Photo by Grace Bader Conrad 

We need more bands to be doing what Lifeguard are doing, please. This past year, the Chicago trio delivered on the early promise of their first coupling of EPs, Crowd Can Talk and Dressed in Trenches, with their standout debut full-length, Ripped and Torn, which heard bassist and vocalist Asher Case, guitarist and vocalist Kai Slater, and drummer Isaac Lowenstein cementing their position as a fresh face in unbridled art-punk that really made you believe that the future of underground rock — alongside their scene peers Horsegirl, those fowl bros from NYC Geese, and everything that their own is doing with Sharp Pins — is in very good hands when it understands how the groundbreakers before made their marks by learning lessons from the past while reinventing its wheels steering into the future. It’s been a story of young artists going with their guts and paying no mind to trend, and coming out better off for it.

For Lifeguard, that means not hitting pause to plot out another proper album cycle, as their momentum pours over into next year when they release a very ambiguously-defined maxi-single that touts 13 songs in 11 minutes. They recorded it in their new Stulogulo — a space they’ve built complete with an 8-track machine and “the aid of the Dub soldiers, dirty mixing pots and Echoplexes” — and if it sounds like a recipe to show off some creative chaos, then you’d be on the mark with that upon hearing its first preview “Ultra Violence”. The listen doesn’t simmer on the fiery punk spurting throughout Ripped and Torn. If anything, they allow the flames to fan out in asymmetrical patterns while sneaking melodic builds into whatever space isn’t already consumed. An intent to blaze their own trail is to be assumed at this point…

Lifeguard’s “Ultra Violence” / “Appetite” maxi single will be released April 3rd on Matador Records.