Uniform announce their fifth studio album, “American Standard”, today, to be released on August 23rd, 2024, via Sacred Bones.
The first single “This is not a Prayer” is a driving force of a song, propelled by the dual drums of Michael Sharp and Michael Blume.
The album is surely Uniform’s most cohesive and intimate work to date, tackling themes of self-destruction and with a particular focus on vocalist Michael Berdan’s bulimia nervosa – reader discretion is advised when looking at the biography below.
About the album and the first single “This is not a Prayer”, Berdan comments:
“Although our new record is best experienced as one cohesive piece, it isn’t exactly Dopesmoker. The songs on ‘American Standard’ feed into an overarching narrative with the goal of retaining their own individual identities.
Existing in the netherworld between Public Image Ltd. and Butthole Surfers: “This is not a Prayer” best exemplifies the bludgeoning percussive interplay between dual drummers Michael Sharp and Michael Blume. Similar to bands like Swans or even Meshuggah, the guitar, bass, and vocals on this track act in complete service to what’s happening on the kits. The song is as purely rhythmic as we’ve ever dared to attempt, and we hope that these beats will take you where you need to go. Drums should serve as lead instruments in extreme music more often, but I digress… Thematically: ‘This is not a Prayer’ touches on the internal paradox that I’ve experienced while in the throes of an eating disorder. It’s about how the best I’ve ever felt about my physical appearance came when the people I love have told me that I look sick. Rather than taking their concerns to heart, I internalized these sentiments as proof that I was on the right track. I was not”.
Pre-order & pre-save “American Standard” here.
Tracklist:
1. American Standard
2. This is not a Prayer
3. Clemency
4. Permanent Embrace
Uniform wants to find what’s underneath. And what’s underneath the underneath. And what’s under that.
“American Standard” begins with a shock. A voice, a room, a face in a mirror. In the mirror stares a visage, doubled and staring back. Each line comes back to him: reflected and refracted in the unsympathetic glass. Forget for a moment that Berdan has been destroying his throat in Uniform for over a decade. Forget his highly stylised delivery on the band’s acclaimed collaborative work (alongside experimental doom titans The Body and Japanese heavy rock powerhouse Boris). Forget the entire tradition of abrasive vocals in aggressive music. Look for what’s underneath the songs, the form, and the style.
With every movement of “American Standard”, Uniform peels off a new layer and tells the story inside of the one that came before it. The lyrics sink down into the core of the innermost self, the small human being crushed in the grip of sickness. Berdan identifies here with the inner illness rather than the reality that lies outside of his warped psyche. His bandmates join him, applying a majestic droning vise of doom that moves beyond SWANS worship and becomes both mechanical and omniscient. As the rhythms continually pulverize, Uniform gives themselves over to the grinding gears of an uncaring universe.
To help peel away this narrative of eating disorders, self-hatred, delusion, mania, and ultimate discovery, Berdan sought assistance from a towering pair of outsider literary figures. Alongside B.R. Yeager (author of the modern cult-classic Negative Space) and Maggie Siebert (the mind behind the contemporary body horror masterpiece Bonding), the three writers eviscerate the personal material to present a portrait of mental and physical illness as vividly terrifying as anything in the present-day canon. The result is an acute articulation of a state beyond simple agony, capturing the thrilling transcendence and deliverance that sickness can bring in the process.
“American Standard” is surely Uniform’s most thematically accomplished and musically self assured album to date. Sections spiral and explode. Motifs drift off into obscurity before reasserting themselves with new power. Genres collide and burst open, forming something idiosyncratic and new. There’s a grandeur, due in part to the addition of Interpol bassist Brad Truax alongside the percussive push and pull of returning drummer Michael Sharp and longtime touring drummer Michael Blume, marking his Uniform recorded debut here. However, this magnificence is most clearly attributable to the scale and power of guitarist and founder Ben Greenberg’s arrangements, matching ever elegantly to the intense lyrical subject matter.
Underneath it all, what remains is trust. A record of this range and depth, a piece of art so far out on a ledge, can only be attempted with an extreme and almost foolish amount of understanding between collaborators. “American Standard” stands firmly on the bedrock that Uniform’s two original members, Michael Berdan and Ben Greenberg, have been building on for over a decade.
In Greenberg’s words: “When we started this record, Berdan told me: ‘I trust you to come up with a solid foundation for this, however you envision this thing. I want you to realize it completely, because I believe in you’. So I wanted to write something overwhelming and all-encompassing for Berdan to lead his narrative through… because I trust and believe in him”.
For an album to defy simple genre exercises and become a work of art, the musicians behind it must push themselves so far beyond the frayed ends of an established comfort zone that they might never return. Without a shred of doubt, “American Standard” is a work of art, agonising in its honesty and relentless in its pursuit of sonic transcendence. It is hideous. It is beautiful. It is necessary.
US Tour Dates 2024:
08/30 New York, NY @ Bowery Ballroom# (Record Release)
9/03 Giant Rock, CA @ (waiting on venue name)
9/04 Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon
9/05 San Francisco, CA @ Thee Parkside
9/06 Eugene, OR @ John Henry’s
9/07 Seattle, WA @ Black Lodge
9/08 Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios
9/09 Vancouver, BC @ The Pearl
9/10 Tacoma, WA @ Elks Temple
# (with Poison Ruin and Leya)
(w/ World Peace 4-10/9)
