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Dutch rock band Iguana Death Cult shares their highly anticipated LP Echo Palace, following the release of three stellar singles, "Oh No," "Pushermen," and "Sensory Overload," with praise from outlets such as DIY, Under the Radar, American Songwriter, Paste, and more.
Alongside the release, the band additionally shares a music video for the record's focus track, "I Just Want A House," described as a "funky millennial nihilist anthem."
On the track, the band wrote: "O the trouble we've found ourselves in! Young people are struggling to find a decent place to live, summers have gotten so hot that vast areas of land are turning into scorched earth, not only is there a patch of plastic in the ocean the size of Texas, apparently we swallow a credit card's worths of microplastic per person every week. Human greed has pushed us to the limits of existence. But since we wrote this groovy dancing song about it, we're probably not even close to being scared enough."
Continuing on the track's accompanying video, they wrote: "Because we were playing shows in the UK, we weren't able to work on this video ourselves, so we gave Hache complete freedom to make what he wanted. He joined forces with his actor friend Nol Klis and artist Helia Rafi, who made the 3D render. 'The idea for the video was about somebody trying to run away from the city and decided to live in the forest by himself. But you can't run away from yourself!' says Hache. I think it covers the message of the song very well since it's about having trouble keeping up in a rapidly changing world and the desire to have a place of your own."
Ahead of the release of their forthcoming LP, Echo Palace (due 5/12), Dutch rock band Iguana Death Cult return with a brand new single entitled "Oh No." Previously, the band shared two stellar singles, "Pushermen" and "Sensory Overload," and this new track continues the hype in anticipation of the record's drop in May.
Wrote the band of the track: "Inspired by Dutch writer Jan Cremer, I decided to write a song about how incredibly amazing I am. This sort of self-mythification seemed funny to me since I spend most of my days wallowing in doubt and worry. In the end it became a metaphor for how we polish up our lives to near perfection on our social media accounts, while mental health problems are becoming more norm rather than an exception."
To accompany the new single, the band has also shared a music video, on which they wrote:
"One night, I played the new record for our good friend Max. When 'Oh No' came on and I heard myself sing the first line, I knew it; We have to get this guy in a knight costume. Max is a 6 foot 5 berserker but also one of the sweetest guys I know. We had so much fun making this video even though it was freezing and we had to hide from the rain every ten minutes. The banter you can have with this guy is unprecedented. One of the sharpest tongues in the game. Everything was filmed in Rotterdam again. Can't represent this beautiful city enough! Because this song has a bit of an old school Iguana feel to it, Hache wanted to use a lot of video distortion like he did back in the day when he made the videos for our first record."
In celebration of their forthcoming album, Iguana Death Cult made an appearance at this year's SXSW (Austin, TX), where they played a total of nine showcases. Following the festival, Paste Magazine noted that the band was one of the "20 Best Acts" they saw there: "I knew I had to see Iguana Death Cult as soon as I heard the band’s name. And they didn’t disappoint. From the word 'go,' the whole crowd was dancing and pushing to their garage and psych-rock extravaganza."
Iguana Death Cult return with a brand new track entitled "Pusherman," premiered by Under the Radar. This new track is the second single off their forthcoming LP, Echo Palace (due 5/12), which was introduced last month with a track entitled, "Sensory Overload."
Speaking on their newest release, the band wrote: "This is one of those songs that just sort of happened while fooling around. Talking about it now already feels kind of surreal but we were literally trapped inside my home because of the curfew that was installed due to covid. Guitar in hand, we were reviewing the state of the world and the growing division and distrust we saw not only in the media, but amongst the people we know. Someone joked that we should quit the band and go into the vaccine business and so, we had our chorus. A chorus that ends on a more serious note that we don't want to be victims of our time. I tried to make the lyrics ambiguous enough that you don't really know which side the narrator is on. In the end we're just all people living different lives."
On the track's video, they continued: "'Pushermen.' It kind of sounds like an action movie doesn’t it? Sadly we came a couple of million short, so Hache came with the idea to do a casting video for a fictional film called: 'Pushermen.' The scenes we did were loosely based on the movie 'Superfly.' If you know, you know."
