VR Sex have a new single or track or a taste of their new album or whatever it is. Whatever it is it is out Organ Thing of The Day today. This is jagged, edgy, edged, urgent, the track is Real Doll Time and if she had only had stopped making that hissing noise? Does some of that sound a little bit cardiac arresting? Neat tune, neat neat neat, do like the way it develops when you kind of think they’re done with it all, here comes the details from the hype sheet that came with it –

“Following 2022’s Rough Dimension LP, Noel Skum – aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty – made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR Sex into a fully collaborative five-piece band. Hard Copy is the result – ten tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome-damaged freak-outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue-sniffing fatales and is due out March 22nd via Dais Records. To mark the announcement, the band are sharing the first single from the record Real Doll Time.

“To christen the new group’s camaraderie of becoming a five-piece band, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, swapped skeletal iPhone demos, and “did that classic thing of a band making the exact record they want without any interference.” Working 12-hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX, and amplifier experiments.

Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel – an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground – the album is dense, rich, and spatial, spurred by Clinco’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych, and loud-quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX’s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication: “My goal is always to load up every take with as much sound as possible in one pass.”

Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents, and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other – when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart: “I can be ugly / I can be strong / I can be proper / I can be wrong / I can be lovely / or I can be gone / the thing that will haunt you is still hanging on.”

Bandcamp

Here’s the previous album while we wait for the new one