Milan-based noise-rockers The Gluts have just announced their highly-anticipated third full-length Dengue Fever Hypnotic Trip, due 12 April on London’s Fuzz Club Records, and shared the first taste of the album. Inspired by bassist Claudia Cesana’s recent encounter with two tropical diseases at once after a trip to Africa, it’s perhaps no surprise that the record is an intense, claustrophobic listen: “Dengue Fever Hypnotic Trip is a trip. Dengue fever, together with malaria, is what Claudia actually experienced. It’s like a fuzz that punches you square in your face in an overloaded hypnotic way, and we wanted to show that in the music,” the band explain.
To announce the release, the Italian four-piece are sharing a surreal video for the opening track ‘E. The Real Punk Rocker’ that, in keeping with the trip-inclined theme of the album, sees the protagonist (aka Nicolò, the band’s frontman) lick a psychoactive frog, only to wake up in Claudia’s body and have quite the night unfold. Talking about the video, they recall: “Our rehearsal room is outside the city, you can just find fields, prostitutes and frogs. One night we tried to make a trip of licking one of the frogs and that’s basically what gave us the idea for this. We thought about what it would be like to wake up in a body which is not your own, thanks to the ‘magic frog effect’. We liked the idea of making it in a funny way so it was natural that the four of us had to be the leading actors in the video.”
The track opens with a distorted, live take on their infamous offering ‘That’s Me’, before the chaos on the video is met by that of the noise. The powerful combinations of fuzzed out guitars with motorik beats that follows combines madness with precision in a way that they have become masters of. Its a strong indicator of whats to come that fans will love but will equally draw the curious closer…
