I love me a bit of psych rock. Particularly when the band playing said psych rock are pushing at the edges of the genre, trying new things and moving the whole thing forward. Frankie and the Witch Fingers have never been ones to sit still. Over the past decade, they’ve evolved from California psych-rock freakouts into a bonafide genre-mutant beast. With Trash Classic, their latest long-player, they double down on the chaos. They twist it, melt it, and launch it through a wormhole of synthetic slime and industrial-grade bile. The result is an album that feels like it’s been stitched together from broken machines, bad dreams, and manic sugar highs.
This is a record born not in some pastoral studio retreat but in the real-deal grit of Vernon, Los Angeles. That rawness drips into every second of Trash Classic but it’s in the studio alchemy of Oakland’s Tiny Telephone with producer Maryam Qudus where the band crackled into new forms. There’s a messiness here, but it’s purposeful. The sound of a band gleefully breaking their own toys to build something new.
The band had a lot of fun making the album, listen to this.
“Every day of recording began with cartoons blaring at full volume—a Looney Tunes ritual that turned the madness of the recording process into something childlike. Late at night, sugar-fuelled candy binges kept the energy spiking, pushing the sessions into a fever dream of jittery playfulness.”
They must have been wired for weeks! Let’s drop the needle and see how much of that energy was transferred to the grooves.
The album opens with ‘Channel Rot’. A snarling opening salvo that feels like stumbling through a glitching transmission. With a screech of tyres and an assortment of TV shows coming at us, we are off! This is the sound of collapsing signals and sensory overload, where the song’s structure seems to warp around the stop start guitar stabs and skittering synths. A mere taste of the technicolour madness to come.
We are then straight into ‘T.V. Baby’, a satirical screed aimed at screen addiction and information rot. The groove here is furious and feels like its coming at you from every angle. The lyrics are both comic and ominous: “Gimme gimme toxic sugar / I’m a sucker for that fit.” It’s mutant punk with a burnt-out VHS aesthetic, capturing the eerie intimacy of modern media’s brain-melt. If the whole album is at this pace I’m going to need a wee lie down after side A alone.
‘Dead Silence’ next is possibly the album’s emotional nadir. A spiralling descent into noise fatigue and internal static. Vocals echo like thoughts bouncing off concrete walls, while delivering a stark existential punch: “Everything is dead.” It’s bleak at times, but weirdly cathartic. Searching for the escape that saves you from the final escape, the one you can’t come back from. The track keeps tapping that metaphorical elevator button, waiting for something to change, knowing it probably won’t. In this day and age with this epidemic of mental illness and anxiety this is an incredibly well observed track.
Up next is the weaponised frustration of ‘Fucksake’. The rhythm is jagged, the vocal delivery more spit than speech. “What do you think what do you get, for fuck’s sake?” becomes a mantra for digital burnout and bodily disintegration. The track has the swagger of Roxy Music and the industrial punk energy of the MC5. Pure adrenaline and absurdist apocalypse. I can imagine this will get a great call and response at their live shows!
The robot energy is palpable next with ‘Economy’. “This has got to be the best economy,” is almost spat out, dripping with sarcasm. The synths are particularly cool here, sputtering and gurgling like corrupted cash registers. The beat, on the other hand, marches forward with mechanical insistence, mimicking the inescapable churn of the market machine. It’s a dystopian dance-punk commentary on capitalism’s failure to nourish the soul and it cuts like a knife.
We leave the robot energy behind for ‘Eggs Laid Brain’. This is possibly the most surreal cut on the record and that’s saying something. Lyrically it reads like a Lovecraftian satire of human thought. “Sucking out the fun, how tasty,” repeats like a warped nursery rhyme, while the instrumentation slinks and squirms with insectoid menace. It’s psychedelic in the most visceral, bodily sense—a track that feels like it’s crawling inside your skull.
We plummet headlong into ‘Out Of The Flesh’ next. Emotionally raw and vocally twisted. “Come find me curled up like a dying worm” sets the tone. This is self-excavation through noise and melody. Guitars pummel us relentlessly; synths soar and swell. This has amazing energy encapsulating everything I love about Frankie and the Witch Fingers. Riffs, call and response vocals and knowing wink to the audience!
A pixelated war cry from the AI uprising. ‘Total Reset’ is the album’s most explosive track—robotic voices chant apocalyptic prophecies over pounding drums and gleaming synth stabs. It imagines a world where our digital offspring have had enough, where extermination becomes the only resolution. Think Kraftwerk by way of Slayer. Genius! Bonkers but fricken genius.
The band channels their inner B-52s on this sly, sexy romp through power, performance and perception. ‘Conducting Experiments’ is psychedelic disco-punk that plays with gender, identity and authority. “These two women are conducting experiments,” entranced and adrift. The track’s got swagger and sass to spare, and the chorus is an all-timer. Clear the dancefloor Frankie and the Witch Fingers are coming through.
‘Gutter Priestess’ is just pure sleaze and shadow. Think of a Lynchian fever dream involving rituals, spoons, and motel rooms soaked in amber light. The bassline prowls like a predator, vocals are pure menace. The gutter priestess is a mythical avatar of the album’s themes—decay, indulgence, transformation. You’ll feel the leather bite. Down boy!
The title track is a final baptism in the sludge. By this point, you’re just a bit frayed but grinning and loving it, lost in static and slime. “Yet another hole in my head” we hear sung, almost jubilantly, as if trauma has become transcendence. The track oscillates between feral and euphoric, tying things up in an ecstatic roar of warped hope.
Trash Classic is a full-body immersion into chaos, commentary and catharsis. This is a band who’ve always flirted with the edge, but now they’ve leapt right off it, arms flailing, laughing as they fall. Every track on this record pulses with intent. It’s messy, magnetic and malevolent in all the right ways. What Frankie and the Witch Fingers have made here is an album that is both a sonic experiment and an emotional exorcism. It forces you to confront the rot while dancing in it. It mocks our obsession with consumption while sounding like the inside of a melting vending machine. It offers no salvation, just glorious collapse. If you’re ready to rip out the circuits and get weird with the witches, then Trash Classic is the record you’ve been waiting for.
Trash Classic is out on Friday June 6th via Fuzz Club and Levitation. Check out the Frankie and the Witch Fingers Bandcamp to find out more.
You can follow Frankie and the Witch Fingers on social media here…
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