UPCHUCK – Sense Yourself (2024 Segall Mix) – LP – Blood Splatter Vinyl

LP – Limited Edition Blood Splatter Vinyl.

Upchuck are experiencing a moment. The Atlanta punk collective just came off multiple tour runs with their good friend Faye Webster. Their Ty Segall-produced second album Bite The Hand That Feeds, with all its buzzsaw guitars and high-speed rippers and headbanging sludge, arrived in October. Later this year, theyll make appearances at multiple festivals including Coachella. In the midst of relentlessly barreling ahead, the band and their label Famous Class are taking a beat to revisit how they got here.

After working with Segall on Bite the Hand That Feeds, the band floated the notion that they wished they could hear what their collaborator could do with the songs on their 2022 debut album Sense Yourself. Holed up in his studio over Christmas with COVID and nothing else to do, Ty Segall began toying with Sense Yourself, sifting through folders of unlabeled stems to find the best guitar parts, emboldening the drum sound, and bringing greater clarity to KTs vocals, all while bolstering the urgency of the bands overall attack. With Segalls new mix, Upchucks intense and righteous debut now impossibly overflows with even more fuzz and fury.

In Segall, they found a kindred spirit whose studio approach made sense for just how hard they wanted this music to hit. When we first went to record with Ty for Bite the Hand That Feeds, Mikey and I walked into the guitar room and Ty said, Dont touch the EQs. We looked at the amp and everything was on 10 except the master volume, Hoff said. Previously, the band had been encouraged to capture the unvarnished sound of the studio. Theyd toured with Segalls band Fuzz, so everybody had the same goal while recording together: Capture the electricity of their intense live set.

The bands shows have a reputation for coming unglued, and theres no greater document of that than Sense Yourselfs iconic album artwork. With no text, its a candid photo of a moment from a show shot on film without editing: blood streaked across KTs face as they shout into the mic. In the middle of their EP release show, KT was in the pit as a fan started crowd surfing inside a shopping cart. A loose piece of metal near a wheel caught the singer right near the eyebrow and blood was everywhere, an instant piece of iconography snapped by probably every camera phone in the room.

When Hoff revisits the message of this first album and Upchucks first songs, he thinks back to the year before the band even started when he and KT were hanging out. We were sitting around talking for eight hours like fuck, that’s fucked up, that’s fucked up. Upchuck became a vehicle for these five people to process how fucked up everything it isto digest these formative hours-long conversations and put them to bludgeoning, intense rock music. The music is also fun as hell, and thats part of the point. There’s a lot we need to do as people and a lot of things we need to fix in society but also like come on man like have your fun, wild out, have your drink, KT says. But be on your shit at the same time. Check your folk.

Tracklist:

Side A
1. Upchuck
2. Sense Yourself
3. Wage For War
4. Facecard
5. Boss Up

Side B
1. Perdido
2. In The Wire
3. In Your Mind
4. Leech
5. Our Skin