Long Island, NY's Crime In Stereo are back with the announcement of its forthcoming album House & Trance, set for release on October 27, 2023 via Pure Noise Records, their first album in 13 years. With the announcement, the band has also released the lead single 'Hypernormalisation' along with new single "Books Cannot Be Killed By Fire" both from the forthcoming LP and streamable below. Lead single Hypernormalisation analyses the apathy of people in the face of their imminent demise, "The wildfires gathered themselves together, advancing enough petition signatures to force a vote on rerouting subterranean magma ducts directly into any east/west commuter corridors. Cities of water rushed in from the sea only to circle the neighborhood for hours, stymied by alternate side parking." The additional streaming song, Books Cannot Be Killed By Fire turns its acerbic eye to recent and ongoing Republican efforts to whitewash American history and restrict access to its truth.

About the new LP, "House & Trance" feels like the natural next step for Crime In Stereo. It was entirely self-produced by the band (outside of it, both Romnes and Cioni are acclaimed and accomplished producers), and flows on so well from their past that it’s almost like the intervening decade and a bit hasn’t happened. This collection of songs not only sound sonically incredible but are riddled with the anguish of life and existence in 2023, both musically and lyrically. They’re not just reflective of these times—the effects of late-stage capitalism and neoliberalism, the encroaching dominance of fascism within the US political system, the increasing alienation and isolation that comes from the purposeful eradication of community by corporate politics—but of the immense human collateral damage that comes with all of that. As much as it’s symbolic of the universal environmental and systemic crises the world faces right now, it also operates—as Crime In Stereo songs always have—on a more personal level. Towards the end of making the album, Dunne (Guitar) had to be rushed in from a session for emergency surgery after developing a septic infection from that almost killed him. Understandably, that brush with mortality seeps into these songs. There are references to being consumed or destroyed by the sun, for instance, in House / Trance—a wonderful blast of ominous, hyperactive melancholy—as well as the dour dreaminess of final track (and ‘tribute’ to the band’s home of Long Island) Skells. Indeed, this record often feels like it’s on the verge of a world-ending implosion. Within that apocalyptic setting are contained other catastrophes and human ills—the stuttering post-hardcore of Superyacht Ecopark offers an incisive takedown of the billionaire mindset where wealth is accumulated at the expense of humanity. And while this album as a whole, offers a scathing indictment on the state of the union, it wasn’t actually intended to be overtly political. That’s just what it became as an accurate reflection of the times and what the powers that be are doing.

Yet while it was born from bleakness, from hopelessness, from brushes with death and out of a failing society and country, its very existence rages against everything that made it, offering a significant sense of hope and meaning, of beauty and salvation, of a future not yet written off.