MENSA DEATHSQUAD to Release YOU WILL HEAR THUNDER April 12
MENSA DEATHSQUAD
Get Their Legs Back with New LP
YOU WILL HEAR THUNDER
Title Track Out TODAY
Listen HERE
“Composing and producing I can do 365 days-a-year, but the emotional work that songwriting requires is too taxing to stay in that space all the time,” explains Brandon Phillips of Darkwave electronic group Mensa Deathsquad. “When it’s time to write again, there is this excruciating period where you’re really just learning to walk again, and then one day – BOOM. You cast aside your crutches and walk under your own power. ‘You Will Hear Thunder’ was that song – the one where I finally got my legs back. I can still feel the fragility that’s just behind the veil of all that swagger and I definitely love that.”
Out TODAY “You Will Hear Thunder” is the latest single off the full-length album You Will Hear Thunder (Out April 12, 2022) following singles “Light,” “Riot of the Rebel Angels,” and “Chin Up, Eyes Wide Open.” Phillips, a longtime musician, songwriter, and member of bands The Gadjits, The Architects, and Other Americans, is storming into 2022 with a record of emotional honesty that can’t be bargained with or swept under the rug – it demands to be known and it demands your surrender.
You Will Hear Thunder is the third Mensa Deathsquad album following Cyclist and Patient Zero and finds Phillips turning his search inward looking for the raw, vulnerable places that tell us truths we can feel in our blood. Each track is smart, sexy, and thought-provoking – optimized for late hours, raised pulses and sweaty catharsis.
“I knew there was a record inside me, chewing its way out but I was 100% certain that I didn’t want to just jump back on my usual creative merry-go-round,” explains Phillips. “2021 had been too fucking hard. Something about my process had gone toxic and I could feel that toxicity spreading.”
Pivoting from that process on You Will Hear Thunder, Phillips teamed up with musician Barb Morrison (Antony and The Johnsons, Blondie, Deborah Harry) as his music mentor, working together to lay bare the passionate catharsis of his new writing direction.
“I basically handed them my entire creative life in a shoebox like, ‘Okay, what’s worth keeping and what has to go?’ Barb just fearlessly took that entire shoebox and all it’s trauma, anxiety and conflict in one hand, held my hand in the other and we just walked forward and kept walking forward until there was an album.”
Walking forward on his new found legs, You Will Hear Thunder sees Phillips then breaking into a full sprint through pulsing club kicks and throbbing waves of synthesizers, slamming headlong into jagged post-punk guitars and emotionally raw vocals about a desire so powerful that simply admitting its existence would set fire to heaven and earth.
“A thousand years ago when I stepped into a real studio for the very first time to make a record, Brett Gurewitz told me to make the record that was missing from my record collection. That is more or less, what’s happening on You Will Hear Thunder,” says Phillips. “All my favorite playlists tend to put Lady Gaga right into Jesus And Mary Chain right into Peaches, right into Depeche Mode. It‘s like I dumped crates of new wave and post-punk and electroclash singles into a hole in the ground and covered them with dirt and this is the weird tree that grew.”
The “You Will Hear Thunder” single by Mensa Deathsquad is out now on all DSPs. The You Will Hear Thunder LP will be out April 12, 2022.
1. The Body Only Dies
2. Light
3. Riot of the Rebel Angels
4. Hold Me Down
5. Rats
6. Men Like You
7. Chin Up, Eyes Wide Open
8. You Will Hear Thunder
9. For Real
10. Kill Somebody
11. Desperate Like Us
12. The Saddle
13. Secret
14. Men Like You Fosse Version
