By the time Psychedelic Porn Crumpets dropped their fourth studio album, SHYGA! The Sunlight Mound, the world had well and truly turned to shit. It was February ‘21, and with new variants of COVID-19 emerging, more lockdowns looming, and a return to the good ol’ days of live music looking farther out of reach by the hour, dark and stormy, angst-driven rock was the new bubblegum pop. It came as no surprise, then, that SHYGA! hit the ARIA Top 5 – a huge leap up from the #31 debut of its predecessor, And Now For The Whatchamacallit.
The band themselves were expectedly stoked by LP4’s success, but they were also on the brink of insanity. A punitive cocktail of anxiety, uncertainty and boredom pushed frontman Jack McEwan right to the edge, toyed with heaviness, its follow-up was inevitably going to plumb the deepest depths of true bleakness. And though tracks like ‘Bubblegum Infinity’ and ‘Acid Dent’ paint the picture of a bright and buoyant psych-pop album primed for festival mainstages, beneath the surface, is a gut-punching journey into the darkest corners of McEwan’s psyche.
