Two years ago, No Age returned after a five year stretch without releasing a new album with the excellent Snares Like a Haircut. Alongside their newly reconvened independent status in signing with the truly autonamous Drag City Records, their fifth full-length effort heard Dean Spunt and Randy Randall putting together the best of their scratchy lo-fi ethos with enriched fever dreaming throughout their soundscape that made for a deliriously, caffeinated binge of art punk. A return to form it was, but without rehashing the past, if you will.
It’s not going to take another half decade to get new No Age, thankfully. This June, the heroes of the Los Angeles Smell scene era will return with their sixth studio effort Goons Be Gone. It’s being touted as their most direct statement yet, and that’s not a bluff when listening to its leadoff listen “Turned to String”. The hook-concentrated listen swirls in a woozy chug-along of thick-riffed wave riding and sunspot synths looping their way into the static. “But I already know too much / Not better now,” Spunts reflections wane into the sky, though this listen proves otherwise.
No Age’s latest and greatest, Goons Be Gone, is finally out! Effortlessly raw and extravagant in one practiced swoop, Goons Be Gone sees No Age set their live/bedroom internal clock to get out early into a glorious wind-tunnel of naked beats and sunbaked guitars, forming a wave from which they hang eleven tunes.
No Age have shared a new driving, blissfully energetic punk anthem in their new single “Head Sport Full Face.” The song is accompanied by a video that uses archival footage shot by Aaron Rose (director of 2008’s Beautiful Losers) of the band from a decade ago—stitched together into a nostalgic ode to the blistering, anxious sentiments that still pulsate in their music.
“Head Sport Full Face” finds some cathartic escape in its virulent riffs and raw percussiveness, while singer Dean Spunt’s fading cries dip in and out of a pining dreaminess.
Based in Los Angeles, No Age is the noise rock creation of guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist Spunt, the former being the one who first pieces together the video when Rose emailed them out of the blue the archived video clips. The result is a poignant blending of the band’s past antics and the current uncertainty of pretty much everything around them—and yet the shots of them blasting through punk tracks under dim venue lights to equally voracious crowds is exactly the kind of tonic for such a mess.
“Head Sport Full Face” is already delirious with grimy-meets-melodic soundscapes, but the newly “discovered” video attached to the song pieces together an appropriate reminder of the kind of energy now missing from the world—of crashing together against the heady weight of that wall of sound with a crowd of people around you.
“He said he was going through old hard drives and he found a folder labeled “No Age”. He opened it and found all this footage from 10 years ago. Maybe he was thinking of making a video for us but never did? He sent us a a link to a whole bunch of footage and he had shot on a small hand held digital video camera. I edited it together for the video. After a few round of notes from Dean and Aaron, this is the video.”
How “Head Sport Full Face” music video was made:
Dean and I have known Aaron Rose for years, we played the wedding procession at his wedding.
A few weeks into the Covid 19 quarantine we got email out of the blue from Aaron. He said he was going through old hard drives and he found a folder labeled “No Age”. He opened it and found all this footage from 10 years ago. Maybe he was thinking of making a video for us but never did? He sent us a a link to a whole bunch of footage and he had shot on a small hand held digital video camera. I edited it together for the video. After a few round of notes from Dean and Aaron this is the video.
Los Angeles noisepunk duo No Age will release their new album, “Goons Be Gone”, on June 5th via Drag City and here’s the Fall-esque “War Dance” that may leave your ears ringing till the record’s actually out.
Drag City Inc. Track from “Goons Be Gone,” available on LP/CS/CD/Digital from Drag City on June 5th, 2020.
No Age fully deliver on the promises of their earlier albums.
Rock and roll for the black hole – reimagined rippers, for the misfits that 2017 couldn’t kill to blast under the shadow of the big boot and beyond the glow of the chemical horizon. This is driving music, Very psychedelic punk. Perfect highway music and you’re the designated shotgun rider – get in!
In 2013, when last we heard from No Age, the duo were tearing down the mid-’00s drone-punk sound they helped define. Five years later drummer/vocalist Dean Allen Spunt and guitarist Randy Randall came back together to rebuild it into something even bigger and more self-assured. Snares Like A Haircut plays almost like a revue of the band’s career, with all-out punk stompers nestled next to shimmering instrumental meditations, shoegaze ballads, and combinations of the three. Most striking, though, is the poise with which the band has returned to this material, assembling this worthy comeback with even more confidence and musical depth than they showed off at their peak.
Track from LP/CS/CD “Snares Like a Haircut”, released January 26, 2018 on Drag City Records.
Don’t call it a comeback, but nearly five years after their last record, LA duo No Age has returned with its fifth full-length. Since 2005, guitarist Randy Randall and drummer/vocalist Dean Spunt have toyed with the idea and the definition of punk, always redefining it in terms of their sound but never wavering from the ethos underpinning it. With 2013’s An Object, for example, the pair physically made ten-thousand copies of the record themselves, despite the fact that it was being released on Sub Pop Records, a label more than capable of manufacturing those copies itself.
Of course, the world has changed a lot since then, and it seems that No Age are poised to confront it with these twelve songs. That said, this album doesn’t rage against the machine with visceral aplomb, but given that this is NoAge, that’s perhaps not surprising. Instead, the pair provide a disturbing and unsettling soundtrack to reflect these disturbing and unsettling times—a fuzzy, fizzling backdrop to the chaos and trauma that surrounds us at the moment.
The record begins on a somewhat antagonistic note, with the rambunctious and frenzied surge of “Cruise Control.” But even in that rush of buzzsaw guitars and charged feedback, there’s an unavoidable warmth, one that both reflects but then transcends any problems at hand, be they personal or political or a combination of the two. This is the case for many of the rest of these songs—“Stuck in the Changer” is wistful but forceful, “Popper” doom-laden but also optimistic, and the instrumental title track a soothing flood of comfort. It’s both a non-song—an interlude, an afterthought—and the most important track on the record, offering, as it does, some time to reflect, a moment of near-meditative calm.
There is—as there always has been on No Age records—a sense of almost naïve innocence. This is a band continuing to make music the way it wants to make music with no concerns for how other people will perceive it, and that approach serves them just as well here. Because this is a record that—subtly, subconsciously—offers some kind of solace while also invoking the unnerving and disquieting times we live in. A song like “Sqashed,” for example, with its nod to The Velvet Underground, simultaneously puts you on edge and gets you through it. For better or worse, it’s the perfect backdrop to life in 2018, and for as long as we need it, this album will be here to help.
In certain musical circles, the word “accessible” is a death sentence, a Judas-esque betrayal. Or worse, a synonym for “sell-out.” For noise-punk veterans No Age, it means their best release in recent memory. With recurring choruses and a selection of guitar riffs you can actually hum, much of Snares Like a Haircut feels like a new era for DeanSpunt and Randy Randall, who got their start doing time at L.A.’s The Smell, a grotty, sweat-marinated touchstone of DIY legitimacy. “Cruise Control” signals this change, as the duo turn their churning, rumbling noise into an almost hooky(!) melody, and introducing the positive feeling of release that characterizes the album
Track from LP/CS/CD “Snares Like a Haircut”, released January 26, 2018 on Drag City Records.
Rock and roll for the black hole – reimagined rippers, for the misfits that 2017 couldn’t kill to blast under the shadow of the big boot and beyond the glow of the chemical horizon. This is driving music, and you’re the designated shotgun rider
The Fat Angel Sings 