Tropical Fuck Storm - Deep States

Deep States is the third studio album by Australian rock band Tropical Fuck Storm, released in August 2021 via TFS Records and Joyful Noise Recordings.

Tropical Fuck Storm are a rock band formed in 2017 by Gareth Liddiard (guitar, vocals) and Fiona Kitschin (bass, vocals) after their previous band The Drones went into hiatus at the end of 2016. They recruited Erica Dunn (guitars, keyboards, vocals) and Lauren Hammel (drums) to work on new material that they had been developing. Their debut album A Laughing Death In Meatspace was released in 2018 to positive reviews, reaching #25 on the Australian Albums charts. Their follow-up Braindrops (2019) also received very positive reviews and climbed to #10 on the Australian ARIA albums charts, also featuring in many end of year top album lists in Australia and overseas.

Most of us have lived some inner Tropical Fuck Storm over this past year and a half. Gareth Liddiard, frontman for the Aussie band with a name perfectly suited to the times, was like the rest of us in feeling the malaise.

On not writing any new songs for the first six months of the global shutdown, he says, “Why would I? Everything seemed pointless.” Even for a band that’s made a career out of crafting songs attuned to political and social crisis, there was a new bleak in the air, what the band calls “give-a- fuck fatigue.”

A Laughing Death in Meatspace and Braindrops, Tropical Fuck Storm’s 2018 and 2019 records, probed the destructive force of consumerist culture, the imperialistic reaches of the United States, the threat posed by a warming planet. The band wedded a brave new worldview to an ever lively acid punk sound. Which made you sometimes despair. While still wanting to dance.

Deep States mines familiar ground as well as new cultural terrains, while digging deeper into the subjective state of contemporary panic. Over the last five years, you didn’t have to be conspiratorial to see the conspiracies everywhere you turned; and Liddiard, Fiona Kitschin, Erica Dunn, and Lauren Hummel, the Tropical Fuck Storm collective, know how to make friends with the strange.

They invite our paranoia and fatigue. “It’s a permanent state,” Liddiard sings, “war made the State, the State made war, what’s the point of worrying ’bout it anymore?”

The band chronicles weird adventures in statecraft and surveillance, ponders the global infatuation with resurgent fascisms. Tropical Fuck Storm shines an incandescent light on a world in which corporate media, bad-faith leaders, and charismatics of all stripes lose the ability to recognize their own deceptiveness.

This album is an Australian exclusive on red coloured vinyl with a printed inner sleeve and download code, pressed in Australia via TFS and Joyful Noise.