It’s been a little over a year and a half since Chicago’s Poison Boys exposed us to their seedy dive bar rock and roll with their debut ‘Out of My Head‘
It hasn’t exactly been completely quiet though. In 2020 they dropped the raw 7’ ‘Mean Queen‘/’Take a Chance with Me‘ and now we have the first taste of their forthcoming album.
‘Nothing But Darkness‘ opens with arena rock fury into a delicious;y dirty riff before divebombing into a scrappy and sleazy dose of hard-rock-stained street punk.
We hooked up for a little Q&A.
How was your 2020?
2020 was what it was, but we made the best of it. Started off with a bang getting to play the House of Blues for around 400-500 people while opening for The Adicts, that was totally sick. We ended up getting some pretty cool footage of the show that’ll be used for a music video for “Nothing but Darkness” that’ll be out soon. We also released our fourth 7″ record called “Mean Queen” on badass looking yellow vinyl through our friends at Hobo Wolfman Records in Chicago. Finished out the year working pretty hard on our new LP, which will contain “Nothing but Darkness” + 11 other tracks so we’re super excited about that.
Thoughts on the recent deaths of Sylvain Sylvain and Phil Spector…
Syl Sylvain was obviously a huge inspiration to us. Without him, there wouldn’t be a New York Dolls and of course, then there wouldn’t really be a Poison Boys. We owe our sound in very large part to the music he made and while we never got to meet him, we feel a pretty tremendous loss with his passing. Phil Spector on the other hand also made some absolutely stone-cold classics. Some of them could possibly have even sounded better more stripped-down, but then it wouldn’t be that Phil Spector sound we all know. All I can say is he made great music and terrible life decisions. I’ve dealt firsthand with some super fantastic songwriters/musicians that had an awful abusive side and ended up ostracizing the majority of their friends, lovers, and bandmates because of it. It’s a damn shame but it’s still worth celebrating those who played the actual music that was written. The Ronettes, The Crystals, Darlene Love, those are some of the best if not THE best singers of all time in my opinion and their music changed my life forever from hearing them in the car as a little kid. In recent years I’ve played the hell out of that Back to Mono box set. It never gets old.
What’s up for 2021?
This year we have a bunch of releases in the works. Stay tuned for the next single off of our upcoming LP, this one called “Dick in the Dirt“. A lighthearted sleazer of a track I’m sure many of us can relate to about getting so wasted you find yourself waking up on someone’s lawn the next day. Some of us have been there… more than a few times! Cheers!
