NEWS: Boss Hog Release New Track + Expand Tour Dates + Album Out 3/24

March 09, 2017 • Leave a Comment

New York City’s Boss Hog have released the track “Ground Control.” The track appears on their first studio album in 17 years, Brood X, due for release this March 24th via In The Red Records. Listen and share “Ground Control” here.

Boss Hog has announced expanded US tour dates including Detroit, Pittsburgh and more. The NYC record release show is March 30 at Mercury Lounge. Watch + share the tour trailer here.

Led by Cristina Martinez (ably assisted by her faithful sideman/husband Jon Spencer, as ever playing Flavor Flav to Cristina’s Chuck D), Brood X feels less like the work of a group who’ve been on ice for so long, more a slithering and sludgy monster of an album, a boiling pot of hot funk keys, growling punk attack, searing blues breaks and the ground-shaking holler of Martinez.

On hiatus since they finished promoting 2000’s icy, wonderful ‘Whiteout’ album, Boss Hog began stirring again late in 2008 with the first of several short runs of shows. “We’d play a handful of shows, once a year,” Martinez remembers. “Festivals, the Amphetamine Reptile 25th Anniversary party, some benefit shows.” Things started getting serious a couple of years later, when the Boss Hog all-stars – Martinez, Spencer, bassist Jen Jurgensen, drummer Hollis Queens and keysman Mickey Finn – decided this reunion habit was worth committing to wax.

Cooked up in the same Lower East Side basement where Boss Hog brewed their first blistering noiseouts, and cut at Michigan’s Key Club Recording Company on the same Flickinger N32 Matrix console Sly Stone used for There’s A Riot Goin’ On, ‘Brood X’ is serious music for serious times, the perfect soundtrack for a necessary revolution.

The 17-year cicadas have re-awoken, and not a moment too soon. New York has changed beyond recognition and there’s a buffoonish villain entering the White House, but Martinez’s towering vocals and vicious, hilarious, emboldening lyrics have never sounded so sharp, nor Boss Hog so timely. Opener ‘Billy’, all brawny low-end and delirious funk organ, finds Cristina and Jon howling about “The brink of destruction!” over apocalyptic beats, while Ground Control, a prismatic vision of today’s Big Apple, includes the bitter observation, “This is the cost of privilege”.

“A lot of Cristina’s lyrics on this album resonate with me more deeply since the election,” nods Spencer. “They’re blues songs, protest songs.”

“The songs do feel oddly relevant now,” Cristina adds.

The Boss Hog All Stars: