If the title doesn’t grab you, the jaunty guitar hook should. If all else fails, how about the first line? “The devil can fuck right off/And suck me dry/I’m going to Heaven when I die.” This is no grungy outlaw country track, though: Tuskers layers their sound with a trance-ish, almost trip-hop-like beat that will keep you grooving alongside the bravado.
Tuskers keeps their internet presence minimal and mysterious, but here’s what Chris Gilman says about himself: “Central New Jersey DIY alt-country, emo trucker music, homemade as hell.”
“I recorded this album during a long stretch of unemployment while living with my folks,” Gilman writes to Adobe & Teardrops. “I was out of work and back home even prior to the pandemic, so I just had endless amounts of time to fill, and wound up sinking more hours into this project than anything else I’ve ever done. I was like those 2001 chimps going nuts over the monolith, but with an outdated version of Garageband on my super old, shitty laptop. As for the lyrics, they’re written from the POV of a character who is clearly bitter as hell and reflecting on what went wrong. Someone who got humbled, exiled, pointed fingers, and ultimately shouldered the blame. Whoever this person is, they are a weird freak and I hope they are doing better now.”
You can listen to Tuskers’ album Hunker Down Now on Bandcamp and Spotify.