We haven’t heard much from Russian Baths since they released their debut album Deepfake back in 2019—in fact the only item uploaded to their Bandcamp since then was an alternate take to that LP’s eerie opening track posted early last year. But this week the noise-rock duo is returning with a brand new 7-inch featuring two unheard singles, the first of which we’re debuting here today.
A-side “Done and Dead” feels far removed from both the uncomfortable open spaces of Deepfake and its less comfortable crescendos of blistering noise. Instead, it opens sounding like a Midwest emo standard before warping into a number of different, subtly surreal forms courtesy of a wide variety of collaborators, whose contributions were recorded remotely. “This song includes 14 instruments: guitar, piano, strings, Mellotron, pull them out of a hat,” the band shares before shouting out a handful of their collaborators—including Lo Moon drummer Sterling Law, who’s played with Kim Gordon and Olivia Rodrigo (“The internet is weird,” they add).
Speaking of “weird,” “Done and Dead” examines the out-of-body—or, rather, stuck-in-body—experience of sleep paralysis and the ways in which humans have dealt with it over time. “In the seventh century, the Byzantine physician Paulus Aegineta suggested bleeding, drastic purgatives, and friction of the extremities as cures for sleep paralysis,” the band notes. “As of 2014, you could pay $295 for an exorcism over Skype. I wonder if that’s gone up.”
Hear the A-side to the new project below, and pre-order the single here before it arrives this Friday via Good Eye Records.
