Experimental psych-rock legends Butthole Surfers will return to the studio to record their ninth album and first in 16 years — news that broke last week at, of all places, a meeting of the Austin, Texas, City Council’s music advisory commission, according to the Austin Chronicle.
According to the paper’s Playback column, engineer/producer Stuart Sullivan, a new appointee to the Austin Music Commission, “gave a cursory rundown of his résumé when he off-handedly mentioned he was about to record with his longtime muses the Butthole Surfers.”
The Chronicle was able to confirm this with guitarist/co-founder Paul Leary.
The band’s last album, Weird Revolution, was released in 2001; it was largely a re-recording of an aborted record from 1998 that was to have been called After the Astronaut. Since then, the band has toured sporadically with various lineups, including a 2009 trek that saw Jeff Pinkus and Teresa Taylor rejoin Leary, Gibby Haynes and King Coffey for the first time since 1989.
The Butthole Surfers — with a lineup featuring Haynes, Leary, Coffey and Pinkus — last performed at the Day For Night Festival in Houston in December. The band had been scheduled to play at the Safe As Milk Festival in the U.K. in April, but that event was canceled over low ticket sales.
In an interview this past March with The Quietus about the 30th anniversary of Locust Abortion Technician, Leary raised the possibility of a new Butthole Surfers record:
“We’ve all been busy with our own separate things, and I’ve done a lot of producing in the past few years, and I’ve got to the point now where I feel like I’ve done doing that for a while, so it’s time to make a new Butthole Surfers album. Especially now that Trump is president, jeez! If there was ever a time for a Butthole Surfers album it’s fucking now. It just doesn’t get any weirder than that.”
Below, see footage of the Butthole Surfers at Day For Night Festival late last year.
PREVIOUSLY ON SLICING UP EYEBALLS
- Publisher launches Kickstarter to get Butthole Surfers bio ‘Scatological Alchemy’ into print
- Butthole Surfers’ ‘Independent Worm Saloon’ to receive 180-gram vinyl reissue
- Butthole Surfers to reissue 4 out-of-print Touch and Go albums on vinyl this fall
- Stream: Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes teams with Jack White for 7-inch
- Butthole Surfers’ reunited ’80s lineup heads out on North American tour this fall
