Long-time collaborators and ARIA-award winners Tex Perkins and Matt Walker put the wheels in motion on the first Fat Rubber Band album after finding common cause listening to the great 1950s guitarist Link Wray. Inspired by the ‘fire and brimstone’ of Wray’s country-funk sound, Perkins and Walker began sculpting swampy blues laced with ample amounts of distortion in Walker’s studio in the Dandenong Ranges. “At Matt's studio – you open the door to the studio and nature floods in," Perkins says. “We wanted it to sound rural, to feel the dirt and the grass and the leaves.” Even after all these decades, when you think you know that gravelly baritone inside out, Perkins finds new emotional tones in the service of the Fat Rubber Band’s songs vivid narratives, with their characters wrestling, but sometimes dancing, with the tougher, darker qualities of the human condition. This is truly existential country blues. Bubbling underneath those upfront vocals and raw harmonies are intricately entwined guitar conversations and unexpected percussive flourishes, deliberately emphasised by the Perkins and Walker on tracks like “For A Love Long Gone”. This is end times existential electric-country-funk-folk-rock-swamp-witch-blues; its way out there, but it’s here right now.