Over the last 15 years, Cincinnati garage-psych veterans The Harlequins have made a name for themselves as purveyors of agit-punk narratives doused in dense, swirling layers of raucous guitar riffs, cloudy basslines, and percussive detonations. Having shared the stage with bands like Cherry Glazerr, Ty Segall, and Kikagaku Moyo, they know their way around grimy psych-inflected rock and roll. But they also don’t skimp on the melodies, remembering that a song needs to stick in the crevasses of your brain for it to be most effective — and for its message to be completely absorbed.
The band will release their eighth album, TIME, on September 2, and it’s a continuation of the volatile sonic journey they’ve been on since the band first began recording together. Harnessing heir collective energies into post-genre exploration of anger, frustration, and socio-political evisceration, the record veers way from static musical convention and embraces a wider range of influences and experiences.
“It’s one of the more eclectic albums we’ve done in a while,” singer-guitarist Michael Oliva says. “And it’s a little drier, cleaner and more experimental on the audiophile side. While it still has a live feel the way our older stuff does, there are a few songs that are a bit more ambitious, production-wise. We had fun pulling some studio tricks, and definitely went a little extra in that realm.”
On recent single “Sound of the Creeps”, they work through a wiry psych swamp of clamoring guitar lines and multi-tracked vocals that bloom into a distorted miasma of fuzzed-out riffs before slowing back down to focus on the vicious lyrical narratives within. As Oliva sings, “Everything will be OK / If you fall into place / Listening to the sound of the police / Oh to be free / A dream that haunts the likes of you and me / And all the rest who dream / Fear fuels the violent sheep / Turn away the kind they keep…“, you begin to understand how the band’s perception of various social systems have slowly corroded until they see nothing but a useless collection of governmental figureheads complacent in their positions of power.
For the track’s video, Oliva and his wife cobbled together scenes from 1922’s Häxan, a film from director Benjamin Christensen that uses fiction and documentary archetypes to examine aspects of witchcraft and demonology. It feels like a fever dream, with vision of devils, satanic rituals, and oversized animals prowling around gothic landscapes. It creates a hypnotic backdrop for the band’s vicious indictment of tyrants and their despotic political maneuverings. Oliva’s wife, Ellina, is from Ukraine, and the bitterness is palpable with each venomous syllable.
“I produced, recorded and mixed ‘Sound of the Creeps’ myself, bouncing between our rehearsal space and my home studio,” explains Oliva. “The song is about the perversion of truth, deterioration of character, and the ongoing spread of malice and corruption throughout a nation as they approach a new, peak boldness.”
He continues: “It was written between 2016 and 2017, when a lot of hate crimes and racial violence started to erupt in America during the 2016 presidential election. An ugly side of the country felt emboldened to show its face, though these immoral cesspools of humanity are not unique to America. This kind of hate has been rising for a while now all around the world, and I thought the imagery in 1922 Swedish silent film Häxan perfectly encapsulated how you could visualize the souls of these selfish, ignorant and dangerous people. So for the ‘Sound of the Creeps’ video, I decided to take public-domain footage from the film and cut it up to represent the narrative I was trying to tell. It started as a Covid project between me and my wife, but it felt important to finish, since the subject matter is still sadly relevant today. Also, it was impossible not to use the lovely footage of those grotesque, cartoonish pigs to represent a certain oppressive occupation in America that originally evolved from slave catchers.”
Watch the video below.
The Harlequins’ new album, TIME, is due out September 2 via Dizzybird. Follow the band on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
