A band that calls itself DOOM SLUG and opens its debut album by shouting the words “Doom Slug Fucks Ahh!” over three and a half minutes of jamming has already told you something about its sense of humor. What Year of the Slug spends the next nine tracks proving is that the same band can turn around and write about playground bullying, authoritarian control, and duels fought over broken trust without ever losing that same wink. The gap between the goofy mascot logo and the record underneath it is the whole story here, and it’s a gap this Denver trio, built from veterans of Colorado bands Yerkish, Musuji, Falchemist, and Sin Fix, clearly enjoys living inside.
Opener “Doom Slug” sets that tone immediately, a mission statement shouted once and then handed over to the band’s instrumental instincts for the rest of its runtime, the kind of loose, jam-heavy intro that matches a live show built, as the band describes it, around heavy riffs anchoring room for improvisation to wander. “Pins and Needles” follows as the record’s most familiar entry, already out as a single last year, and hearing it inside the album rather than alone changes what stands out about it. Surrounded by songs this direct about violence and control, the song’s central image, numbness standing in for a love that smothers rather than holds, plays as the album’s first entry in a running argument about what happens when connection curdles into something closer to a trap.
“Genesis” and “Atrophy” work that same territory from opposite angles. “Genesis” wraps addiction and desire into an Eden myth turned in on itself, “head eats tail, back to Genesis,” a snake image that keeps circling rather than progressing. “Atrophy” strips the metaphor down to something closer to plain diagnosis, “we traded our will for ease, the infection’s all around us now and we feed its disease,” a line that reads as commentary on dependency in general rather than any single vice. Both songs are built on the same idea, that comfort and decay can look identical from the inside, and neither one blinks at how bleak that gets.
“Sarsaparilla” is where the band’s title-versus-content trick lands hardest. A sarsaparilla is a saloon drink, the harmless order at an Old West bar, and the song underneath that title is a duel, guns at dawn, bodies tangled and quartered, “that’s the bet you’ve made, that’s the price you pay.” That mismatch between the drink and the violence runs on the same instinct that named a band DOOM SLUG in the first place, dressing something legitimately dark in a costume that looks almost cute from a distance.
“Recess” runs a mere seventy-nine seconds, and the length is the point. A song about a school playground turning into a site of real cruelty, phones out while a kid gets shoved into a locker, doesn’t need to sit in that scene any longer than a real recess bell allows before cutting it short. “Bloody Knuckles” and “Savage” keep the album’s second half moving at a similarly blunt pace, the former a fistfight set to tape, “your words are piss in the wind, they mean nothing at all,” the latter a compressed burst of dangerous attraction that never bothers explaining itself past “this ain’t love, this is something else.” “Glory” slows back down into something closer to reckoning, mirror imagery echoing “Genesis” from earlier in the tracklist, landing on the record’s most quietly damning line, “if you can’t be honest with yourself, then how in the hell are you going to be honest with anyone else.”
Then the record hands its last ten minutes to “Darkwave Duck,” and nothing that came before it quite prepares you for the swing. The song spends most of its runtime inside the voice of an authoritarian narrator, someone who taught a frightened choir to kneel and made a god out of control, before the perspective cracks and mercy starts burning through, “the walls I made, the laws I wrote, now mercy burns inside my throat.” Out of that collapse comes the title figure itself, a black-feathered, soft-eyed omen gliding in over the ruins, a strikingly strange image to land a record on and exactly the kind of tonal whiplash DOOM SLUG has been building toward the whole album. Calling a ten-minute prog epic about the fall of a dictator “Darkwave Duck” is either a joke or dead serious, and Year of the Slug has spent its entire runtime proving it can be both at once.
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