Tropical Fuck Storm have always sounded like a trashcan on fire rolling down a hill while someone screams poetry at it. On Fairyland Codex, their fourth studio album and first on Fire Records, the band has turned that flaming descent into a full-blown landslide: chaotic, prophetic, and littered with strange characters clawing their way through the wreckage of civilization.
Recorded in their lair at Dodgy Brothers studio in Nagambie alongside co-conspirator Michael Beach, Fairyland Codex is more so genre-burning than genre-bending.
Every track is a twitchy diorama of collapse. The guitars snarl and flinch like they’re allergic to comfort. Rhythms slither forward and back. Gareth Liddiard’s barked prophecies are countered—sometimes soothed, sometimes shredded—by the haunted harmonies of Fiona Kitschin and Erica Dunn.
There’s no chorus without crisis here. But amidst the sonic shrapnel is an eerie cohesion. Fairyland Codex feels like a culmination of TFS’s work to date: a dadaist dispatch from a world where nothing is stable, and everything, especially the groove, is subject to violent revision.
Tropical Fuck Storm have spent nearly a decade building a mythology out of societal decay, conspiracy dreams, and bug-eyed existentialism. Their live shows are known to melt faces and dislocate expectations, and this record captures that same energy in a jar, then shakes it violently for 40 minutes.
Due for release on June 20th, Fairyland Codex doesn’t want to be liked. It wants to be feared. It’s the sound of the end times, but louder, weirder, and dancing.
Pre-order the record on Bandcamp here.
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