Kal Marks announce new album

Kal Marks have announced details of the follow-up to their excellent 2022 release, My Name Is Hell.

Wasteland Baby will be released on September 13 via Exploding in Sound. Today the band share the video for lead track, Insects, which you can watch/listen to below.

Renown for exploring and exposing blunt, uncomfortable truths, with Wasteland Baby vocalist/guitarist Carl Shane has taken a different approach. “The album was driven by the fears I’m having about being a father. The initial spark was this fear, and I thought that maybe if I could express it, I could overcome it,” he says, per the press release notes.

“We really had to be more thoughtful if we really wanted to make a more mature, cohesive record,” says Shane, who is joined by bassist/vocalist John Russell, drummer Adam Berkowitz and guitarist-vocalist Christina Puerto. “We were really all on the same page in that we wanted to make something really, really special and that was going to require us putting a lot of ego aside and just trying to serve the songs as best as possible.”

Speaking of the writing process of Wasteland Baby, Shane explains. “We got kind of pigeonholed into the noise-rock thing, and I think we wanted to depart from that. Sure, we’re noisy, and we like the Jesus Lizard and Fugazi, but a lot of that doesn’t feel that imaginative to us at this point. I also listen to a lot of Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan and Silver Jews, and we listen to a lot of funk and soul, and we wanted to not shy away from showing those sides of ourselves.

He continues.

“I would storyboard everything and find common threads in the words. I always kept notebooks on me to write lyrics, notes on the production, and just my overall feelings. Some days were really fruitful, some were filled with writer’s block and sleepless nights. Some of the songs I kind of hallucinated. I don’t know how to fully explain it, but it felt surreal. At times I even felt I was losing my mind and hearing voices.”

Sea Change: In Conversation with Kal Marks’ Carl Shane

Offering comment on the lead single, Shane says, “Insects was an excruciating song to get right. We were listening to a lot more danceable music at the time. Anything from Depeche Mode, Giorgio Moroder, Rhythm Nation by Janet Jackson, Cerone and DAF. We wanted to make something danceable and poppy but have it make sense in our world. We also loved the duality a lot of this music had with dark lyrical themes with upbeat propulsive rhythms. It’s a grim tune to tap your feet to. A lot of frustration in it.”

The video, directed by William Hart, is a “David vs Goliath song, but unfortunately I think Goliath wins,” according to Shane.

Hart also explains the ideas behind the video. “I listened to the song probably 420 times while walking my dog and then I would come home and would put on The X Files and then some old reruns of Cops,” he says. “I have this hatred for authority and oppression that the lyrics easily brought out of me. My friend Alex Purifoy listened to me ramble about an idea and helped give me some ideas which turned into this 12 Monkeys/ Delicatessen/ industrial surreal monster chase scene. There was originally a whole bank heist and car chase story we scaled back but the characters exist in a world under a bridge in a polluted terrorzone.”