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Wild Palms guitarist Sonic Hawkins is back with new album Muscle Beach Sonic Hawkins is the solo project from Darrell Hawkins of alt-rock outfit Wild Palms (One Little Indian Records). On his new solo LP Muscle Beach, Hawkins presents an album of raw, spiky anthems splitting the difference between shit-kicking punk and hooky electro-pop. Hailing from Rochester in the Medway area of Kent, Hawkins grew up watching local heroes such as Billy Childish and cites the area’s punk and 60’s garage revival as continuing influences alongside artists such as The Fall, Neu!, Velvet Underground and Iggy Pop. You can hear these influences spilling out of Christine. Same for the upcoming single Bubblegum, which in its title alone nods to Hawkins’ razor-sharp instinct for catchy, repetitive phrasing as a fundamental of popular music, however, overdriven it might be. Proving immediacy and simple melodic structures can still bite, his fuzz-laden power chords and crunching, metronomic drums are uncompromising and infectious in equal measure. Hawkins started developing the material for his solo project from the first guitar chords he learned, and some of the songs have been adapted from the earliest tracks he wrote with an old art school band. In pursuit of the thrill of his initial wide-eyed musical experiments, his guitars get laid down in spontaneous takes, side-stepping the temptation to refine the grit and grain out of the music. There’s room to breathe beyond the squall of distortion too. Hell To Your Door is a tender, charmingly unhinged acoustic track in which only Hawkins’ own voice gets pronounced electronic treatment, creating a ghostly foil to the stark honesty of his lead vocals. In Sonic Hawkins, art, pop culture and music feed into one another, influencing everything from the project’s name (inspired by a life-long fascination with Sonic The Hedgehog) to the lyrics, whether nodding to Stephen King novels or The Lemonheads. Muscle Beach will be out on all digital platforms and available as limited edition cassette tape on Nov 18th, 2022 Credits: Music and lyrics written and performed by Darrell Hawkins Produced by Matthew Herbert and Darrell Hawkins Mixed by Ben Hillier and Matthew Herbert Sonic Hawkins - Muscle Beach Accidental Records out 18.11.22 Digital Album / Ltd Cassette Tape Tracklist: 1. Bubblegum 2. Christine 3. You Were Seeing it 4. DD1 5. Hell To Your Door 6. Muscle Beach 7. Rola Cola 8. Hot Dog Breath 9. A229 10. Sukhumvit |
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