Tear Dungeon bring the noise on Squirm. The riotous Texan’s unleash their unique brand of sonic battery and anarchy for all to see and hear.

TEAR DUNGEON

Some bands want you to hear them. Tear Dungeon would rather you survived them. The Austin five-piece have spent the past ten years building a reputation that walks into every room ahead of them, one written in stage blood, splintered furniture and nervous conversations between promoters and venue owners. Masks on, amps cranked well past the point of good sense, vocalist Andrew Cashen scaling whatever happens to be nearest the ceiling, they are the kind of live proposition that turns an ordinary weeknight into a story people are still telling years later.

It would be easy to dismiss them as a novelty turn, a bit of Texan theatre dressed up in rubber and gore, and plenty of people have. That would be a mistake. Beneath the carnage there has always been a band with real ability and a genuine grievance, and on their second full-length they have decided, quite deliberately, to aim that grievance at targets that thoroughly deserve it.

THE ORIGIN STORY

The story goes back to at least 2016, when a loose gang of players drawn from Austin favourites A Giant Dog and Sweet Spirit began making a racket together with Cashen at the centre of it all. It took until 2018 for the Gory Hole EP to turn up on King Pizza, recorded to tape in a practice room and issued as a run of just one hundred bone-white cassettes, which tells you all you need to know about the ambitions of the time: loud, drenched in feedback and not overly fussed about who was listening.

By the time Carl arrived on Feels So Good on Halloween 2022, things had tightened considerably. Cashen has since described that record as the point where the band decided to take the playing seriously, and it shows in the oddball time signatures and a much sturdier recording. The Austin Chronicle once memorably likened the band to a filthier, more dangerous Melvins. The personnel has shifted along the way, and the current line-up, with Johnny Dowey and Will Grover on twin guitars, Chris Prorock behind the kit and Jason Reece on bass, has spent the intervening years honing itself on bills alongside the likes of Amyl and the Sniffers, High on Fire, Osees and Negative Approach, with a trip north to Sled Island in Calgary this summer for good measure.

SQUIRM

And so, finally, to Squirm, released through TODO Records. Back when these songs were first taking shape, Cashen said the band had given themselves no rules about genre, only a theme, and that theme was anger. That is exactly what pours out of the speakers. The targets are named early and hit repeatedly: police violence, hollow religiosity, and the general sense of a nation quietly decaying from the foundations up. It is squarely a record of its moment, made by people who read the news and feel their pulse quicken for all the wrong reasons.

Twelve tracks, most of them done and dusted before you have finished processing the last one. The writing was a more collective affair this time, with songs coming from different corners of the band and anything that did not click quickly being thrown out, and that ruthlessness shows in the pacing. Stuart Sikes tracked it, John Michael Landon mixed it at Estuary Recording, and Greg Obis mastered it at Chicago Mastering Service, and between them they have pulled off the tricky job of capturing the mayhem without sanding down its edges.

BURN YOUR MONEY

Burn Your Money wastes no time on pleasantries. The guitars arrive already deep in the red with Prorock driving everything forward like a man who has just been told the building is on fire. It sets out the stall neatly: fuzz, fury, and a chorus you can bellow back even if the verse passed you by entirely.

Then comes the song that will inevitably grab the headlines, Charley Kirk’s Neckhole Fleshlight. There is no delicate way to put this: the title is a deliberately grotesque swipe at the late right-wing activist, and given the manner of his death, a good many listeners, including plenty who share the band’s politics, will find it crass rather than cutting. Punk has always traded in provocation, and Tear Dungeon have never pretended to be anything other than a band built to offend, but this is the one moment on the record where the shock feels like the point rather than the delivery system. Musically it is a snarling, lurching piece of work; it is simply a pity that the conversation will be about the title rather than the riff.

RED FLAG

Red Flag pulls things back onto firmer ground, a heavy-lidded, mid-paced stomp where the sludgier side of the band’s sound comes to the fore and the two guitars grind against each other like tectonic plates.

Then there is I’m Not Dead Yet; the song that launched the campaign and the smartest thing here. Cashen has explained that the brief was to write a one-chord song, the simplest thing the band could produce, and that they fell short only marginally by landing on two. That simplicity is its superpower. The riff digs its hooks in and refuses to let go, and the lyric, a gleeful, faintly bewildered celebration of still being upright despite everything, lands somewhere between gallows humour and genuine gratitude. If you have seen the accompanying video, filmed on the night the crowd and band turned the now-closed Ghost Cat Lounge into an actual demolition site, you will know precisely how this sounds in a room.

