The members of Alkaline Trio They have been releasing good albums for almost three decades, some as acclaimed as that great “Good Mourning” 2003, and in their brand new album they show no signs of exhaustion. On the contrary. The present “Blood, Hair And Eyeballs” It roars with energy and resonates like the beginning of a new stage.
It is worth remembering that Matt Skiba joined the now resurrected Blink-182 to help two friends, and with them he composed and recorded two albums, but he never put his usual punk rock band aside. The best proof of this was that “Is This Thing Cursed?” from 2018, released when he was already fully immersed in his adventure with Hoppus and Barker.
For the recording of this new album, the tenth as the “X” on the cover underlines, the trio decided to reserve Dave Grohl’s 606 studios for two weeks and write the songs there, under the careful supervision of Cameron Webb , a guarantee producer with whom they had previously worked and from whom it seems that they asked for the extra rawness that the aforementioned one lacked. “Is This Thing Cursed?”, whose bill is much more pop. It has been many years, they have explained, that they did not compose like this, from scratch between the three of them, mainly because they lived (live) in different cities and it was more practical to bring sketches or skeletons from home.
That Derek Grant, in the band since 2003, announced that this will be his last work also marks the end of a stage, the most lasting and well-known. He says goodbye with a more than remarkable album that will now defend live another wonder of the drums like Atom Willard, whose solvency is more than proven. The former drummer of Rocket From the Crypt, Against Me!, The Offspring and Plosivs, among many other groups, also seems like the natural replacement. With Skiba he already had a musical project, The Hell, presented in 2013, and more recently they put together another, Lektron, in which a member of Afi also participates.
But back to the new album, which is really very good. This “Blood, Hair And Eyeballs”, His first release for Rise Records after a three-album run with Epitaph, he portrays a world on fire with that melancholic tone and those gloomy metaphors so characteristic of trademark pieces such as the brilliant “Bad Time”, “Scars”, “Break” y “Shake With Me”, with Skibba and bassist Dan Adriano splitting vocal duties.
For a band like Alkaline Trio, that finds inspiration in the darkest side of the human being, which has been singing to doom for almost three decades, these post-pandemic times must have been tremendously inspiring. Without going any further, in the cut that gives its name to the album we find living dead wandering through an apocalyptic hospital: “Walk like a zombie up and down these halls / Sleep like the undead, like the undead /At the end of the day”. Political leaders and terrorist groups who threaten the Apocalypse on a daily basis (“Meet me”, “Break”)shootings in the streets that do not stop (“Bad Time”), the so-called zombie epidemic caused by fentanyl addiction (“Teenage Heart”)… These elements, extremely topical, also sneak more or less clearly into their new album with that dark varnish so characteristic of them.
A historical moment as shabby and dangerous as the one we live in deserved a terrifying punk rock album, and that is precisely what the alkaline trio does best.