The Fat Angel Sings

In 1972, when rock & roll was all but dead in Manhattan, five cross-dressing glam punks from the boroughs convened and began hammering out sub-Chuck Berry rock for the downtown in-crowd. It took another year before a record company dared to sign them, thus foisting The New York Dolls on an essentially uninterested world. Taking their cue from the band’s guitarist/Keef-alike Johnny Thunders, hardcore Dolls fans pooh-poohed Todd Rundgren’s production as wimpy: twenty-five years after its release, songs like “Personality Crisis” and “Looking for a Kiss” sound more trashily invigorating than ever.

Declared both the Best New Band and Worst Band in Creem magazine’s year-end poll, the New York Dolls were nothing if not polarizing when their self-titled first album hit the streets. Back then they were occasionally crossdressing Lower Manhattan gutter punks that – despite packing such NYC venues their debut, released July 27, 1973.

Today, they are hailed as innovators and visionaries. What a difference time can sometimes make. The album was recorded in eight days at New York City’s Record Plant and mixed in half a day. During the process there was no love lost between the band and the album’s producer Todd Rundgren, who disdained the quintet as amateurish. Their aura of danger, recklessness, flamboyance and decadence was borne out by a trail of death: original drummer Billy Murcia died in 1972 from an overdose; guitarist Johnny Thunders (a longtime heroin addict) in 1991 from indeterminate causes that could have been ill health, drugs and/or foul play; drummer Jerry Nolan the next year from chronic health problems.

They had emerged from a residency in New York’s Mercer Arts Center as both pariahs and icons.

Now considered proto-punks, the Dolls were a bridge from glam and early hard rock to punk (the band’s late-in-career manager was Malcolm McLaren, who went on manage the Sex Pistols). They were an inspiration for Kiss and such later metals bands as Motley Crüe, Guns N’ Roses and Hanoi Rocks. Today such album tracks as “Personality Crisis,” “Trash,” “Looking for a Kiss” and “Jet Boy” are regarded by some as rock classics, and the LP is seen as one of rock music’s great debut records.

In 2004 original members Johansen, Syl Sylvain and Arthur Kane reunited to play London’s Meltdown festival, invited by that year’s curator, Morrisey. Kane died later that year from leukemia. Johansen and Sylvain released a new Dolls album in 2006, and another in 2009 that was produced by – of all people – Rundgren. Sylvain died on January 13th, 2021.

The New York Dolls is a powerhouse of Stones swagger, bluesy attitude, garage punk sloppiness and 60s girl group pastiche. From the opening scream of “Personality Crisis” via the social commentary of “Vietnamese baby” and chronicling of NY’s demi-monde in “Looking For A Kiss”, “Subway Train” or “Bad Girl” it appealed equally to fans of the MC5, glam or heavy metal. No one at this time had combined all this into a single band. The riffs of Johnny Thunders and the bawling of David Johansen gave birth to big hair metal as well as punk and still sounds like the end of civilisation. Their follow-up was so rightly named, “Too Much Too Soon”

This week, Bright Eyes shared a new song, “1st World Blues,” that is influenced by ska music and is a takedown of late stage capitalism, with references to Reaganomics and large chain stores such as Hot Topic and Old Navy. It is accompanied by a lyric video (which plays more like a regular music video.

Bright Eyes is Conor Oberst, Mike Mogis, and Nathaniel Wolcott. The band collectively had this to say about the song in a press release: “‘1st World Blues’ is an homage to ska in all its waves. From Desmond Decker to Tim Armstrong, we’re just happy to add our track to the bin.

The video is inspired by NYC 90s hip hop, which like ska, has a long tradition of unifying people and using celebratory music to convey subversive political themes. To be played loud. Windows down. Summertime.”

Bright Eyes released a new album, Five Dice, All Threes, last year via Dead Oceans. It was the band’s 10th studio album and followed Down in the Weeds, Where the World Once Was, which came out in 2020 via Dead Oceans.

MOJO’s finest writing on Nick Cave in a single deluxe volume.

