Tropical Fuck Storm have cataclysm in their DNA. So it’s apt for the Australian band to unveil a new single in the midst of a developing global crisis.
The reliably unkempt ‘Suburbiopia’ premiered this morning along with a cult-parodying music video from director Oscar O’Shea. The song features Amyl & the Sniffers’ Amy Taylor on the OP-1 synth and musician Dan Kelly on the Protech Kinder Keyboard. Band members Fiona Kitschin and Erica Dunn share lead vocals.
Watch: TFS – Suburbiopia
Led by songwriter Gareth Liddiard, Tropical Fuck Storm have been making chaotic music for chaotic times since emerging out of the dwindling candle wax of The Drones in 2017. They’ve released two albums over the last couple of years, the titles of which give you a fair idea of the band’s uncompromising approach to end-times rock music.
2018’s A Laughing Death in Meatspace surveyed a world dominated by overzealous online trolls and demagogic ignoramuses such as Donald Trump. The album’s standout track was ‘The Future of History’, which extrapolated on chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov’s famous loss to the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue.
“I used to worry one day they’d have feelings too / But these days I’m more worried that that is not true,” went the final line of the song’s ominous chorus.
Watch: Tropical Fuck Storm – The Future of History
TFS were back just a year later with album number two, Braindrops. The album covered many of the same themes as its predecessor, although it was suspended in the air by the narratively linked ‘Maria 62’ and ‘Maria 63’.
“It’s about a Mossad agent traveling to Buenos Aires to assassinate Maria Orsic, a Nazi witch who telepathically got the blueprints for warp drive engines from aliens,” Liddiard said at the time. “It may be the most stupid song ever written.”
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So how does ‘Suburbiopia’ stack up in terms of apocalyptic reconnaissance and unsettling stupidity? Pretty dang well. Guitarist and vocalist Erica Dunn conceived the title, which planted an inspired braindrop in Liddiard.
“I thought ‘What if all those nutty cults with their fucked up suicide escape plans weren’t wrong and everybody else accusing them of being insane was wrong?’” he said to NME.
Thoughts about the Sisyphean pointlessness of life are becoming harder to suppress. TFS might not solve this problem, but they’ll sure as hell offer some abiding comfort.
