Daily Dose: Tropical Fuck Storm, “Paradise”

Daily Dose is your daily source for the song you absolutely, positively need to hear every day. Curated by the Paste Music Team.

Aussie psych-punk quartet Tropical Fuck Storm announced Braindrops, their new album due out Aug. 23, on Tuesday morning. Along with the news comes “Paradise,” the album’s sweeping opening track.

“Time is all it is / Still it disappears / So you need to tell me what’s true,” lead singer Gareth Liddiard growls early in “Paradise.” As he’s done in other songs with Tropical Fuck Storm or their forebear The Drones, Liddiard has a particular power to make the massive miniscule, immediately following those lines with the pained, “Do you think about me like I think about you? / Or is that impossible too?” In conjunction, those lines act as a poetic thesis statement for the song, weaponizing a fumbling relationship to interrogate larger concepts of human connection and transience over sprawling instrumentation.

Between the stream-of-consciousness lyrics and the punk-via-lounge sonics behind them, “Paradise” wouldn’t sound too out of place in the Twin Peaks roadhouse. The song starts syrupy and slowly, sludging through an emotional hangover with disquieting drums and barely there guitar lines. The anxious band turns that sheepishness into anger, disassembling the sound into discordant chaos and piecing itself back together several times over the song’s six-minute runtime.

On Braindrops, Liddiard says that he’s “invented fake news as a genre of music” in a statement. What exactly that means, we’re unsure, though a press release promises that the album “overflows with compelling sounds and visions that reflect the often dark and fractured reality of life on planet Earth as we hurtle toward environmental and social decay at a frighteningly rapid clip.” Sounds lovely—we can’t wait.

Braindrops will release on Aug. 23 via Joyful Noise. Listen to “Paradise” below, then revisit TFS’ 2018 Paste session as you browse their upcoming tour dates and check out all the details of their new album.

Braindrops Album Art:

Braindrops Tracklist:
01. Paradise
02. The Planet of Straw Men
03. Who’s My Eugene?
04. The Happiest Guy Around
05. Maria 62
06. Braindrops
07. Aspirin
08. Desert Sands of Venus
09. Maria 63

Tropical Fuck Storm Tour Dates:

August
28 – Los Angeles, Calif. @ Bootleg
29 – San Francisco, Calif. @ Bottom of the Hill
30 – Arcata, Calif. @ Richard’s Goat Tavern
31 – Portland, Ore. @ Mississippi Studios

September
01 – Vancouver, B.C. @ Static Jupiter
03 – Seattle, Wash. @ Barboza
06 – Washington, D.C. @ Comet Ping Pong
07 – Raleigh, N.C. @ Hopscotch Festival
08 – Atlanta, Ga. @ The Earl
10 – Austin, Texas @ Hotel Vegas
11 – Dallas, Texas @ Three Links
13 – St. Louis, Miss. @ Duck Room
14 – Chicago, Ill. @ Empty Bottle
15 – Cleveland, Ohio @ Now That’s Class
17 – Toronto, Ont. @ Baby G
18 – Montreal, Que. @ Le Ritz
19 – Boston, Mass. @ Great Scott
20 – Brooklyn, N.Y. @ Elsewhere

November
06 – Manchester, U.K. @ Soup Kitchen
07 – Brighton, U.K. @ The Hope and Ruin
08 – London, U.K. @ Islington Assembly Hall