Duane Denison, guitarist of Chicago noise rock icons The Jesus Lizard, summarizes his band’s music pretty succinctly in a recent Zoom call: “If you look at the whole catalog, we had basically three songs: The fast jumpy one, the slow creepy one, and the midtempo chuggy one.”
Denison, speaking from his current home in Nashville, is a bit self-deprecating and self-critical, but even speaking in gross understatements, he still hones in on an essential truth: Fast, creepy, or chuggy, all of The Jesus Lizard’s music is driven by a singular aggression. Too weird for grunge but with more of a chip on their shoulder than what was happening in most of indie rock in the early ‘90s, The Jesus Lizard carved out their own unique niche through anthems that paired humor with an abrasive menace and an explosive live presence guided primarily by the stage-diving, trouser-dropping antics of vocalist David Yow.
They also moved fast. In the first four years of the band’s existence, they released four records back to back, closing out their decade-long legacy with six full-length albums, a handful of EPs, and countless tour dates in the rearview. Back then, Denison, Yow, bassist David Wm. Sims, and drummer Mac McNeilly lived and breathed noise rock.
“For years, the four of us all lived together in the same apartment,” says Yow. “We practiced, toured, and recorded—that’s all we did.”
A lot has changed since then. They live in different cities, have taken on different projects, and are now in their 60s. But after reuniting for some live performances back in 2009 and reconvening every few years thereafter for what they referred to as “re-enactments,” The Jesus Lizard are finally releasing new music. Rack, out in September via Ipecac, recaptures the incendiary energy of the band in their prime while finding them pursuing some fascinating sonic detours as well. Rack isn’t an attempt to repeat the past, but they also concede that the way they play and work together over the years hasn’t actually changed all that much.
“We’re the same four guys we were back then, so you know, given the opportunity to come up with some ideas, you’re going to come up with the same ideas you had before, only hopefully more evolved,” Yow says.
Ahead of the release of the first new music from The Jesus Lizard in 26 years, we caught up with Denison and Yow to guide us through their catalog on Bandcamp.
Pure (1989)
The lineup of The Jesus Lizard hadn’t yet calcified when they released their debut EP, 1989’s Pure. Recorded as the trio of Yow, Denison, and bassist David Wm. Sims, the five-song release is backed rhythmically by a drum machine rather than their longtime drummer Mac McNeilly. The overall effect is an album that shares more in common with the ’80s-era industrial post-hardcore of Big Black than The Jesus Lizard’s more rhythmic fluidity, defined instead by its sharp angles and harsh edges. But the juxtaposition of Denison’s sharp jabs against Sims’s two-ton bass riffs and Yow’s manic yelps establishes the blueprint for the group’s albums that followed, a concise and punchy proof of concept.
“Because of the fact that it’s got a drum machine, it’s almost like a demo,” Denison says. “Like, maybe a drum machine demo of what Head became. In a way, I wish we would have waited…but it is what it is, and it got our foot in the door if nothing else.”
Even if the record feels more like a demo to the group, its songs—in particular, “Bloody Mary” and “Blockbuster”—ended up being staples in the band’s live set for decades. “We’ve probably played those songs several thousand times,” Yow says.
Head (1990)
“It’s pretty gritty and unrefined,” says vocalist Yow of the band’s first full-length album, Head, which notably is also the first of the group’s albums to feature drummer McNeilly. From the opening punch of “One Evening,” the difference is both apparent and significant. The heavy crack of his snare and steady strut of hi-hat add more human muscle behind Sims’ low-end and Denison’s six-string scrape. It’s more rhythmically complex, with moments like “If You Had Lips” recalling the syncopated noise-punk of The Birthday Party in addition to blazing, riff-driven barnburners like “7 vs. 8.”
While the album is a major step forward from their first EP, Denison qualifies that, on Head, The Jesus Lizard were still finding their voice: “Back then, when bands were first starting, you were given time to develop. The first couple things, to me, sound like a band that haven’t yet figured out who they are. To me the influences there are still discernible, and it’s not a unified thing. It’s a band still finding itself. But it has its moments.”
Goat (1991)
“This is where the Jesus Lizard’s sound, to me, everything coalesced, and it truly sounds unique,” Denison says of the group’s second full-length LP, Goat. And critical and fan consensus over the years seems to converge with that assessment, its nine songs representing the full spectrum of the band’s sound—from the ominous creep of opener “Then Comes Dudley” to the climactic epic of “Monkey Trick,” the foul-mouthed mania of “Lady Shoes” to the jerky, eminently quotable “Mouth Breather.” That last track, one of the band’s best-known, features Yow barking—nearly verbatim—a quote from engineer Steve Albini about Slint drummer Britt Walford when he flooded his basement: “Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy, I like him just fine…but he’s a mouth breather.”
In just barely over a half-hour, the band’s sound fully arrives—acerbic, misanthropic, and thrilling as hell. “It sounds like it’s found its own voice,” Denison says. “The way the instruments sound, the way we play together, the way the vocals work, with or against the music. I think that album is fairly sparse and there’s a lot of spaciousness on the recording, and we were recording in big rooms. The guitar’s fairly clean and fairly thin, so you can hear a little bit of everything. It has a certain atmosphere that has continuity throughout the album. A lot of times, I’ll watch guitar players, and they’ve got racks of guitars and a crew of guys bringing in different amps on every song. And I used one guitar and one amp on that whole album, and that’s the one people like the best.”