Suislide is another title that will raise eyebrows, although the song itself plays more like a queasy, disorientating spiral than anything flippant, the guitars bending in and out of shape as the rhythm section slides away from underneath. 40 and 40 changes gear completely. A short, sharp blast of hardcore that sounds as though it was written, rehearsed, and recorded in the time it takes to boil a kettle. Reece is the glue throughout this stretch, his bass thick and rubbery, holding together songs that constantly sound on the verge of shaking themselves apart. Prorock, meanwhile, plays as though every fill might be his last, which, given the band’s reputation, is not entirely out of the question.

THE THEMATIC CORE

Then the album’s thematic core. Shame and God Is Winning arrive as a pair and are where the anger is at its most focused, taking aim at hypocrisy in public life and piety that has remarkably little to do with loving thy neighbour. Shame is the more direct of the two, Cashen’s voice shredded to the point where you begin to fear for his throat, while God Is Winning is the most menacing moment on the album, slowing to a doom-laden crawl before erupting all over again. The title works on two levels, and the band clearly relish the irony: if this is victory, it looks an awful lot like collapse. Reference points come thick and fast here, a bit of early hardcore bile, a dollop of sludge, a smear of noise-rock abrasion, yet the combination feels unmistakably their own.

Kill For Health keeps up the pressure with a riff that sounds as if it has been dragged backwards through a hedge, and which, going by the title alone, is not exactly a love letter to the American healthcare system. Medicine offers the closest thing on the record to a breather, a slower, more hypnotic groove built on repetition, the twin guitars circling each other warily before the whole thing boils over in its final stretch. It proves the band can do patience as well as panic, and it makes the sprint to the finish feel even more urgent.

CONTROLLED CHAOS

That leaves the home straight. Freak Flag, the second single, is the most instantly catchy song the band have ever put their name to, a wiry, ramshackle charge built around a riff so immediate it feels like you have known it for years. It is a rallying cry for everybody who has ever been told to tone it down, and it will surely earn the loudest roar of the night whenever they finally make it over here. And then Steady Diet closes the album with a slow, grinding march, the sound of a band spent but unbowed, ending not with a tidy resolution but with a wall of feedback that hangs around just long enough to make you uncomfortable. Fitting, for a record called Squirm.

The real surprise of Squirm is how much control sits beneath the mess. It would have been easy for Tear Dungeon to make an album that simply tried to bottle the live experience, all noise, and no shape, and end up with something that sounds thrilling with a bruise on your shin but falls flat on the sofa. Instead, there is real craft here. The songs are short because they need to be, not because the band could not be bothered to finish them, and the sequencing keeps shifting the tempo just often enough to stop fatigue setting in.

FEROCIOUS & FUNNY

That said, it is not flawless. The middle third does occasionally blur into one long howl, and across twelve tracks the unrelenting intensity can start to feel less like a punch and more like a headache. The provocations, too, will cost them listeners who would otherwise adore this record, and there is a nagging sense that at least one of them is there purely to see who flinches. But when it connects, and it connects far more often than it misses, it is ferocious, funny, and surprisingly tuneful.

Cashen himself deserves a closer look, because his performance is the thing that holds the whole enterprise together. He is not a singer in any conventional sense, and he has no interest in pretending otherwise. What he brings instead is total commitment, a voice that veers from a strangled yelp to a guttural roar within the space of a single line, and the rare knack of sounding simultaneously furious and in on the joke. Plenty of vocalists can scream; far fewer can make you laugh and wince in the same breath. There is a lot of humour on Squirm, most of it pitch-black, and it is that humour that stops the record from tipping over into pure sermon. For all the bile, you never feel lectured. You feel as though you have been invited into the pit, handed a mask, and told to get stuck in.

PROUD LOCAL LINEAGE

It also slots neatly into a proud local lineage. Austin has a long history of producing bands who are equal parts art project and public nuisance, from the Big Boys and Scratch Acid onwards, and Tear Dungeon feel like the rightful heirs to that tradition of brains disguised as brawn. There is a Texan heaviness in the riffs, a punk economy in the arrangements and a noise-rock willingness to let things fall apart when it suits the song. Compared with Carl, this is a louder, leaner, and more pointed record, one that trades some of the earlier technical showboating for directness without losing any of the musicianship. Sikes and Landon have done a fine job here, keeping the guitars thick and physical and giving the drums the kind of room-shaking weight that makes you want to check the ceiling for cracks.

After years of being talked about more for what happens at their gigs than what comes out of the amplifiers, Squirm is the record that finally makes the case for Tear Dungeon on tape. Noisy, nasty, occasionally tasteless, and frequently brilliant, it captures a band who are angry about the right things and have the tunes to back it up. Now that they have lined up European and UK booking representation, here is hoping a trip across the Atlantic is not far off, because a band this unhinged deserves a full house, a sturdy ceiling, and a very understanding landlord.

Tear Dungeon: Instagram / Bandcamp

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