Primal Scream

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Primal Scream spent the best part of their 34-year career in a haze of class A drugs and alcohol, while somehow managing to produce quality records. So how does a band like this fare when mind-altering substances are removed from the equation? They fare pretty well actually, maybe even better than before. “We [still] like making druggy-sounding, psychedelic music,” explained frontman Bobby Gillespie in an interview with The Telegraph. “It’s just that since we stopped taking drugs we got better at it.” Now nine years clean, the band have released their 11th album, Chaosmosis (2016), with vocal cameos from Sky Ferreira and HAIM. The title was taken from a book by French philosopher Félix Guattari that focuses on subjectivity and how we are conditioned by what surrounds us. More introspective in its lyrical content and slightly ruminative in nature, the experimentalism and creativity that defines Primal Scream lives on in this album. Although the quality of Chaosmosis is indisputable, it can’t hold a candle to their epic album Screamadelica (1991), which launched them into rock and roll fame in the early Nineties and still rings true for new generations of music lovers. But at 54, Gillespie’s swagger is still going strong along with his unquestionable ability to make a solid, hypnotising album with or without narcotics.

More information here.