"Dutch band Iguana Death Cult's rip-roaring melodies are built to jettison far beyond their homebase of Rotterdam." - FADER
"Frenetic, intense sonic assaults, they turn psych punk into astonishingly concise three-dimensional documents." - CLASH
"Jangly, angular guitars fight for space in the track with a bobbing bassline holding it all in together...This jam would fit on your playlists with Parquet Courts, Ty Segall or Television and is a catchy starting point to get a feel for their well-executed blend of rock and roll fringe." - KCRW
"With a carousel of outlandish and frisky guitar tones, Iguana Death Cult curate something absurd and sportive, yet illuminating."- Paste
About the single, the band explains:
After the pandemic hit, and the people of the world suddenly grew wary and suspicious of one another, Iguana Death Cult, one of Europe’s most exciting rock exports, became more than just a band to its members—it became therapy. “I think for the first ten times we went to jam,” says guitarist/vocalist Tobias Opschoor, speaking about the process of making the new album Echo Palace, “we just drank wine and talked about it, and just kept on talking for hours—and then were like, ‘OK, I have to go because I have to work tomorrow.’”
Taking place at frontman Jeroen Reek’s apartment in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, these gatherings slowly shifted from talking about this surreal chapter of their lives—the days of quiet streets and cramped buildings—to making music about it. “I was living in a really crappy, leaky, ready-for-demolition apartment,” explains Reek, “with just one heat source—like a really old-school, gas stove kind of thing.” Working on cold nights, they had to gather around that heater together—a cozy approach that ultimately got their creative flow going, fast.
Armed with the talents of Justin Boer on bass and Arjen van Opstal on drums, and tapping the keys work Jimmy de Kok for the first time on album, the band took their trademark melodic garage-rock style and expanded it out to make it vibier and looser, with each member contributing ideas to develop the sound palette in full. “We all get into this sort of blender and then everybody gives a little bit of a flavor to it,” says Opschoor.
The sounds they started to make tapped into the band’s acerbic bite established on their first two LPs, 2017’s The First Stirrings of Hideous Insect Life and 2019’s Nude Casino—albums that sometimes felt like Parquet Courts colliding with Super Furry Animals. (Paste described Nude Casino as evoking “the colorful mischief of nights out where even a humdrum accountant can feel like a Clint Eastwood desperado.”) Their explosive performances of these records turned them into a cult live act among psych fans, who have thrashed to the band everywhere from Amsterdam to Austin. (It was during a particularly bananas set at SXSW that the band won over Innovative Leisure.) But working on this new album, huddled together as the world split apart, everything began to flutter like Remain in Light.
Echo Palace may be the Iguana Death Cult music that’s most overtly about the strange cause and effect of groupthink, but the theme has been lurking there since the very beginning, when the band was first formed by childhood friends Reek and Opschoor over ten years ago. The name of Iguana Death Cult is a partial nod to Reek’s fascination with cults in general—and the “Iguana” part is a nod to Iggy Pop, whose first band was the Iguanas. Watching the pandemic paranoia and conspiracy theories steeping across their country, Reek wrote lyrics reflecting the scene in front of him: “Purple, veiny soccer mommies,” he sings in a deep, foreboding voice on the song “Echo Palace,” “Sharpening their guillotines.” It’s a cut so infectious that it betrays the density of its lyrics, which were adapted from a poem Reek wrote about the repercussions of “shutting yourself off from everyone outside of your own ideology.”
When it came time to record the full set, the band headed to PAF Studio in Rotterdam, and then had the self-produced album subsequently mixed by Joo-Joo Ashworth (Sasami, Dummy) at Studio 22 in Los Angeles and mastered by Dave Cooley (Tame Impala, Yves Tumor). As the instruments swirl and trade solos on “I Just a Want House,” a funky millennial nihilist anthem, you can practically hear the growth of a group that’s been pushing itself further and further with every tour and every Belgian-stove fuelled jam session. The album is a big swing, stretching Iguana Death Cult beyond its garage rock origins and taking them to a new realm. It’s the type of project that warranted having legendary Dutch saxophonist Benjamin Herman stop by to add to the squall on tracks like “Oh No” and “Sensory Overload,” heady thrashers that morph into calculated freakouts; that warranted Reek and Opschoor knowing when screaming their guts out on tracks like “Pushermen,” and Boer and van Opstal knowing when to bring the rhythm section to a jazzy simmer on tracks like “Paper Straws.”
The end result of Echo Palace is an appropriately worldly album from a group breaking past the confines of its home country. That’s not to say that Iguana Death Cult aren’t proudly Dutch; the group takes from the trademark hard work ethic of their Rotterdam base and applies it to their approach with music. But it’s 2022, and we’re less defined by our borders than ever before. “When we play in other countries, for me that gives the same amount of pleasure—or even more—than when we play in the Netherlands,” says Opschoor.
“We’re not just little countries anymore, everything is global,” adds Reek, speaking about society at large—but he might as well be speaking about Iguana Death Cult itself. “We’re turning into a global thing.”