Kingston, New York band Open Head is inspired by the sounds New York no-wave and the avant-garde history of punk, noise, hip-hop and electronic music. The quartet have played shows with Geese, Bodega, Stuck, Dummy, Show Me The Body, Habibi, Wand, Cola, Water From Your Eyes and YHWH Nailgun, along with an upcoming appearance at Basilica Soundscape, taking place this weekend in Hudsonn NY.

The band are today announcing their signing to Wharf Cat Records (Lily Konigsberg, Drop Nineteens) and sharing their first single for the label, a track called “Catacomb.”

“Catacomb” came together during an improv session in which Jared Ashdown (vocals, guitar) and Jonathan McCarthy (bass) swapped their respective guitars for processed sounds, trigger pads and a synth. The goal was to create something immediate and powerful, with sounds acting more like materials. Brandon Minnervini’s prepared guitar, sometimes bell-like and sometimes colossal, sits atop Daniel Schwartz’s drumming, inspired in part by Moroccan Rai rhythms, to create a compound dance logic, both entrenched and off-kilter. Reckoning with the nightmare of our crumbling worldview, robbed future, and mediated personality, the lyrics are loosely based on the book, ‘The Blind Owl’ by Sadegh Hedayat, which explores the connections between political oppression and personal depression. In the song we are carried and crushed, carried and crushed until finally we find ourselves with the image of a trickster god, who builds high-rises and concrete pools as effigies to himself all the while fading away.

order “Catacomb” by Open Head HERE