Foggy Notions are proud to present Show Me The Body live at Button Factory Dublin on Wednesday 17th February. Tickets on general sale Friday 6th November at 10:00.
Alone Together is an album about praxis. Putting belief into action. The opening line, “radical love compels me to fight”, reflects lived experience, the act of standing up for one another and for what you believe in, regardless of the outcome. Working alongside producers Klas Åhlund and Kenneth Blume III, Show Me The Body has recontextualized their core language into something with more focus, urgency, and clarity than ever before. Alone Together is not about atmosphere but about direct communication, a call to galvanise ourselves and the people around us.
Stand with us baby. Thank you for being here. Even if you feel alone Don’t trip on it Cause we can stand alone together.
Bones of Show Me The Body's fourth full-length album formed first in their Corpus studio, in the basement of the building that also serves as the New York City collective's headquarters and the home in which frontman Julian Cashwan Pratt lives with his young family. Writing the album in the wake of the birth of his daughter, who arrived just two years before the release of the hardcore trailblazers' most harrowing and most joyous output to date. Alone Together brings the band's ethos of resilience in the darkest moments into startling focus. Alone Together is about praxis.
Pratt and the band’s cofounder, Harlan Steed, brought in composer Gio Escobar and his cohort of musicians from Standing on the Corner. "We would send Gio certain riffs from the record," Pratt explained, "and he would recontextualise those riffs in the language of lonely New York City jazz, in the vernacular that Standing on the Corner has, that we love and appreciate." That's the first thing you hear on Alone Together's opening track, "Alone Interlude": one of Pratt's crushing riffs transmuted into horn section bombast, with Pratt chanting "welcome, welcome, welcome.”
Klas Åhlund, one of the album's producers, came over from Sweden to visit Pratt and Steed in Queens and gave a blunt assessment of the band's demos. "He caught me at me becoming an adult, so I didn't tell him to fuck off." And so, Pratt said, the band sat with Åhlund's one critical piece of advice: "There's certain parts of our music that are distinctly Show Me The Body. And he was like, 'those parts only your band could do? You should just do that all the time. All the parts that sound like everybody else, you should just do less.'" With this ringing in their minds, they soon decamped to the California studio of Kenneth Blume III, where the band and their new odd-couple producers took that core sound to unheard-of heights.
On a track like "No God," the union of Åhlund, Blume and Show Me The Body render those signature sounds with purity: Pratt's overdriven banjo for a verse, before the arrival of buckshot snares, and the sheer overwhelm of Harlan Steed on bass. By the climax, Pratt's ragged half-rap of "I will wait for no god to make it real" has conflagrated, coming into a full-body shriek: "I need to make it real!" That clarity reignites when the band take confident steps forward into new territory, like the bright punk of "Good Time," which still feels fundamentally comprised of Show Me The Body DNA.
In the title track, which closes the album, you will hear the origins of the Just Blaze-ish horns from "Alone Interlude" The blood-boiling riff, and the call to action that is Alone Together's essence: "Blessed are those who stand alone." Alone Together is one part rollicking punk dirge, and one part riotous celebration - a work wrapped in the dichotomous themes of huge love and huge loss. You'll hear that come together as "Alone Interlude" transitions into track 2, "Eat for Peace": overwhelming drums storm in, churning bass, a sneering banjo, and the hoarse chant of that opening line, the mantra which underpins the record, "radical love compels me to fight". That's life, and that's Show Me The Body. Time to wake up. "Remain in love with those around you, and with yourself, when it seems like the most ridiculous option."
On previous releases, the band wrote about and against the city of New York, but on Alone Together, the city hovers in the background, “more like a ghost,” Pratt says. Replacing much of that cantankerous energy are dispatches from pits of despair, like the near-whisper over warped and warbled riffs on the existential "Do What's Right": "sometimes I wanna hurt myself / I think it would make me happy." Those depths are then punctuated with bursts of bewildering joy, brought to being by new life and old friends.
In the wake of making Alone Together, Pratt lost a close friend. Whose voice and legacy now weaves throughout Alone Together, opening the record directly alongside Pratt’s ("Are you alone?" "It's easy to feel alone”), and in his absence, the album takes on new meaning. Songs like “See You Again” had already been inspired by the death of a mentor, Mike Down of the bands Amenity and Forced Down. "Obviously, everything is tragic. That's never gonna go away," Pratt said. Then he remembered their most recent tour, where once again his dear comrade helped bring their defiant, uncontrollable live show across the world. "He would grab the mic on stage, and he would sing, and afterwards he would give it back to me, and we would often hug each other and kiss each other. It was so important to remember how ready he was to fight for those he loved. He would drop a motherfucker quick, and he would kiss a motherfucker quick. Same energy, all the time." On Alone Together, Show Me The Body follows that same impulse— whether in adoration or confrontation, the music coheres into radical, violent love.
