
Swedish power duo Molosser Crude celebrates the new year with “Slave to the Voices,” a grunge-smelling Stoner Blues track that is first out of a string of singles leading up to an album in late Spring.
Stream the first single “Slave To The Voices” through the Spotify player below:
Purchase the single on bandcamp: https://molossercrude.bandcamp.com/track/slave-to-the-voices
Let’s try an experiment. We’ll sketch a musical map of the U.S., where we mark out four points: Palm Springs Desert in the Southwest, the Hill Country of Mississippi i the Southeast, New York City in the Northeast and Seattle i the Northwest. Now we try to calculate a point midway between these four. This is where some weird geometry must be at work, because we end up a few kilometers south of the village of Fjärås in Western Sweden. And there we find power duo Molosser Crude, with Tess on vocals and drums, and Jahn on guitar.
From the very start, Molosser Crude’s music has been firmly rooted in the Heavy riffs of Palm Springs Desert’s Stoner Rock (Kyuss, QOTSA) and the rough organic groove of Hill Country Blues (Junior Kimbrough, R.L. Burnside), with a chaotic ingredient inspired by the Noise Rock (Unsane) and Avant-Garde Jazz (John Coltrane, Albert Ayler) of New York City. With the move of house that the duo made last year from the dark woods of Småland towards the cold, rainy and windy region of port city Gothenburg, a dose of Seattle Grunge seems to have entered the mix in their new release, “Slave to the Voices.”
The new single, “Slave to the Voices,” is actually Molosser Crude’s first step away from the live-in-the-studio format that the duo has used in their previous releases – everything recorded live in one take, vocals included. Their new recording still builds on the same foundation, a one-take recording of drums and guitar (played through guitar amps and a bass amp simultaneously) to preserve the energy of the live performance. This time, though, Crude have allowed themselves the luxury of tracking the vocals separately and even making a couple of guitar overdubs. The result is a doomy concoction that erupts in powerful choruses intermingled with slow-cooking, Psychedelic interludes, leading up to a chaotic end to unload any excessive energy. The whole thing clocks in at close to eight minutes, but there are no dead points in this immaculately choreographed evolution. As the duo says: ”We can’t stop until we’re finished.”
2023 ended with a bang for Molosser Crude with the participation in Opeth singer David Isberg’s Doom New Year in Stockholm, but 2024 was a silent year with no gigs and no new releases. The reason was that Tess and Jahn had to relocate to the west coast from their long-time haunt at Molosser Farm in Uråsa, Småland, and this proved a very time-consuming task, with a small farm to make ready for sale and finding a new spot to live on for the household’s population of people and animals. With everything in flux, the time was not right for gigging or recording/releasing, but Molosser Crude kept up the rehearsing and song-writing, and the result is a fat batch of new songs. Some of these will be released as singles during this spring, culminating in the duo’s first album in May, but then there’s still material left for another album, soon to follow – and yet more new material will surely see the light of day during the year.
Molosser Crude’s first gig of the year will be on March 14th at the venerable Belsepub Club in Gothenburg, that has catered to a riff-loving audience ever since the ’90s.
The next single in line will be released in February – a punch-packing Stoner Rock piece called “Swallow the Sun.” Stay tuned!