The riff that became “A Nice Relaxing Bath” didn’t sit right on its own. It looped in the practice space, heavy but incomplete, until the answer felt obvious: “this track needs Eugene, it’s his.” The call went out, and when Eugene Robinson stepped in, the song stopped behaving like a Nadsat track and started bending around his voice.
Italian duo Nadsat return with the second single from their upcoming album “Out For Blood”, due March 6th via Overdrive Records. The track features Robinson, known for his work in Buñuel and Oxbow, and the collaboration lands somewhere between instinct and inevitability. “This song was never anybody else’s but mine,” he says. “I heard that on first hearing it and I suspect the world will too.”
Nadsat had already pushed their sound into a tighter, more aggressive shape on 2023’s “Torn Times”, where everything leaned toward subtraction — minimal editing, direct hits, no excess. That record locked them into a stripped-down, saturated approach built on short, blunt songs. What follows now is less about restraint and more about pressure.
“A Nice Relaxing Bath” sits near the center of that shift. The band call it one of the most dynamic cuts on the record, and one of the clearest points where blues seeps into their writing. Not as a reference point, but as a working part of the structure: harmonica lines cutting through the mix, slide guitar scraping across “For the Hell Hounds”, riffs dragging themselves into something closer to sludge than straight noise rock.
Wyświetl ten post na Instagramie
“The blues entered into the writing flow spontaneously,” they explain. It wasn’t mapped out in advance. It showed up in the way riffs leaned, in borrowed lines — like fragments lifted almost directly from Muddy Waters’ “I Am the Blues” and dropped into “Dear Guts” — and in the way certain songs refused to stay clean or contained.
That shift toward something thicker, more suffocating, runs across the whole record. The band describe “Out For Blood” as heavier and more distorted than anything they’ve done before, a record with no real thematic thread beyond getting something out of their system. Anger, irony, disillusionment, flashes of something physical and ugly — it’s all in there, but the meaning sits in the sound itself.
They still treat the studio like an extension of the room they rehearse in. No click track, almost no editing, nothing polished past recognition. “We record without a click track, almost no editing, trying to keep the sound as close as possible to what we hear in our live sets,” they say. That approach is practical. They’ve seen what happens when songs evolve on stage and refuse to shrink them back down for recording.
“Untied” from the previous record stretched far beyond its original version once it hit live sets, its ending pulled out and looped until it felt right in the room. That stuck.
On “Out For Blood”, they wrote with those moments already in mind. The closing riff in “Deeper Ways (PT. I)” stays long and repetitive on purpose. “We thought it would feel better live. And oh boy, it does feel good.”
The collaboration with Robinson followed the same logic. He was given full autonomy, and the result didn’t just complete the track — it pushed it somewhere the band wouldn’t have reached on their own. “He delivered such a dramatic and intense performance, adding some nuances we would have never been able to conceive.”
Lyrically, things stay loose by design. “Instinct is 90% of the job,” they say. Half the lyrics were written days before entering the studio, often starting as placeholder words chosen for how they sounded rather than what they meant. Some of those fragments stayed. Others turned into more defined pieces, though even then, clarity isn’t the goal.
“Dead End” circles around the inability to move forward and the quiet acceptance of that state. “Untold War” can read like anything personal or abstract, but it traces back to something specific — recovery from ACL surgery. The meaning exists, but it’s not locked in place for the listener.
The album pulls from a wide range of influences without smoothing them out: Eyehategod, Melvins, Entombed, Whores, alongside the weight of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and R.L. Burnside. The result isn’t a blend so much as a pile-up. Sludge dragging against post-hardcore tension, noise rock pushed until it starts to collapse under its own density.
There are 12 tracks on “Out For Blood”, and none of them are built to let up. The band describe it as a wall with no exit, a continuation of what “Torn Times” started but driven further into repetition, weight, and volume. “We tried to write songs that we liked to play,” they say. “A step forward from the last release but retaining its fury.”
They remain, first and last, a live band.
“Out For Blood” is out March 6th via Overdrive Records.
🔔 IDIOTEQ is ad-free, independent, and runs on one person’s time. If you want it to stay that way: DONATE via PayPal 𝗈𝗋 SUPPORT via Patreon.
Stay connected via Newsletter · Instagram · Facebook · X (Twitter) · Threads · Bluesky · Messenger · WhatsApp.