Forty-five years ago, Nick Cave and his band The Birthday Party relocated from Melbourne, Australia to London, England, lured by the city’s thriving post-punk scene and the endless possibilities the capital promised. It was the start of a musical, spiritual and, indeed, chemical journey that would see Cave evolve from The Birthday Party’s unholy goth pin-up into a careworn songwriter of rare depth, beauty and transcendent power, abetted by his darkly suave backing group The Bad Seeds.

To celebrate the singer’s extraordinary career, MOJO magazine has brought together its finest writing on Cave in a new, deluxe 132-page bookazine. Drawing on over 30 years of exclusive interviews and in-depth features, we unravel the story of how Cave turned from troubled Melbourne teenager into fearsome goth frontman, and how his complex relationship with hard drugs and religion would feed into The Bad Seeds’ ever richer, darker and more sexually charged music.

Phil Sutcliffe’s piece on his early years touches on the traumatic loss of the singer’s father when he was 21, news of which arrived while Cave was detained in a Melbourne police station, while Andrew Male investigates how The Birthday Party’s violence – on-stage and on-record – was superseded by the fascinating fruits of The Bad Seeds’ experimental mid-’80s years in Berlin.

As the 1980s progressed, so did Cave’s descent into substance abuse, which an early ’90s move to Brazil and the hit “Murder Ballads” LP – featuring duets with Kylie Minogue and Polly Harvey – did little to stop. But, as James McNair’s revelatory – and occasionally testy – interview with the singer from 1997 reveals, he was slowly turning a corner into sobriety, the hymnal and timeless “Into My Arms” from “The Boatman’s Call” album tellingly written after attending church in rehab.

In the 2000s, a cleaned-up Cave unexpectedly transformed into a cultural icon, and Dorian Lynskey’s panoramic survey of the singer’s latter years – marked by the tragic loss of his son in 2015 – explores why. And, for your entertainment and enlightenment, we also present our choice of Cave’s 50 Greatest Songs 
Illustrated with rare and iconic photographs, Mojo Collectors’ Series: NICK CAVE is an essential purchase for Bad Seeds fans and all music connoisseurs.

Ron Gallo’s “Too Tired To Love You” — both the studio version of his new single and the live performance “Too Tired To Love You (Live at Basilica San Vitale)” — capturing the emotional cost of now.

Ron Gallo is an ever-evolving artist whose work straddles the line between confrontational and compassionate, absurd and sincere. With a career defined by sharp wit, garage-punk chaos, and existential inquiry, he’s long used music to wrestle with the contradictions of modern life.

After years of genre-hopping, world touring, and throwing punches at society’s failings, Gallo now finds himself in a quieter but no less urgent mode, one rooted in clarity, immediacy, and a return to the essence of his song writing.

Gallo’s past work includes the acclaimed “Heavy Meta” (2017), the genre-defying “Peacemeal” (2020), the fiery “Foreground Music” (2023), and most recently, “7AM Songs of Resistance“. Now entering a new chapter, Gallo is reconnecting with what first drew him to music: words, voice, and the urgency to say something real — before the world fully falls apart.

Flock Of Dimes next record, “The Life You Save“, will be released on Sub Pop on October 10th, 2025. You can listen to the first single, “Long After Midnight,” and watch its accompanying video, directed by Spence Kelly. Put succinctly, this record is about addiction, co-dependency, and trying to learn how to find peace in the face of others’ suffering. The story of this record is one that I’ve shied away from addressing directly, because in many ways I didn’t yet have the perspective I needed to understand that it was also mine to tell. 

I am so proud of this record—not just because of the songs, but because the fact that it exists and I am sharing it with you means that I am further along on my own path towards peace than I ever dreamed I could go. If you see yourself in any part of this short description, this record is also for you. 

I produced this record myself with indispensable help from Adrian Olsen (engineer/mixer), Nick Sanborn (additional production), and many brilliant musicians: Alan Good Parker, TJ Maiani, Jacob Ungerleider, Matt McCaughan, Adam Schatz, Caroline Shaw, and Meg Duffy. It was recorded at Betty’s in NC (add. engineering by Alli Rogers) and at Montrose Recordings in LA, and was mastered by Huntley Miller.

