I’m excited to announce that a new Dirty Knobs album is on the way, releasing this Halloween. SCORCHER is something of a return to the early days of DK, back when it was more of an experimental glitch project. While I often try to obfuscate the equipment and raw sounds used to make songs, here I am keeping more of those elements clear and obvious with a focus on percussion and rhythm while still encasing it in a dark shroud of mystery and darkness and dark mystery.

I will be adding more preview tracks over the following weeks up until it releases on October 31st, so keep your dial tuned to the album page.

I hope you enjoy SCORCHER. I’ve put a tremendous amount of effort into it and I am very happy with the result. It sounds really good played very loud in a big room.

Here is a look into what I was thinking about while recording it:

Darkened ratways under the city’s megastructure pulse with a rolling, undulating rhythm. A dry scraping sound tumbles down howling shafts, racing against the falling condensation and pigeon shit. Shafts of pure white light catch drifts of dirt, dandruff, and fleas. A sub-harmonic pressure silently shakes tons of metal conduit, flaking off rust and paint in an abrasive red mist. Moss and slime house busy ecologies, living and dying and living again without any sense of history.

Fast shadows move like boiling oil against a glacial mass of decaying support struts. Cracks open, firing shrapnel across miles of emptiness. Eyeless heads turn vaguely toward the sound.

The city groans under its own weight, shifting, listing, settling onto waves of its past. Superheated jets of grime spray against concrete walls, eroding strange and shifting glyphs into the surface. The story they record is one of endings and obsoletion.

The album art was inspired by the mosaic image here, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope looking back at the sun:

Good luck out there,

-Zac

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