News
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.”
Iguana Death Cult release the B-Side to their limited edition 7" vinyl Future Monuments
“Artificial Afterlife contemplates over the possibility of assuring life after death by the means of technology. It could be the perfect soundtrack to waking up in a computer generated walhalla where your consciousness got uploaded to. Zuckerberg, if you read this, get in touch.”
Iguana Death Cult release their new single "Future Moments." March 15th will see the release of "Artificial Afterlife" which is the b side on a 7" by Rotterdam-based label Spazz Records.
At the beginning of 2020, everything seemed to be going well for Iguana Death Cult. Their second album Nude Casino was released via Innovative Leisure and received great reviews, a festival summer full of shows was planned with an additional 7 week tour in the United States. Until the pandemic threw a spanner in the works. "When the pandemic started, it took a while before we could motivate ourselves to start making music again. After pulling ourselves out of the creative vacuum, we started looking for a continuation of our musical identity." - Says guitarist Tobias Opschoor.
"Future Monuments" and "Artificial Afterlife" are the first songs where keyboardist/percussionist Jimmy de Kok was actively involved in the writing process since joining the band in 2019. This involvement has resulted in synth parts being intensely present in both songs, which is new for the band.
The new single "Future Monuments" deals with the question who the heroes of our future will be and how fast their statues will get torn down again. Frontman Jeroen Reek explains: “In a world as polarized as this, it’s pretty hard to tell I think. There are a lot of false, yet persuasive messiahs out there preaching their way into the minds of people that are looking for answers, for something to hold on to in this confusing day and age. It’s hard to not fall prey to these charlatans, to separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to picking our leaders. This worries us. We made the song sound big and heroic so it feels like a proper epos”
"The music video is about the urge to transcend and leave a legacy. Why don't we all become a portrait? Why don't we all quit our jobs and follow our dreams? Why don't we all become statues? It takes guts to stop the wheel we are living in. Despite the fields of concrete, we cannot see beyond one block. Maybe it's time we all went back into the woods." - says Hector Garcia Martin, who made the clip.
On the new single, Meat Market, Iguana Death Cult explain "This angry little ditty about the death of romance is an absolute success during the live shows but we decided to keep it of the record because it felt a little to far away from the other songs."
"Frenetic, intense sonic assaults, they turn psych punk into astonishingly concise three-dimensional documents." - CLASH