Last but not least: I’m going on tour! I’ll be taking a killer band

New album “The Life You Save” out October 10th

A collection of 1980s classic American power pop has been released this summer by Cherry Red Records. “I Wanna Be a Teen Again: American Power Pop 1980-1989 arrived July 18th, 2025. The 3-CD set, spanning more than 75 tracks from such recording artists as the Bangles, Marshall Crenshaw, Dwight Twilley, and Katrina and the Waves,

From the label’s May announcement: In 1979, The Knack kicked open the doors for a global power pop explosion, and a year or so later, almost as quickly, the doors closed again, but not before a mass of their contemporaries followed them through. Soon, a bunch of others got caught up in the excitement and the record business relearned the power of guitar-driven pop – the first few years of the ’80s were as exciting for power pop as the last couple of the 70s had been, and even when it returned to the underground, the music continued to flow throughout the decade. Other acts represented in the collection include the Romantics, Eric Carmen, Rick Springfield, the Go-Go’s, the Smithereens, and Cheap Trick.

“I Wanna Be A Teen Again” follows the 80s power pop explosion from its hypocentre early in the decade to its enduring late period gems, exploring both leading and lesser lights, the old hands and new talents who made it such an exciting musical happening. By the middle of the decade, the term power pop had been all but retired, but a handful of new bands found success by avoiding it, whilst new movements, including the Paisley Underground and indie pop, helped keep others alive under new brandings. All the while a small number of holdouts, the pop equivalent of the soldiers lost in the jungle after the war had ended, strove to keep the music and the name alive.

Packed with classic cuts and long-overlooked rough diamonds, and appearing at a time when new outfits like The Lemon Twigs pick through the body of 80s power pop for material and inspiration and some key artists like Redd Kross and The Bangles are celebrated in books and film, I Wanna Be A Teen Again is a timely examination and celebration of this action-packed era and its thrilling sounds.

There’s one thing Forth Wanderers want to make clear as they prepare to release their third album “The Longer This Goes On” “We’re not back,” guitarist Ben Guterl says emphatically. It’s perhaps an unexpected sentiment to pair with the band’s first album since they parted ways seven years ago, but the band insists it’s just an honest answer — they came together to record the 10 intricately constructed gems that make up this new record, and they’re still figuring out what being in Forth Wanderers means to them, over 10 years after the project’s conception. Listening to these songs, each a glittering celebration of vocalist Ava Trilling’s urgent and intuitive lyrics and the band’s natural musical chemistry, though, it’s hard to feel like there’s much of anything left unsaid.

Filled with spit-shined melodies, chiming vocal harmonies, and slinky, slanted rhythms, the album is more expansive than just a return to form. Here, the band aren’t afraid to take the scenic route to a hook, layering instrumental flourishes to fill in the empty spaces, creating room for Trilling’s haunting range, or repeating a riff or a lyric until it becomes a Zen koan. On “The Longer This Goes On“, Forth Wanderers sound more self-aware and self-assured than ever before. Just don’t call it a comeback.

‘The Longer This Goes On,’ out on Sub Pop Records on July 18th, 2025.

“Through big hooks and brazen lyrics, Dead Tooth’s sound has a welcome discordance. The group fronted by Zach James churn out dystopian post-punk that you might hear at a posthumous dinner party where Ian Curtis and Herman Hesse are swilling whiskey and cracking jokes. Dead Tooth’s sound brings a welcome discordance to a dystopian landscape. The self proclaimed “rodeo-core” quintet from Queens, N.Y., weave high-energy hooks, brazen lyrics and dirty sax into a refreshingly unhinged live show thats’s earned them comparisons to acts like Refused, At The Drive-In and The Jesus Lizard.

After recording their second EP Pig Pile, the pandemic disembodied the band as it did so many others. Ambitious to keep the momentum going, James rebuilt the project from the ground up. He added an EWI / sax player and relinquished live guitar duties for a frontman persona.”

