Don’t let the band name scare you… this is a very sick rock band. VR SEX is hitting up Raleigh on July 9th. Keep an eye out for lineup updates.
VR SEX
Bandcamp | Spotify | Instagram
Following 2022’s Rough Dimension LP, Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty – made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR SEX into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group’s camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result – 10 tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales.
Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel – an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground – the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loudquiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.”
Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”
De()t
Bandcamp | Instagram
Pronounced “Debt.” Freaky rippers for fans of Killed By Death comps and filling out mad libs. Full-length LP out soon via Simp Records and a 7” out later this year via Sorry State Records
Trash Signal
Website | Bandcamp | Instagram
Trash Signal started with the serendipitous introduction of Lishie Comiskey (Comiskey Players, Brennan’s Revenge) and Dave Yarwood (No Love, Exit Mice) by a mutual friend at an outdoor karaoke event. The two got to talking and realized that they shared a lot of musical influences, and before long, synth punk demos were flying back and forth between their apartments in Durham and Chapel Hill.
In 2022, the duo released their first two singles, “The Palms” and “I Should Be Asleep”, featuring Yarwood on synthesizer, guitars and drum programming and Comiskey on bass and vocals.
After months of searching for like-minded synth punk advocates, the live version of Trash Signal coalesced in 2023, with Yarwood taking over drum duties, Portland transplant Clay Staley (Agents of E.C.C.O) issuing frenetic, jazz-infused guitar lines, and Oxford, Mississippi’s own Capel Howorth (Plainer, Penny Peach) adeptly dual-wielding guitar and synth. Meanwhile, Comiskey drops basslines as melodic as they are thunderous, while delivering Pylon-esque vocals steeped in the ferocity of Lost Sounds and the unapologetic quirkiness of Devo.
Fans have described Trash Signal as “hitting a spot somewhere between the Pixies, Ex Hex, and Stereolab.”
