Believe it or not, there was once a brief period when John Dwyer’s musical output was entirely relegated to one statically titled outlet. After cutting his teeth in bands like Coachwhips, Pink & Brown, and The Hospitals in the 2000s, it was Thee Oh Sees that propelled Dwyer to his initial stardom beyond the West Coast’s local garage rock scene; yet after those other lo-fi punk projects fell by the wayside, Dwyer eventually got the itch to go solo in 2014 with his debut album of minimalist psychedelic synth music and touches of krautrock that would soon find their way into the Oh Sees formula. As that moniker became far more nebulous, and as Dwyer began jamming with a revolving cast of jazz heads, it seems that Damaged Bug began getting pushed to the backburner.
Tomorrow sees the release of the project’s fifth album and first in nearly six years. Titled ZUZAX, it’s a familiarly disorienting trip through tight post-punk rhythms and squirrely synth bleeps. The project lands in the midst of Dwyer’s discography finding new life on his newly forged Deathgod label, which even recently reissued a considerable chunk of his discography spanning several projects via a single massive cassette box. Clearly in a retrospective mindset, it makes sense that ZUZAX would be an equally ambitious reconsideration of nearly a decade’s worth of unreleased work. As Dwyer shared, over 40 Damaged Bug demos were considered in the project’s inception.
“I just kept having other things going on and life kept getting in the way,” the songwriter shared of the release’s unusually long gestation period. “And frankly, the songs were all over the place so I didn’t see a thread in there. But in light of current events in the world, I feel like it’s every artist’s calling to construct personal messages cloaked in moments of escapism. That’s what this record is for me—something to clear the decks a little bit in my studio, relax my mind, and keep the wolf from the door. It’s a bit of a joyous/sad record dealing with hope and forgiveness, two things which I hope end up more in my life.”
Ahead of the album’s release tomorrow, hear an early stream of the full project below.
