‘Runnin’ Escapin’’ by 10 000 Russos

Seven years on from their inception and the Porto-based outfit are today announcing their third full-length, Kompromat and sharing the huge first single, ‘Runnin’ Escapin’’. Due for release November 8th on Fuzz Club.

Portuguese trio 10 000 Russos are an incendiary, galvanising presence in the European Psych underworld; something that’s impossible to shake after you first catch their notoriously all-consuming live show or drop the needle on that LP for the first time. Seven years on from their inception and the Porto-based outfit are today announcing their third full-length, Kompromat and sharing the huge first single, ‘Runnin’ Escapin’’. Due for release November 8th on Fuzz Club, the new LP arrives following their second album Distress Distress (2017), a collab record with Dutch industrialists and label-mates RMFTM (2018) and, as always, endless touring: spanning from September to November 2019, 10 000 Russos are embarking on a mammoth tour that’ll see them play 50+ shows across Mexico, the UK and mainland Europe.

Taking its name from the Soviet-era Russian term for ‘compromising material’ (the words earliest use traces back to KGB slang) that was gathered on politicians and business owners as leverage to blackmail and coerce, the monolithic drones heard on Kompromat hint at a two-fold revolution – a subconscious upheaval, as well as a socio-political one. They say of the record: “Like all of our work, the songs started from jams and were worked from there but this record feels fatter and has this kind of dance-y vibe to it. Unlike Distress Distress it feels like there is a sense of release there, despite the oppressive feeling that runs through a lot of the album.” Keeping with that theme, ‘Runnin’ Escapin’’ is about “random unpredictable situations” and the volatility inherent in them, something that’s borne out as the song unfolds throughout its running time.

Though tapping into the same transcendental minimalism of bands like Neu!, Suicide and Faust, 10 000 Russos have a sound that is solely their own: João Pimenta’s machine-like percussion and brooding vocal drawls sound like a cyborg Mark E. Smith drearily narrating the end-of-times atop the abrasive guitar manipulations and experimental loops of Pedro Pestana and driving, motorik basslines that are seemingly summoned from the most depraved corners of André Couto’s psyche. That’s been 10 000 Russos ever-evolving template for many years and, as we’ve seen with this first taste of what’s to come, on new album Kompromat that’s amped up tenfold and delivered with a new-found urgency.