Another Night Out With The Jesus Lizard

In conversation with David Yow and guitarist Duane Denison.

by Khagan Aslanov

Photos by Joshua Black Wilkin

Published on September 10, 2024

There was a specific strain of kid in the ’90s who never found what they were looking for in grunge, indie, or hip-hop, genres that came to define the decade. Kids with an untellable yearning for something rougher, faster, more dissonant and nihilistic. These kids with soon-to-be blown eardrums found a strange home in the insipid rosters of noise punk labels like Touch and Go, SST, Alternative Tentacles, and Amphetamine Reptile, and in the pungent embrace of bands like Killdozer, Tragic Mulatto, and Oxbow.

The Jesus Lizard were not the most wretched band amongst their peers, nor did they aim to be, really. Even in that overstock of underground gnashers, they were a singularity. They understood both havoc and restraint, and deployed them in equal measure. They forewent sludge, wave saxes and throbbing electronics, sticking instead to the traditional vox/guitar/bass/drums combination. They wrote albums that were clanging and loud and felt impossibly airtight. And during their by-now mythical live shows, they unchained that coiled minimalism onto their audiences, with songs that felt so rigid they were bound to snap in moments, then turning dizzyingly tensile the next. With little to no ostentation or pre-tense, they set almost-unattainable standards of what it meant to make tuneful noise.

The band came about from the dissolution of the Austin outfit Scratch Acid, and spent close to a decade on Touch and Go, releasing a quartet of now-immortal albums helmed by Steve Albini’s production. In 1995, they signed to Capitol Records and began stretching their vocal and musical skills into new, experimental directions, looking toward the future for what seemed like the first time in their tenure. Then, just four years later, the Jesus Lizard broke up. They have reconvened for short reunion tours sporadically in the ensuing years, with fans, both old and new, clamouring for more material and losing hope with every tour that passed.

Now, suddenly, the Jesus Lizard are back, with an extended tour and a new album to boot.

Yet, Rack is not a rehash of the halcyon days, nor does it feel like a cash-in on the ‘90s nostalgia that has swept over young generations. The band appears to be looking to the future once again, cutting an album that picks up where they left off all those decades ago, but also sounds and feels as vital and untethered as they always were.

“If I had a goal at all with this, it was to try and yes, reference the past, but to evolve. And well, I think we did it,” says Duane Denison, the inimitable guitarist, whose tense, metronome-like arpeggiated lines defined the band’s sound.

Their live shows continue to overtake the senses as well. For all of the backfilled legend of how ‘violent’ their concerts were at the time, even at their most animal, the Jesus Lizard shows avoided the angry, unsafe atmosphere of hardcore punk, opting for something more sensuous, self-aware and simply fun.

Photo by Doug Coombe

“It’s physical, but without malice.”

– David Yow

“It’s physical, but without malice,” says David Yow, the lovely, lurid frontman of the Jesus Lizard, infamous for wild stage dives and frequent bouts of nudity. “When we look out at the crowd, we want to see smiling faces.”

The timing of this rebirth seems particularly loaded, with their longest collaborator, Steve Albini, passing away just a month before the announcement of Rack. After all, when the Jesus Lizard dissolved, Albini’s band, Shellac, was left as perhaps the closest that noise fans got to the sort of raw, agitated, concentric clamour that became their brand. And when the band moved to Capitol, all sorts of stories flew around about Albini chastising them publicly for moving to a major, with the once-perfect working relationship looking like it was permanently in tatters.

But once again, the press stories and fan-milled rumours never really accurately captured the enduring connection between the two: as Yow says, “About two weeks before he died, Steve (Albini) texted me to say ‘Dude, you guys are recording a new album? People are going to shit themselves!’

The future of the band has always been uncertain. Since 1999, after that first push, the Jesus Lizard have become a shadowy figure on the scene, resurrecting for those brief reunion tours and popping up on albums of fellow experimentalists with little fanfare or promotion. So who knows how long this stretch will last? For now, thankfully, they’re back to unleash that giddy vileness onto a new batch of young believers.

“We still tour like we used to,” Denison says. “With a minimal crew, in large vans, in cheap motels. We’re still doing it. We’ve made this into a self-sustaining organism. We’re healthy, we get along, we have new ideas, and we’ve still got our chops. Or at least most of them.”