Wet walls and melted spines. Autosurgery and insomnia. Choking gazes and rotting gasoline. Clammy static and splattered breathing and Cyboman. You already know that Wolf Eyes has been the best band in America since well before your buddy shoved that one CD in your hand, subject to stoked whispers and heady rumor among the kids, Slicer or was it Dead Hills?? or maybe someone’s Fortune Dove rip, fucking boss and who can remember and anyway it’s not about you, not about your scuffed skip-happy backpack discman, not even about that crucial teenage revelation of the kinds of transcendence accessible through sheets of lacerating noise, through the sickly silences they could crowd, through the subtle interplays of restraint and punishment that constitute this band’s incontestably advanced songwriting. It’s about the tunes, which have been saying everything that needs saying for three decades running.

Here now, as if further proof were required, is Self Embalmed, Wolf Eyes’ first new full-length as the core duo of Nate Young and John Olson since 2023, twelve tracks of vortexing electronics and bewildering lyric babble and avalanching helljazz from the noise zone’s trashmen-in-chief, long may they reign. I trust by now you know the deal: warped sogging kicks and trebly drumsynth skittering insectine over blotting bass throbs, narcotized vocals ported in via wormhole collapse, mumbles and screams and the high bleats of those evil homemade reed setups Olson is always playing. A warning, and a tirade, and a full-throated statement. Self Embalmed, man; let the kids know. Thirty years in, and still nothing sounds like this.

- Mark Iosifescu

Limited edition 12" vinyl pressed on black wax, with a full colour scrawled title sheet. Artwork by Nate Young, script by John Olson, design by Grant Corum.