Swedish collective Goat have announced a career-spanning compilation album, Headsoup, encapsulating non-album singles, b-sides, and other rarities. The record also features the first batch of new Goat music since their scintillating Let it Burn single – recorded towards the end of 2020: Queen of the Underground and Fill My Mouth, both illustrating the blazing musical progression that furthers their ascent; both psych palette-melding scorchers that surely represent Goat’s creative zenith (a mean feat considering the folk-psych outing of last full release Requiem)?
Recently released Queen of the Underground treats Goat’s characteristic buoyant rhythms to lashings of their ‘fuzzwah’ guitar – akin to that of Let it Burn yet with added excoriating psych vigour – atop the vocal’s searing, regal declaration, “I am the Queen of the Underground”. Crediting the track’s opalescent, shapeshifting veneer, Goat themselves beg the question: “Who says a rock band can’t play funk? Electric guitars can be just as sexy today as when Eddie Hazel funked the shit out of ‘em.”
Headsoup also comprises jazz-flute solos, pounding Afrobeat rhythms, ferocious desert blues, drifting Ethio-jazz and churning drones, and more; the kind of magnificent juxtaposition which brought them a clamouring desire from all corners of the globe, since their 2012 debut World Music bringing a similar multi-cultural, multi-genre diversity to psych-dom everywhere.
From these beginnings, Goat furrowed a truly unique lore enveloped in psych-scented smoke – anonymous members claimed to hail from the remote and cursed village of Korpilombo in northern Sweden, where inhabitants had for centuries been devoted to a form of voodoo introduced by a travelling witch doctor – which, alongside frenzied live shows with twin high priestess vocalists accompanied by the flexuous grooves of Goat’s instrumentalists, gave them unfathomable legend.
As World Music proposed with its boundless and visceral introduction to the band’s enshrouding mystery – continued in 2014’s darker, mesmeric Commune and the manifestation of their cosmic folk variant on 2016’s Requiem – the elusively pervasive enigma of Goat and their music makes them a legend like no other, a legend which Headsoup pushes further still.
Rocket Recordings release Headsoup on August 27th; pre-order the label’s exclusive version here, and the Norman Records or Rough Trade limited edition vinyl variants are also available. See the video for Queen of the Underground below, made by Teeth of the Sea’s Mike Bourne. Listen to the track’s full, 6-minute psych glory here.