“It spawned a whole new word for the modern culture: G-O-A-T: the greatest of all time,” Yow deadpans. “So there you go.”
Liar (1992)
The Jesus Lizard’s first four releases were all released within a year of one another, reflecting the quartet’s full-time commitment to cultivating their noise. And by the time they released their third album Liar, they seemed to be playing at a more accelerated rate as well, kicking off with the urgent drive of “Boilermaker,” chugging into the menacing “Gladiator” and onto the violent rumble of “The Art of Self Defense.” There’s a get-up and go to Liar that scarcely lets up, arriving as something like the more manic twin of the previous year’s Goat. In fact, Yow even says that, given the back-to-back recordings and release of the two albums—as well as what the group recognizes as a consistent standard of quality—Goat and Liar “might as well have been a double album.”
Denison concurs: “Liar starts out with more of a bang with ‘Boilermaker’ and then ‘Gladiator,’ and there’s maybe a higher percentage of fast songs than on Goat. But they’re very similar otherwise. We’re the same guys, the same gear, same studio, less than a year later to record it. Yeah, so we were kind of, I don’t know, racing the clock. We felt like we had something to say, and boy, we had to get it out there.”
Down (1994)
The Jesus Lizard had a busy 1994, releasing the live album Show, appearing on the soundtrack to Kevin Smith’s successful low-budget cinematic debut Clerks, and saw their “Glamorous” video heckled by Beavis and Butthead, in addition to being the year of the release of their fourth album Down. The final studio album that The Jesus Lizard released through independent label Touch and Go before making the major-label leap to Capitol for two more records in the late ‘90s, Down continued the path of creep-and-pummel that the group had established in their two previous records if perhaps with a little bit of the intensity dialed back. While it features some churning standouts like the leadoff track “Fly on the Wall,” as well as the punishing gallop of “Din,” Denison notes that the experience of making it felt a bit rushed due to self-imposed pressures.
“I wish we had waited or taken more time,” Denison says. “We felt pressured, or at least I did—like, ‘You guys are rolling, you need to get another one out.’ And if anything, we should have stepped back and taken a couple more months. There are still some good songs on there, some of which we still play live, but for me personally, it’s not what it should have been.”
Bang (2000)
The Jesus Lizard stopped playing together in 1999, taking a decade off before eventually reconvening for a series of occasional reunion shows, beginning in 2009 and continuing well into the late 2010s. The final cap on their first decade together was 2000’s Bang, a compilation released by Touch and Go that brought together various odds and ends from throughout the group’s catalog, including singles and B-sides and various live versions of songs that appear on other albums. While it features a handful of excellent non-album curiosities such as “Glamorous,” from their 1994 Lash EP, as well as their cover of Chrome’s “Chrome,” the group doesn’t shy away from voicing some of their grievances with the compilation.
“There’s an annoying live version of ‘Blockbuster’ where you can hear this guy fucking talk over the song,” Denison says. “I think somebody thought it was funny, and you can hear someone saying, ‘David! David! Not you, the other David!’ But it doesn’t hold up. I’d use that album sometimes to practice with, just to get different versions just so you don’t get too stuck playing things in the same tempo because it does fluctuate with a live drummer. But then I’d get to that one and just hit that fuckin’ skip button.”
Rack (2024)
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl LP, Cassette
After ten years of playing reunion shows on and off with no specific plans to record any new music, Denison and Sims had begun putting together riffs and sketches for what could have potentially been the band’s first new music in over two decades. And in time that grew to be enough to fill a new album, Rack, their first since the release of 1998’s then-swan-song, Blue. Released via Ipecac, with which Denison had previously worked as a member of Tomahawk along with the label’s founder Mike Patton, the album recaptures the grit and churn of The Jesus Lizard’s classic era if one that’s only slightly less unhinged on Yow’s part. It’s a fitting return for the group, abrasive and surging with energy, and always just on the verge of chaos—as all the band’s best recordings are—but reflective of where the band is now as opposed to where they were.
“I think it’s a pretty good reflection of we’re older and we’ve evolved and this is this version of it. Personally, as a guitar player, I wanted to avoid doing what old guy guitar players do. They try to be technically impressive and show how they’ve matured, and if anything, I wanted to play like a kid—a kid on meth, maybe.”
Moments like the driving “Grind” and the rhythmic jerk of opener “Hide & Seek” capture The Jesus Lizard in their antagonistic element. Yet the album showcases a few moments of more nuanced surprises as well, like the low-key, spoken-word creep of “What If?” But while the group occasionally stray beyond the expectations of what a Jesus Lizard album typically sounds like, they never second-guessed it, reaffirming that they’re the only ones who can set the rules of what a Jesus Lizard album is supposed to sound like.
“Being as how we’re the Jesus Lizard, we can’t sound any more like The Jesus Lizard than we do,” Yow says. “No matter how hard we try.”
