream and shout / They don’t know what they’re missing.”
The brooding “Stepping on a Rake” approaches a full-on ballad, with Liddiard and the rhythm section turning in an eerily restrained, aching performance. This newfound tenderness carries its own ambivalence, however—“Don’t worry about stormy weather,” Liddiard sighs, a sly reference to the band’s provocative name. Joined by Kitschin and Dunn, Liddiard declares, “So far, nothing has changed,” in the first chorus, meaning it as both reassurance and complaint. Apocalypse hovers eternally on the horizon, but never quite arrives, and in the meantime, love only just holds despair at bay. “I’m still your island when you’re washed away,” Liddiard sings, delivering the affirmation in a melancholy murmur that acknowledges not just the creeping untenability of the situation, but its possible undesirability.
After the halfway point of the title track, the band leans harder into chaos, as if they’d lost the ability to hold the center or just abandoned the effort altogether. “Dunning Kruger’s Loser Cruiser” and “Bloodsport” swing wildly between nihilistic funk and disjointed no wave sing-alongs, while “Joe Meek Will Inherit the Earth,” whose title puts the pioneering, homicidal British producer in conversation with the Bible, rides a cool post-punk groove. The back half of the album might lack the impressively mournful desperation of the first few songs, but, if nothing else, it shows that it’s still possible to kick it after all the locks have been blown off, and death’s door stands wide open.
