Iguana Death Cult — Echo PalaceAfter the pandemic hit, and the people of the world suddenly grew wary and suspicious of
one another, Iguana Death Cult, one of Europe’s most exciting rock exports, became more
than just a band to its members—it became therapy. “I think for the first ten times we went to
jam,” says guitarist/vocalist Tobias Opschoor, speaking about the process of making the new
album Echo Palace, “we just drank wine and talked about it, and just kept on talking for
hours—and then were like, ‘OK, I have to go because I have to work tomorrow.’”
Taking place at frontman Jeroen Reek’s apartment in the Dutch city of Rotterdam, these
gatherings slowly shifted from talking about this surreal chapter of their lives—the days of
quiet streets and cramped buildings—to making music about it. “I was living in a really
crappy, leaky, ready-for-demolition apartment,” explains Reek, “with just one heat
source—like a really old-school, gas stove kind of thing.” Working on cold nights, they had
to gather around that heater together—a cozy approach that ultimately got their creative flow
going, fast.
Armed with the talents of Justin Boer on bass and Arjen van Opstal on drums, and tapping
the keys work Jimmy de Kok for the first time on album, the band took their trademark
melodic garage-rock style and expanded it out to make it vibier and looser, with each member
contributing ideas to develop the sound palette in full. “We all get into this sort of blender and
then everybody gives a little bit of a flavor to it,” says Opschoor.
The sounds they started to make tapped into the band’s acerbic bite established on their first
two LPs, 2017’s The First Stirrings of Hideous Insect Life and 2019’s Nude Casino—albums
that sometimes felt like Parquet Courts colliding with Super Furry Animals. (Paste described
Nude Casino as evoking “the colorful mischief of nights out where even a humdrum
accountant can feel like a Clint Eastwood desperado.”) Their explosive performances of these
records turned them into a cult live act among psych fans, who have thrashed to the band
everywhere from Amsterdam to Austin. (It was during a particularly bananas set at SXSW
that the band won over Innovative Leisure.) But working on this new album, huddled
together as the world split apart, everything began to flutter like Remain in Light.
Echo Palace may be the Iguana Death Cult music that’s most overtly about the strange cause
and effect of groupthink, but the theme has been lurking there since the very beginning, when
the band was first formed by childhood friends Reek and Opschoor over ten years ago. The
name of Iguana Death Cult is a partial nod to Reek’s fascination with cults in general—and
the “Iguana” part is a nod to Iggy Pop, whose first band was the Iguanas.
Watching the pandemic paranoia and conspiracy theories steeping across their country, Reek
wrote lyrics reflecting the scene in front of him: “Purple, veiny soccer mommies,” he sings in
a deep, foreboding voice on the song “Echo Palace,” “Sharpening their guillotines.” It’s a cut
so infectious that it betrays the density of its lyrics, which were adapted from a poem Reek
wrote about the repercussions of “shutting yourself off from everyone outside of your own
ideology.”
While each song on the record wrestles with these confusing times, Reek is keen not to point
fingers. “These songs were written in such a polarizing time – we lost friends to conspiracy
theories and ideologies. There are so many conflicting views and opinions. But I also don’t
want to sound like I have all the answers,” he explains. “We should continue to talk to each
other.”
Echo Palace sees the band push their psych roots further than ever before. With a
wide-spanning interest in disco, dance music, New York No Wave and artists such as ESG,
Talking Heads, Medium Medium, plus Squid, Pottery and Parquet Courts, the record is a
melting pot of energy, groove, and playful experimentation, with only one rule – the audience
isn’t going to be able to stand still.
When it came time to record the full set, the band headed to PAF Studio in Rotterdam, and
then had the self-produced album subsequently mixed by Joo-Joo Ashworth (Sasami,
Dummy) at Studio 22 in Los Angeles and mastered by Dave Cooley (Tame Impala, Yves
Tumor). As the instruments swirl and trade solos on “I Just a Want House,” a funky
millennial nihilist anthem, you can practically hear the growth of a group that’s been pushing
itself further and further with every tour and every Belgian-stove fuelled jam session. The
album is a big swing, stretching Iguana Death Cult beyond its garage rock origins and taking
them to a new realm.
It’s the type of project that warranted having legendary Dutch jazz saxophonist Benjamin
Herman stop by to add to the squall on tracks like “Oh No” and “Sensory Overload,”. “He is
a hero of ours”, the band admit. “We’d go and hear him play with our parents when we were
kids.” The added sax led these heady thrashers to morph into calculated freakouts, which
warranted Reek and Opschoor to scream their guts out on tracks like “Pushermen,” and Boer
and van Opstal knowing when to bring the rhythm section to a jazzy simmer on tracks like
“Paper Straws.”
The end result of Echo Palace is an appropriately worldly album from a group breaking past
the confines of its home country. That’s not to say that Iguana Death Cult aren’t proudly
Dutch; the group takes from the trademark hard work ethic of their Rotterdam base and
applies it to their approach with music. But it’s 2022, and we’re less defined by our borders
than ever before. “When we play in other countries, for me that gives the same amount of
pleasure—or even more—than when we play in the Netherlands,” says Opschoor.
“We’re not just little countries anymore, everything is global,” adds Reek, speaking about
society at large—but he might as well be speaking about Iguana Death Cult itself. “We’re
turning into a global thing.”
Event Venue
3160 16th Street, San Francisco, California 94103, United States
Tickets
