Los Angeles based four piece Sprain play angular punk/noise at soaring volumes. Their forthcoming album, As Lost Through Collision—out September 4th on The Flenser—unfurls threads of spidery 90s rock (think Unwound, Duster, Slint, etc.) and is a complex and cathartic exercise in tension and restraint.
Written at home and refined on the road, the five new tracks that comprise As Lost Through Collision are parts monolithic and minimalist, manic and mellow. Engineered by Josiah Mazzaschi at The Cave (Built to Spill, The Jesus and Mary Chain) and mixed by Tim Green at Louder Studios (The Melvins, Lungfish, Jawbreaker), the music here retains its organic purity and captures Sprain in its truest state. The listener can hear every instrument and every tonal deviation while the band members embrace musical and philosophical abstraction in their art practice; they emphasize sound as force, differentiating the concept of pure sound from music. And although As Lost Through Collision is a departure from their previous EP, it still retains Sprain’s former slowcore aesthetic. “This record was a conscious effort to move beyond the initial style we experimented with on our last EP into something more unique—something more ‘us,’” they comment.
