Digital Garbage (Luminous Vinyl)

Brand new sealed  Album, Loser Edition coloured vinyl with digital download.

The Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition.

There are several readily available metrics that can help determine just how doomed our world truly is: increasing temperatures, rising ocean levels, species extinction rates, and so forth. But there is a less visible, arguably more accurate measure of gauging whether we’re flat out fucked: those moments when Mudhoney get political. While they’re never lacking in agitation and spite, the Seattle scuzz-punk pioneers tend to direct their ire at more, fish-in-a-barrel targets: posers, douchebags, themselves. But you know things in the world are really getting bad whenever Mudhoney remove tongue from cheek to deliver a grave diagnosis of a festering societal condition, be it the rise of evangelical extremism or neocon war pigs. And, in the never-ending shit show that is 2018, that latent impulse has been rudely re-awakened: Mudhoney’s latest album, Digital Garbage, feels less like a collection of songs than a news-saturated social-media feed filled with all the profane polemics of a 2 a.m. drunk-Tweet.

Earlier, this year, Mudhoney celebrated its 30th-anniversary by releasing LiE, a career-spanning live compilation that reified the timeless quality of their snot-nosed noise. Digital Garbage, on the other hand, is an album with no greater desire than to be dated as soon as possible—because that would at least be an encouraging sign that we’ve emerged from the world of shit in which this record is steeped. As the title suggests, Digital Garbage is Mudhoney’s comment on life in the internet age, though it’s most concerned with the insidious offline side effects of unfettered information dissemination. By Mudhoney standards, Digital Garbage’s relentless topicality practically makes it their first true concept album.

Mudhoney are hardly the only band fretting about the fate of humanity these days, but they are the only band with Mark Arm, whose sneering presence ensures that even the most woke proclamations will be in gloriously bad taste. Take the garage-rocker “Paranoid Core,” whose breathless stream of dog-whistled outrage—“Robots and aliens stealing jobs, they’re bringing drugs, they’ll rape your mom!/Beware the city’s dazzling lights where dykes are waiting to steal your wife!”—renders it a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” directed at InfoWars wackos. And as “Please Mr. Gunman” illustrates, dark days inevitably yield the blackest of humour, with Arm requesting that the titular shooter at least have the decency to mow him down “in church.” That may seem like an especially twisted way to commemorate the victims of Charleston; for Mudhoney, it’s a suitably absurd response to an absurd nation where even the most sacred public spaces aren’t safe from assault-rifle rampages.