“Wisconsin probes how 8 roller-coaster riders became trapped upside down for hours.” That’s the headline of a news article that surfaced this morning, just before we put the finishing touches on this article. Using ladder trucks to reach them, it took firefighters more than three hours to get all the passengers down.
To experience getting stuck upside-down on a roller coaster ride, it would have been easier for all concerned (though only slightly less scary) if they’d just listened to the new Tacos! song you’re about to hear.
You might get some sense of that just from gazing at the cover art for this Seattle band’s new album 3, which is headed for release in August via Portland’s Nadine Records. Seeing those three children dressed from an older era skipping through a field of skulls beneath interested vultures suggests a strange trip is at hand, and so it is. You’ll also get a good sense of that in listening to this new song, “Chin Up, Tits Out“.
Tacos! are no strangers to the Seattle music scene, or to people with a taste for their previous albums of raucous metal/punk and noisy rock. But whereas the band functioned for a decade as the duo of Lupe Flores and Donovan Stewart, they’ve now got a third member in long-time friend Hozoji Matheson-Margullis, who wrote the song you’re about to hear. We’re told that “following Covid and the death of her mother, she withdrew into herself; going through the motions so she could remain intact; continuing her hobbies and living her life despite living with an immense and plodding disconnection… a ghost with her chin up”.
The press materials do a good job capturing what happens in this music: “The song sounds like a fight gone awry; a rumble in which the losing party has already been chosen. There’s loss, grief, and passion there, concealed slyly beneath layers of splitting guitars and riotous vocals.” But of course we have our own way of trying to capture the experience, in addition to that thing about the roller-coaster ride, also gone awry.
At first, the drums sound like baseballs bouncing around a tumble-dryer that found a groove, while the distorted guitar simultaneously blares and scrapes in bursts. The drums lock into a grooving beat backed by a beefy bass, but the riff starts warping and slithering just in time for the wailing vocals to soar. The music sounds menacing and more than a little demented, and that voice sends shivers down the spine when it climbs even higher, eventually screaming in intensity.
The song is packed with visceral punch, but it does become a roller-coaster ride that goes upside down. Those woozy, sinister riffs begin to gnaw and gnash, bursting and blaring again with added venom, backed by electric drum fills and a burbling bass, everything leading up to a frightening finale.
We’ve obviously made an exception to the somewhat porous rule about singing in our site’s title, but man, when you hear this fire-fueled singing you’ll understand why:
Nadine Records will release 3 on August 4th, on variant vinyl editions and digitally, and pre-orders are up for grabs now. They recommend it for fans of Big Business, Red Fang, and Melvins (which is a lot of good company to be in). Below, we’ve also included a stream of the first single off the album, “Kick Rocks“.
PRE-ORDER:
https://tacosband-nadinerecords.bandcamp.com/album/3
FOLLOW TACOS!:
https://www.facebook.com/tacosband
https://www.instagram.com/tacos_the_band/