The Shits return with their first new music since 2023’s 'You're A Mess'.
'Diet Of Worms' – the band’s second album for Rocket will be unleashed on to the world on 3 April.
Watch the video for the first track to be revealed, the psyched-out punk stench of 'Joyless Satisfaction' above.
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'Diet Of Worms' is available to preorder now on clear vinyl (ltd to 120 copies) via the link below – you can also pick-up a black vinyl (ltd to 280 copies) via all decent record shops.
What's the point of the howl of string to speaker, the hammering of stick-on skin? Is it transcendence, elevating the human spirit by catharsis in sound? Or is it summoning chaos, a purgatory in which to bask in all that’s unclean, the better to feel alive?
Why not both? Because that’s what’s on offer on Diet Of Worms, the second Rocket release by The Shits, Leeds via Newcastle’s titans of disgust and deliverance. This is a feast for the senses in the worst way possible - primal rock boiled down to its essence and flung full in your face. Using repetition, tortured vocal invective and heads-down intensity as blunt instruments, these eight tracks are an unprecedented torrent of acidic salvation. Whilst lurking somewhere on the decadence-destruction axis between the nihilism of prime Stooges and the bloody blackout of Brainbombs, Diet Of Worms is possessed of a legitimately uncompromising hostility that both elevates and debases it to co-ordinates unknown.
There are revelations here in the riffage and the rancour, even if they are the kind that occur in the bleary miasma of the lock-in, or witnessing the streetlight blur of the subsequent stagger home. Even more single-minded and remorseless than the band’s Rocket debut ‘You’re A Mess’, this is a record that demands full immersion. Whether it’s ‘Then You’re Dead’ hammering on a pulverising garage-stinking riff until it begs for mercy, or ‘Change My Ways’, whose Creedence-In-Hell swagger and lurch is that of abjection transmuted into joy, this is psychedelia forcibly removed from its comfort zone of pastiche, and thrust into a bad-trip realm of the vivid and nightmarish.
But rarely has the process of making beauty and horror indivisible seemed like so much fun. If Werner Herzog was right, and the only harmony in the universe is that of overwhelming and collective murder, then The Shits are the true music of the spheres.
Catch the bands infamous live assault here (more dates to be announced shortly):
09 April / UK / Leeds / Brudenell Social Club (w/ Unsane)
16 April / BE / Brussels / Magasin 4
17 April / FR / Besancon / Les Passagers Du Zinc
19 April / CH / Geneva / L’ecurie
20 April / FR / Grenoble / Skatepark Sous Le Pont
22 April / FR / Toulouse / Le Ravelin
23 April / FR / Clermont-Ferrand / Fermenté.e
24 April / FR / Nantes / Blockhaus DY10
25 April / FR / Paris/Montreuil / Le Chinois
12 June / NO / Oslo / Hærverk i Parken
26 September / UK / London / The Windmill