Los Angeles’ Starcrawler formed in 2015, and since that time have gone from bashing out songs in the garage to earning legendary fans such as Shirley Manson and Elton John, and to supporting the likes of Beck, Foo Fighters, Spoon, The Distillers, MC5 and more.
They have announced their remarkable second album Devour You – out 11 October via Rough Trade – a record that dynamically captures the essence and aggression of their gloriously unhinged live shows. Produced by Nick Launay (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, L7) at Sunset Studios, Devour You takes the feral intensity of their 2018 self-titled debut and twists it into something grander and more gracefully composed. With its more elaborate and nuanced yet harder-hitting sonic palette, the result is a selection of songs radiating both raw sensitivity and untamable power, and a record that the band’s Arrow de Wilde says, “encapsulates all the blood, sweat, bruised knees, and broken fingers of a Starcrawler show.”
To kick off the album announcement, Starcrawler share the heavy, swinging and brutally catchy ‘Bet My Brains’ alongside its manic and murderous music video. “That song came from thinking about the tunnel people in New York and Vegas and the Catacombs in France, and the underground village of people who live in the sewers of the L.A. River,” says de Wilde. “I was fascinated with the fact that there is a whole other world happening right under our feet.”
Guitarist and vocalist Henri Cash adds: “Arrow and I hadn’t even talked about it yet, but I’d already written something about the same thing—about how these people’s eyes adapt to pitch-blackness, and they end up going crazy from never seeing the sunlight.”
Devour You is out 11 October. Preorder it here.
