Premiere: Lance Bangs Return With Prickly Notes On “Told U”
There’s something therapeutic about just toying around with an instrument, a feeling that becomes almost revitalizing when you do so alongside a full band. Errant guitar notes and a pacing bass line somehow find harmony together, while a canny drum beat helps steer the melody around a shifty terrain. Before long, you’ve got a knotty song driven by fragmented thoughts that are tethered together, intriguing in their obscurity. Rock group Lance Bangs has excelled at this style of music in the past, and it’s something they are exploring further on their new plucky single “Told U,” which serves as a welcome reminder to the curious charm the band brings to our local scene. Out on Halloween via Citrus City, The Auricular is proud to premiere the capricious song today with an exclusive stream below.
“I still can picture it,” barks singer and frontman Collin Thibodeauxx in the opening moments, as a roaming guitar line is sliced by a sawing countermelody. Over the next 94 seconds, the band builds on this contrasting harmony with abrupt shifts and abstract lyrics that seem to affirm their return to making music. “This drug is like none other / I’m strung out like a father / The garden rots from under / A man is wrought with hunger,” closes the song, offering a veiled look as to what drives the band to continuing creating after all these years.
“Told U” is the first taste of new music from Lance Bangs since they released Whammy in 2020. That record itself came four years after the debut EP Lance Mountain in 2016, marking a release history that’s almost as temperamental as the music itself. But whereas the tonal shifts are deliberate and welcome in their recordings, that uncertain timeline is one Lance Bangs hasn’t particularly planned for. Whammy came after a long period of lineup changes and personal issues, and while it looked like it would usher the band into a new moment, there was little momentum being made for any musician within the first wave of COVID, no matter how bold and exciting the sound was. Two years removed from that release, “Told U” picks up the ball in an impressive sprint, stretching the artistic vision of the erratic songwriting far past what Whammy was capable of. As people in general can now look forward and onward, so does the sound of Lance Bangs which seems fully poised to capitalize on Thibodeauxx’s wayward musical heart.
Luckily, we won’t have to wait long to see where Lance Bangs travels next musically. The band already has another new song ready to go in November, with a formal announcement coming as soon as next week. If the brassy alt-rock sounds of this song are any indication, the next taste of new music from Lance Bangs can’t come soon enough.
“Told U” is out on all streaming platforms Monday, October 31st via Citrus City. (Click here to pre-save it.) Make sure to follow Lance Bangs on Instagram (link here) so you can find out exactly when the next song gets released or a new show gets announced.
