Oneida

A noisy unshackled ruckus but what else would you expect from these lifers with a penchant for gunning it? And that's just what they do here but with a solid smattering of the melodies that made 'Success' such a fist pumper.

Get it on! The music on Oneida’s 17th full-length album all started as tightly structured, melodic rock songs - very much in line with the non-stop bangers of 'Success', from 2022 - but, along the way, they changed. Bobby Matador sketched the structures of these songs from his home base in Boston, then sent the demos to Oneida’s New York contingent: Kid Millions, Hanoi Jane, Shahin Motia and Barry London. “We were working out the songs in New York without Bobby. We would start out riding the riffs, and then Shahin and Jane would add wild, out-of-tune licks,” said Kid Millions. “It seemed so perfect.” Oneida has long straddled gray-area boundaries between the NYC punk/psych/rock world and the art / experimental world, playing at gritty rock clubs and elevated cultural institutions. Oneida’s previous album, 'Success', came after a four-year hiatus, unleashing the band’s pent up creative energy in a set of catchy, accessible, nearly poppy songs. Song structure remained important in the run up towards Expensive Air, but so was the instinctual, improvisatory interplay that has always been a part of Oneida’s process. The band had been playing live together for two years, sharpening its attack and pushing its songs to go harder, faster and wilder.

This album expands on what Oneida achieved with 'Success', but also pushes past it, laying down irresistible song structures then blowing them to psychedelic bits. “I found myself thinking about this record as a darker, looser, louder, counterpart to 'Success',” he explains. “Both records charge forward from the jump and mix the elliptical with the blunt, and longing with self-mockery. But Success is like laughing in a car gunning carelessly through an ice storm, and Expensive Air is how you laugh at yourself as the car spins into the ditch, or a tree. Same trip, but a little closer to the bone.”

RIYL: The Fall, Dead Kennedys, Dinosaur Jr., The Damned, The Cure, Wire, Peaking Lights, The Clean, ZZ Top, Gene Clark, The Ramones, Sun Ra, Martin Rev, Allen Ravenstine, Horse Lords, Liars, CAN, NEU!, Pram, Minami Deutsch, ESG, Acid Mothers Temple, Erase Errata