At the start of 2020, Anders Manga was about to head out on tour for his darkwave side-project when COVID-19 hit. Soon locked in their house under local stay-at-home orders, Manga and his bride and bandmate, Devallia, spent time jamming in their basement and revisiting some of their classic punk favorites. Holed up and barred from the uncertainty of the world, BLOODY HAMMERS conjured 11 new raw-power tracks inspired by that sound, and now they’re unearthed… from the grave! Anders Manga says about the album: “When the pandemic hit and I realized I’d be stuck at home for a while, I started thinking I needed to dig into a music project. I was oddly inspired by the unknown, and fear that this plague was gonna wipe us all out. I needed a creative escape. We’d just released the BLOODY HAMMERS album, ‘The Summoning’ a few months earlier, so I didn’t think about doing another Hammers album at all. When COVID was really hitting NYC hard, that got me thinking about my favorite bands from that whole NY/NJ area… Misfits, Wendy O. Williams, Ramones, Dead Boys, The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, Twisted Sister and such. That’s where I found inspiration to do a horror punk-ish record. I sent a few songs to my label, Napalm Records, mentioning that I’d done some horror punk-ish inspired stuff and wanted to release them digitally under some new band name I’d yet to think up. They loved the songs, felt they’d still fit under the BLOODY HAMMERS name, and I figured, ‘Well… cool, I guess our listeners are used to us being a bit genre-fluid by now, so yeah… let’s do it!’ For me, writing Songs of Unspeakable Terror was escapism from the real-life horrors of 2020. At no point did I get too serious in subject matter, my goal was to make a party record for the apocalypse and that’s what I think we got.” |
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