The Jesus Lizard: Hide & Seek
DL only available now
(for surprise and anticipation)
In a surprise drop that will create a tsunami of gibbering excitement in the Noise Rock underground, The Jesus Lizard have released their first new music for twenty-six years in the shape of Hide & Seek.
The song is a digital only track, released to tease the new album Rack, which is scheduled for release on September 13th through Ipecac Records.
I didn’t know it was coming.
Apparently, it was tease-leaked on socials by band members recently, but I totally missed it. I’m glad I did, because I woke up this morning to what could be the most exciting WTAF?!? moment of 2024. I knew they were playing again and dared hope that there might be an EP or single coming somewhere down the line, but it turns out an entire album has been recorded and is being manufactured as we speak!
And they just decided to drop the first single from it on us today without fair warning.
Oh, wonderful life.
So; is it any good? Oh yes, my friend. It is good. It might even be great.
It might be the most shit-kicking they’ve sounded since Puss.
Musically, Hide & Seek takes its cue from the marginally more straightforward songs of Down more so than, say, Liar or Goat. Still rapturously discordant and abrasive, but with clearer sections that make the song structure more readable – and a recording that is equally open, more akin to their latter albums – Yow’s voice is higher in the mix, making the lyrics more discernible.
And what a joy those lyrics are; “If I could walk, though I know I never will, I’d hunt that rotten hag, creep in for the kill…” Yow is waxing lyrical about hunting an actual witch who has used and abused his delicate frame somewhere dark, woody and creepy.
Probably.
The rabble-rousing chorus is one for the history books: “She’s not an idiot! She’s just a witch! She’s a Battleaxe with no sense of humour.” I literally lolled. It recalls Mouthbreather’s lyrical genius.
It’s a sorry sign of the times that the poetry of Hide & Seek somehow feels naughty. What’s become of us in the intervening quarter century without The Jesus Lizard? We need them – to remind us that there’s such a thing as freedom of expression… we don’t have to be sugar and spice all the time.
The song kicks in with one and a half bars of the open chord signature riff before grooving straight into a sprightly, chugging verse that’s spacious and direct. No time is wasted as the band seamlessly drops straight from there into the chorus quoted above.
As our hideous journey continues, we rise to a crescendo before dropping out to one of Duane Denison’s abundantly beautiful and discordant clean picking passages before lurching back to the chugging verse again for another round; this time opening up and escalating to a refrain before a false stop.
Into silence.
And… then we lurch back up again like a reanimated corpse for a final verse that sees our hero hog-tied onto train tracks before we head to the exit with Yow screaming “Hide & Seek!” to anyone who’ll listen – including you. Click the link below…
It’s a stone-cold classic.
Consider me suitably teased and unbearably tense with anticipation at the thought of Rack and all that it will contain.
I can’t wait.
~
Find the Jesus Lizard on the socials.
All words by Sean Millard
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