Clamm Announce Fourth Album, Share New Single 'Rats'
Ahead of their approaching European tour, Naarm's art-avant-punk trio CLAMM have announced their fourth full-length album, And In Glue, arriving Friday 16 October via Poison City Records, alongside the new single 'Rats'. Album pre-orders are available now via Poison City's e-store and Bandcamp'.
New song 'Rats' marks a step into a fresh musical dimension for the band. While recently released single 'The Licensing' may have felt like familiar sonic territory for longtime listeners, 'Rats' signals a broader exploration of the sounds found on the album. Here, destroyed synth loops sit beneath hooky basslines, while sparse, erratic guitar hums like a barge and stabs sharply. Yet amidst it all, 'Rats' almost feels like a dance track.
To CLAMM frontperson Jack Summers, the single's central theme is maintaining a strong sense of anti-authoritarianism in the face of power.
"I find it really frustrating when power is abused for the sake of it", Summers says. "The song is about not wanting to stop, or not wanting to be told to stop."
CLAMM's fourth album And In Glue is a work preoccupied with friction, alienation and the strange absurdities of contemporary life.
Written and recorded over the course of a year by Jack Summers, Miles Harding and Stella Rennex, co-produced by Julian Angelatos and Summers, mixed by prolific engineer Seth Manchester and mastered by Mikey Young, And In Glue is a record filled with jagged post-punk, industrial abrasion, noise-rock dissonance and moments of unexpected restraint.
All the while, the album maintains the urgency, intensity and incisive social commentary that have become a CLAMM hallmark.
For the new album, the band adopted a different approach to writing, working weekly from a studio at Brunswick's Irene Warehouse across 12 months rather than tracking demos in rehearsal rooms and hiring a studio for a limited number of days.
In fact, the album recordings began as what the band believed were demo sessions in March 2024, only becoming the final product when Summers listened back to one of the tracks and asked, "Why is this a demo?"
Upon realising they were onto something, the band shifted their approach, recognising it might not only be possible to continue down this path, but necessary.
"I was learning how to use Logic as I went," Summers shares. "Tom Keyte runs the room we were recording in and has a default kind of mic setup that just stays on the drums. Because of this we already had such a solid base with the drum sound in combination with Miles' clinical drumming.
"It really allowed us to add and add and add. We got to consider every decision we made and what was best for each song. That was new for us. Looking at things with that level of intensity felt pivotal."
Upon realising something special was happening with the recordings, the band crossed paths with local producer/engineer Julian Angelatos, who brought a passionate perspective and, as Summers puts it, "a digital mop and scrubber" to clean up the work the band had done while helping guide the remainder of the recording process.
This led to the involvement of multiple musicians across the album, arduous late nights and overdub sessions at Rolling Stock Recording Rooms, before the band continued their work with US engineer Seth Manchester, who mixed the record.
After sitting in with Mikey Young, the band felt they had made their most daring and complete record yet, with more considered production, a bigger sound and a much wider range.
While the themes of the record remain much the same, the lyricism on this fourth full-length carries a newfound nuance and tenderness, reflected in both the production and vocal performances.
"I wanted to hide less behind effects and behind some of the directness of my vocal parts in the past," Summers says. He may be referring to tracks such as 'Wait', where a close mic captures softly spoken words before a hard-hitting chorus. 'Wait, Release' follows, featuring violin, and at times it almost sounds as if the singer is reading a poem. Similar moments can be found across tracks such as 'Swept Up', 'Vibrancy', 'No Ritual' and 'So Many Dogs', where restraint in the vocals adds an eerie, buzzing tension to otherwise mostly chaotic songs.
"We've done three records and I'm shouting and angry on all of them," he says.
"I've said it before, but I think we're always going to be a political band and there's always going to be anger because things around us are continuing to get worse, but on this record I felt like directing some of the messaging in a different way.
I'm still shouting most of the time."
