The Drin make obscure, threatening post-punk that invites a kind of mental projection. When the Ohio six-piece light up their ambient gloom with a flash of in-the-red guitar or the thunderclap of a harsh snare, it can be as alarming as the sight of a shadowy figure through the trees. With a steady clip of releases over the past three years, the band has rapidly deepened and darkened its world, growing steadily more confident in its vision of rock as occult shadow play. On 2021’s Engines Sing for the Pale Moon and last year’s Down River in the Distance, where the group operated as a solo project of frontman and multi-instrumentalist Dylan McCartney, the music cast a pall that occasionally risked dampening its forward motion. On Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom, the Drin make small but impactful course corrections, wielding depth and shading as accents to their most effortlessly ominous statement yet.
The pleasures of Today My Friend are both immediate and obscurantist: melodic, hard-driving pop in service of eerie, unsolvable riddles. “Venom,” “Stonewallin’,” and “Walk So Far” are riotously straightforward garage rock in the tradition of Thee Oh Sees’ John Dwyer, propelled by muscular bass, clattering drums, and jagged guitar riffs. But for all its simple pleasures, the record also features wild chasms of noise. “Five and Dime Conjurers” roars to life off the back of a pummeling bassline and descends into a squall of tape delay and guitar feedback, while the deceptive “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling” foregrounds a relentless drumbeat against a backdrop of sulfurous reverb reminiscent of Throbbing Gristle’s “Six Six Sixties.”
On previous records, McCartney teased out fascinating musical threads, incorporating murky EBM and sticky, shambling guitar pop. He has a Liars-like approach to production, working from a punk blueprint but seeding his hooks with labored krautrock drumming and dissonant electronic flourishes. The Drin explore genre to especially playful effect on “Eyes Only for Space,” which incorporates the anti-gravity properties of dub to dramatize utter desolation: “The stars above are no match for the distance that I feel/When angels come to take me away and break me on the wheel.”
McCartney doesn’t sing his lyrics so much as intone them, and rarely at the front of the mix. From his vantage in the depths, he delivers cryptic pronouncements in a ragged drawl or croons over the beat with a corroded edge. He is an unreliable but evocative narrator, spelling out surreal, doom-laden imagery with eyes fixed on encroaching evil. His paranoid speak-singing recalls Kim Gordon on Bad Moon Rising (the Mike Ousley painting of a burning effigy that fronts the record even feels like a callback). “All the warning signs are there/Dogs that bare their teeth/Everywhere is seeming off/Sirens by the creek,” McCartney warns on “Five and Dime Conjurers.” Amid the nightmarish churn of “Peaceful, Easy, Feeling,” he sounds like the teen narrator of Harmony Korine’s Gummo when he suddenly announces, “Life is so amazing/Life is so fun.” But rather than dwell on the rubble and brutality of Korine’s Midwestern landscape, Today My Friend You Drunk the Venom is an album of cast shadows and lurking menace. It’s catchy enough to draw you into its dark center and disarming enough to make you question everything you hear.
