DISCO DOOM ANNOUNCE NEW ALBUM "MT. SURREAL" + SHARE "ROGUE WAVE"
Posted on July 12th, 2022
Disco Doom - the Switzerland-based band led by Anita Rufer and Gabriele De Mario - announce Mt. Surreal, their first new album in 8 years, out September 16th on Exploding in Sound. Today, they present its lead single/video, “Rogue Wave.” Mt. Surreal is brimming with frayed guitar, intricate rhythms, compelling vocals, and fidgety percussion. Its sprawling composition is one you can get lost in - a strange and peculiar journey that’ll wrap you up deep inside its intoxicating world, where lyrics leap out at odd moments, where a hook grabs just when the whole thing threatens to combust. Mt. Surreal offers an exhilarating ride, as well as an ambiguous look at society, touching upon themes of nostalgia and detachment in this strange new world we currently encounter.
Releasing music together for some twenty years, such longevity has earned Disco Doom a legendary status in Switzerland, as well as a reputation for making incredibly forward-thinking rock music. Since the release of 2014's Numerals, the Zurich-based band have toured with Built To Spill, The Breeders, Ovlov, Dinosaur Jr. and more, had their music featured in the end credits of HBO's Animals, and have released a critically acclaimed album under their J&L Defer alter-ego.
The pair began working on Mt. Surreal back in 2018, with the final version worked on from 2019 until late 2020. Though Disco Doom are indeed a four-piece – with Mario Kummer taking up drum duties during the recording of the album, and Mathias Vetter joining as their bass player in early 2021 – the recording was characterized by the work Rufer and De Mario concocted together, as a duo, making the very most of what lay around them, exploring what they could do with their guitars. Initially, Rufer and De Mario recorded with the band in a studio in France, but those sessions didn’t feel quite right and were scrapped, a learning experience which would eventually go on to shape the entire record. The band elaborates on their recording process: “During the recordings we had the idea that every instrument on the record should also be a part of creating the rhythm, and another theme we followed in these recordings was removing and simplifying. We work with a two-inch 16-Track machine and we have no automation on our mixing desk. These two characteristics strongly influence the way we work. We always decide right after the recording whether to keep a track or to overdub it, and when we mix a song it's always like a performance that never can be repeated identically.”
Today’s chugging “Rogue Wave” highlights the band’s more refined side, a tight sub-four-minute jam full of swirling guitars, warped vocals, and skittish percussion. Disco Doom elaborates: "We started the recordings for this album with 'Rogue Wave' and it was the last song we finished. It became the song that accompanied the whole process of creating this album. The song kept a lightness until the end, which is rather unusual for us. It tells about how hard it is sometimes to allow changes and how tempting they are at the same time."