Dead Tooth - Dead Tooth

Down the lost highway of damning self-indictments and apocalypse paralysis, there’s a party happening. That party is the eponymous debut full-length from NYC’s premier rodeo-core quintet, Dead Tooth.

This album (out July 18th via Trash Casual) fearlessly plays out like a 90s blockbuster, replete with grandiose melodrama, black humor and larger-than-life character arcs. As near atonal hooks escape from frontman Zach Ellis’s taut vocal cords, they echo a world where global and personal crises collide; like that chalk-white iceberg into the belly of the RMS Titanic. With mother nature on the skids and humanity floundering in desperation, Dead Tooth sets the scene in the medium of menacing guitar feedback and blistering saxophone.

Dead Tooth was tracked in multiple studios across NYC’s outer boroughs in sessions stretching from 2022-2024; arriving as a cohesive set, thanks in part to the deft touch of mixing engineer Tom Beaujour (Nada Surf, Juliana Hatfield). Keeping effects and overdubs at a minimum, Dead Tooth exudes a rawness that brings the sweat and clamor of a packed Brooklyn basement into the privacy of your very own speakers.

The result is a committed undertaking to unveil 21st century living in all of its unvarnished depravity. As the ship sinks and the passengers cartwheel to their oblivion, this band plays on

Lead single “You Never Do Shit” is a POV tale of a beleaguered musician turning to a life of crime as he reaches the end of his rope. The track highlights Ellis’s penchant for bringing to life overblown personas that lampoon the absurd state of the universe. This song was originally part of a duo of demos written for the Apple TV+ show City On Fire (the other became the ‘hit’ song for the show’s fictional band Ex Post Facto).

On “Jack Dawson”, Ellis finds himself pondering if James Cameron’s Titanic was a defining moment of his childhood. Was a heroic perception of Jack Dawson responsible for him dropping out of community college and bumming around Europe in his early-twenties? Was Dawson truly the freewheeling hopeless romantic his teen self saw him to be? Or was he a manic serial monogamist on the run from something? These are the questions that weigh on the mind of a man locked in his apartment on a pandemic-imposed bender of mezcal and Twin Peaks.