The third single from (16)’s upcoming covers record lands like a confession. Their take on Black Flag’s “Beat My Head Against the Wall” doesn’t stretch or decorate the original so much as drag it through three decades of their own history with it still intact underneath.
“Black Flag’s ‘Beating My Head Against the Wall’ was my first real fracture,” says vocalist Bobby Ferry. “Punk stopped being us vs. them. They turned the blade inward. It became me vs. me, and in retrospect, this song served as the template for the whole inception of (16). We formed in 1992, only eight years after this song was released. A majority of the notes we play can be traced back to this. Instead of ripping it off for 34 years, we finally surrendered and just covered it.”
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That sense of surrender runs through “Forgeries Vol. 1, 1972–1984,” the band’s eleventh album, out May 1st via Heavy Psych Sounds. The record pulls from a wide span — Bee Gees, Scorpions, Black Flag, Blue Öyster Cult — but treats them less like a playlist and more like a set of compulsions that needed to be dealt with directly.
“There comes a point in every band’s life when originality stops being a virtue and honesty takes the wheel,” the band explain. “We return to the impulse that first dragged us into loud rooms and bad ideas: the urge to steal what we love and make it semi-unrecognizable through devotion.”
Covers have always sat inside (16)’s process, but here they’re pushed to the front. Not replicas, not clean tributes — something closer to translation after years of wear. “We’ve always believed that a great cover is not mimicry but revelation. It’s finding a song that’s already lived inside you since youth and letting it crawl out, bruised and changed.”
The selections stretch across eras and styles, but the band treat them as a single thread: “In our collective head, this album exists because these songs demanded it. Because they screamed copy me, and we listened.” What comes out the other side is described less as homage than as something taken and given back altered — “a thank you note and a theft.”
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The artwork, handled by Marald, leans into that idea — stark, uneasy, hard to place — matching a record built on obsession rather than genre logic.
“Beat My Head Against the Wall” sits right at the center of it. Not just another cover, but a loop closing — the point where influence stops pretending to hide. As Jerue puts it, “a majority of the notes we play can be traced back to this.”
“Forgeries Vol. 1, 1972–1984” is out May 1st on Heavy Psych Sounds.
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