Grinderman formed in 2005 when Nick Cave was writing material for the Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds album “Abattoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus”. Featuring Martyn Casey on bass, Warren Ellis on violin and guitar, and Jim Sclavunos on drums, the band crafted songs together. In 2006, they entered a London studio and began a marathon session of song writing and demo recording. Aiming to recreate the rawer, more primal sound of Cave’s acclaimed post-punk project “The Birthday Party,” Grinderman’s lyrics and music were a significant departure from Nick Cave’s earlier work with The Bad Seeds.

The following April, they recorded the best of these new songs and, with the help of their longtime friend and producer Nick Launay, recorded an album.

Their eleven-song debut album, “Grinderman“, released on March 5th, 2007, received critical acclaim and included the singles “No Pussy Blues” and “Get It On.” The quartet reunited in 2009 to record Grinderman 2, released in 2010. In December 2011, Cave announced the band’s dissolution at a music festival in Australia.

When Grinderman released their debut in 2007, Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Jim Sclavunos, and Martyn Casey created a reckless, drunken animal of an alter ego to the Bad Seeds. The album bridged territory mined by everyone from the Stooges to Suicide to Bo Diddley.

Again recorded in the company of producer Nick Launay, “Grinderman 2” is a more polished and studied affair than its predecessor, but it’s a more sonically adventurous, white-hot rock & roll record. The opening, “Mickey Mouse and the Goodbye Man,” comes closest to the songs on the previous album, but feels like it comes by way of Patti Smith’s “Radio Ethiopia,” Howlin’ Wolf, and the Scientists. It’s pure scummy, sleazy, in-the-red dissonant rock.

The swampy, ribald blues of “Kitchenette,” features Casey’s bass roiling around distorted, Echoplexed electric guitar, electric bouzouki, and jungle-like tom-toms and kick drums. Cave does his best lecher-in-heat blues howl — if Charles Bukowski had sung the blues, this is what it would have sounded like.

“Worm Tamer” is a thundering, interlocked coil of triple-note vamps on electric guitar and violin; there’s an organ that sounds like Sun Ra playing in a burlesque theatre, and an elastic groove in the rhythm section that threatens to take the entire thing off the rails, but purposely never does. While the controlled feedback suggests the earliest sounds of the Bad Seeds live, the layered harmony vocals and tautly held tension between rhythm and lead instruments — all on stun — reveal a disciplined sophistication.

With its expansive textural and atmospheric palette, and deliberately studied dynamic bombast, “Grinderman 2” still contains an overdose of rock and roll adrenaline and is drenched in comic sleaze, but it also sounds like a new, more experimental direction for the band more than it does a continuation of its predecessor.

Big Thief have announced a new album called “Double Infinity”. The follow-up to 2022’s “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You” arrives on September 5th via 4AD Records. It’s led by the misty, kinetic new single ‘Incomprehensible’. 

Following the departure of bassist Max Oleartchik, Big Thief made the new album as a trio. They recorded it last winter, over the span of three weeks at New York’s Power Station, with producer Dom Monks. Its cast of collaborators includes Alena Spanger, Caleb Michel, Hannah Cohen, Jon Nellen, Joshua Crumbly, June McDoom, Laraaji, Mikel Patrick Avery, and Mikey Buishas. According to a press release, the musicians “would play for nine hours a day, tracking together — simultaneously — improvising arrangements and making collective discoveries.”

Big Thief will release their sixth studio album, “Double Infinity“, on 5th September 2025.

“Double Infinity” is the follow-up to 2022’s Grammy-nominated album, “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You”, recorded last winter, For three solid weeks, the trio would ride bicycles on frozen streets between Brooklyn and Manhattan, meeting in Power’s Station’s warm wood-panelled room.      

“How can beauty that is living be anything but true?” Adrianne asks as she drives nose against the future with childhood mementos on ‘Incomprehensible’. She understands, “everything I see from now on will be something new.” The silver hairs on her shoulders are new as well. Yet fear of aging is cracked by proof. If a life is shaped by living, “Let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair.” Being born, then staying a while, remains the greatest mystery. Adrianne claims her place and time. “Incomprehensible”, let me be.”

‘Incomprehensible’ taken from ‘Double Infinity’ out 5th September, via 4AD.