Ripped and Torn: Vinyl LP

Pre-Order Item. Release Date Subject to Change.
Label: Matador
Release Date: 6th June

Lifeguard with the debut album we've been waiting for since their 2022 EP 'Crowd Can Talk' and 2023 EP 'Dressed In Trenches' arrived with the kind of backed up buzz that had you recalling some of the best indie and alt-rock bands of the years who backed up the buzz with the bangers. You know the ones. Pretty special stuff coming through. 

On June 6th, Chicago’s Lifeguard will release their debut album Ripped and Torn on Matador Records. The youthful trio of Asher Case (bass, baritone guitar, vocals), Isaac Lowenstein (drums, synth), and Kai Slater (guitar, vocals) have been making music together since they were in high school, nearly a quarter of their lives. Noisy and immediate, cryptic but heartfelt, they draw inspiration from punk, dub, power-pop and experimental sounds, and bring them all together in explosive cacophony.

Recorded last year in Chicago with producer Randy Randall (No Age), the album captures a claustrophobic scrappiness that evokes the feeling and energy of house parties and tightly-packed rooms, where ears are easily overwhelmed, and ragged improvisations connect with the same force as melodic hooks.

The members of Lifeguard are no longer kids. As they’ve grown up, their tastes and identities have naturally diverged with Case, Lowenstein, and Slater each immersing themselves into passions and subcultures that lay outside of the group’s initial scope. But they’ve learned to make space for one another, mirroring the motto of UK experimental icons This Heat: "All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hour alert.”

“It Will Get Worse” evokes early punk, with Lowenstein swapping seamlessly between a blistering d-beat and a shuddering odd-time break. The dub-inflected “Like You’ll Lose” takes inspiration from Lee Perry’s tight drum sound and expansive lo-fi atmospherics, with Case’s baseline providing a center of gravity for skittering rhythms and tumbling echoes.

“Under Your Reach” has become a linchpin of the Lifeguard live set, where its electric organ intro often signals the close of a mid-set free-form freakout. That drone gives way to Slater’s laser-beam guitar riff, and to his and Case’s eerily anthemic vocals, before ultimately blasting off into buzzsaw noise in the song’s climactic breakdown.

Lifeguard remains a singular and intimate space where freedom, noise, and melody find visceral form. “The physical element is something we’re all very together on,” explains Slater. “The immediacy of making music. The instant pleasure and satisfaction of it.”

Tracklisting:

A Tightwire
It Will Get Worse
Me and My Flashes
Under Your Reach
How to Say Deisar
(I Wanna) Break Out
Like You’ll Lose
Music for 3 Drums
France And
Charlie’s Vox
Ripped + Torn
T.L.A.