Next Wave #576: God Damn

Feral garage rock two-piece...

God Damn those guitars are loud. And God DAMN those vocals pierce thru yr skull. And GOD DAMN those drums seem to shatter your chest, turning your innards into goo.

Just… God Damn. A walking, talking, spitting and bleeding assault on the senses, the two-piece erupted into 2014 with their fizzing, scorching live show. Stripping rock music down to its bare essentials, the group have already scorched a trail across the country’s rather more intimate establishments.

“All the songwriting comes from playing in a room together and vibing off each other, bouncing off each other quite a lot,” explains guitarist/vocalist Thom Edward. “The way I work as a songwriter, I just wouldn’t get anything done if I wasn’t in a room with Ash (Weaver, drums). But when we go and record we like it to be a studio recording, a studio album. We’re very much about the studio / live divide.”

Snapped up by One Little Indian, God Damn’s new single ‘Shoe Prints In The Dust’ is as concise and exhilarating a piece of garage punk as you’re likely to hear this year. Produced by Liam Watson at Toe Rag Studios – “literally, from the second you walk in, everything is vintage” – the pair is careful not to define themselves as a garage rock phenomenon.

“We don’t want to pigeonhole ourselves as being this garage rock band,” states Ash. “We want to have that spread. A lot of bands want to be purists for the sake of being purists, whereas we want to go and do other things”.

Recording their debut album in an underground bunker – “a very nice underground bunker, it was really posh!” – God Damn enjoyed the intensity of the studio experience. “We went into album camp, really,” jokes Thom. “We’ve busted a ball. We were there at eight o’clock in the morning til eight, 12 o’clock at night. We did that day after day.”

The results are almost upon us. A riveting live spectacle, God Damn’s studio experiments reveal the layers in their songwriting, the duo’s ability to place melody against feral aggression. “I like to think we write pop songs,” the vocalist continues. “Pop songs with noise pedals and big riffs, really. We listen to more pop music than we do heavy music.”

Says Thom: “I think the album is going to be more of a rock album. I know rock is a bit of a bad word, really. Not to say that we’re going to turn into f*cking Creed or anything on the record. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s a rock album.”

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WHERE: The Midlands

WHAT: Pure, unadulterated rock music

GET 3 SONGS: 'Shoe Prints In The Dust', 'It's A Pity', 'Heavy Money'

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God Damn online

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