CLAMM
And In Glue
Friday 16 October
Poison City Records
New song 'Rats' marks a step into a fresh musical dimension for the band. While recently released single 'The Licensing' may have felt like familiar sonic territory for longtime listeners, 'Rats' signals a broader exploration of the sounds found on the album. Here, destroyed synth loops sit beneath hooky basslines, while sparse, erratic guitar hums like a barge and stabs sharply. Yet amidst it all, 'Rats' almost feels like a dance track.
To CLAMM frontperson Jack Summers, the single's central theme is maintaining a strong sense of anti-authoritarianism in the face of power.
"I find it really frustrating when power is abused for the sake of it", Summers says. "The song is about not wanting to stop, or not wanting to be told to stop."
CLAMM's fourth album And In Glue is a work preoccupied with friction, alienation and the strange absurdities of contemporary life.
Written and recorded over the course of a year by Jack Summers, Miles Harding and Stella Rennex, co-produced by Julian Angelatos and Summers, mixed by prolific engineer Seth Manchester and mastered by Mikey Young, And In Glue is a record filled with jagged post-punk, industrial abrasion, noise-rock dissonance and moments of unexpected restraint.
All the while, the album maintains the urgency, intensity and incisive social commentary that have become a CLAMM hallmark.
For the new album, the band adopted a different approach to writing, working weekly from a studio at Brunswick's Irene Warehouse across 12 months rather than tracking demos in rehearsal rooms and hiring a studio for a limited number of days.
In fact, the album recordings began as what the band believed were demo sessions in March 2024, only becoming the final product when Summers listened back to one of the tracks and asked, "Why is this a demo?"
Upon realising they were onto something, the band shifted their approach, recognising it might not only be possible to continue down this path, but necessary.
"I was learning how to use Logic as I went," Summers shares. "Tom Keyte runs the room we were recording in and has a default kind of mic setup that just stays on the drums. Because of this we already had such a solid base with the drum sound in combination with Miles' clinical drumming.
"It really allowed us to add and add and add. We got to consider every decision we made and what was best for each song. That was new for us. Looking at things with that level of intensity felt pivotal."
Upon realising something special was happening with the recordings, the band crossed paths with local producer/engineer Julian Angelatos, who brought a passionate perspective and, as Summers puts it, "a digital mop and scrubber" to clean up the work the band had done while helping guide the remainder of the recording process.
This led to the involvement of multiple musicians across the album, arduous late nights and overdub sessions at Rolling Stock Recording Rooms, before the band continued their work with US engineer Seth Manchester, who mixed the record.
After sitting in with Mikey Young, the band felt they had made their most daring and complete record yet, with more considered production, a bigger sound and a much wider range.
While the themes of the record remain much the same, the lyricism on this fourth full-length carries a newfound nuance and tenderness, reflected in both the production and vocal performances.
"I wanted to hide less behind effects and behind some of the directness of my vocal parts in the past," Summers says. He may be referring to tracks such as 'Wait', where a close mic captures softly spoken words before a hard-hitting chorus. 'Wait, Release' follows, featuring violin, and at times it almost sounds as if the singer is reading a poem. Similar moments can be found across tracks such as 'Swept Up', 'Vibrancy', 'No Ritual' and 'So Many Dogs', where restraint in the vocals adds an eerie, buzzing tension to otherwise mostly chaotic songs.
"We've done three records and I'm shouting and angry on all of them," he says.
"I've said it before, but I think we're always going to be a political band and there's always going to be anger because things around us are continuing to get worse, but on this record I felt like directing some of the messaging in a different way.
I'm still shouting most of the time."
CLAMM
And In Glue
Friday 16 October
Poison City Records
- Swept Up
- Wait
- Wait, Release
- The Licensing
- Butter Bread
- No Ritual
- Rats
- Vibrancy
- Violent Streak
- Pain, Shame
- So Man
Photo credit: Oscar O'Shea
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