Clowns to NL for two gigs this summer

Melbourne’s Clowns return with a new album, Lucid Again, a nine track fork in the road moment for the band as they evolve their punk sound into so much more. Bad Blood, the band’s 2015 album recorded in home town Cheltenham (where the band grew up) in a complex that houses a bakery, a cattery and a morgue, and right across the road from a cemetery was vastly different to this new beast. Whereas Bad Blood was predominantly a hardcore punk album with only a few tracks featuring the more ‘accessible’ Clowns material, the new record dives back into melody but also as they title suggests heads into more expansion, more psychedelia, more whirring guitars.

New members Hanny J on bass/vocals and Will Robinson on guitar add a new dimension, which propels their already extensive punk palette further afield. Press reacted  pleasantly surprised to Clowns new release - by the musicianship firstly, the raw power secondly and lastly by the way it transported one back in time to the sharpness of the early punk and alternative scene of the late 70’s and early 80’s. Whether by accident or by design, Clowns have channelled the rawness of that era but with a technical musical proficiency that mostly eluded such bands of that time. Cross that over with a mix of clean and hardcore vocal styles and a meld of psychedelia and fuzz-punk riffing – what we have here is a unique Australian band producing very unique works. Clearly Clowns could care less about sticking to the punk script with this work and their eclectic, genre-hopping approach has boldly produced a killer album that will have broad appeal across the usual demarcation lines of alternative Australian music.

With Lucid Again Clowns comes over to the Netherlands for two shows:
22/07: Koog aan de Zaan (NL) @ Haltpop
12/08: Utrecht (NL) @ dBs