Melt Yourself Down

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain” - Roberto Bolaño, Last Evenings On Earth

Question: it’s the end of the world, how are you going to spend it?

Last Evenings On Earth is the apocalyptic second album by Melt Yourself Down, evangelical hawkers of DNA-rearranging post-punk exotica. Snatch your passport and let this hydra-headed serpent take you for a dizzying continent-hopping voyage around a globe spinning ever more rapidly off its axis. If MYD’s self-titled debut was a series of feverish nocturnal visions beamed from a sub-Saharan desert, where voodoo spirits were raised from dusty catacombs, then this is an even headier trip. Here the rhythm has migrated to the city to merge with the pulses and dark currents that run through it.

Capturing the raw energy and wild-eyed intensity of the MYD live show, this is music that speaks in tongues. Casts spells. Here language disintegrates to be replaced by something deeper, more primal, delivered with fire-dancing fury by fervent frontman Kushal Gaya. Like snake-charmers mesmerising a writhing pit of vipers, on ‘The God Of You’ MYD will have you utterly entranced, and by ‘Jump The Fire’ you’re ready to abandon all your worldly possessions and question everything you ever believed.

Feel the subterranean rhythms of urban life in ‘Dot To Dot’. Smell the sweat flecks scattered by swinging mops of hair in the reverberating basements and back rooms of New York, London, Rio, Lagos. Watch the silver morning sun shatter the sea as ‘Yazzan Dayra’ builds itself into a state of rapture, like the Whirling Dervishes of Sufism or the circle pits of hardcore punk before them.  

In both sound and aesthetic, Melt Yourself Down have celebrated migration since day one. Theirs is musical unity through movement and sound. Trans-international. They number in their ranks some of the finest musicians of their generation and Last Evenings On Earth condenses the human experience down to a series of shamanic rituals. It’s a journey both internal and external. This is musical trepanning. Musical exploration. Musical everything.

If this is the end of the world, the Last Evening On Earth... bring it. 

Melt Yourself Down are Kushal Gaya (vocals), Ruth Goller (bass), Shabaka Hutchings (saxophone), Satin Singh (percussion), Tom Skinner (drums), Pete Wareham (saxophone) with Leafcutter John (electronics/production).

Top 40 Album Of The Year - Rough Trade Store

“A scalp-frazzling chunk of psychedelic funk” - Top 10 Album Of The Year, Time Out

“A bazaar sax smackdown that has an iron in every furnace of global psychedelia, smelted into a structure of tungsten strength” - Pitchfork

“Flamethrowing punk-jazz party band” - The Guardian

“A pulsating, itchy funky brew, pitched somewhere between Pigbag and Can” - Uncut

“You probably owe it to yourself to buy this record” - The Quietus