Released March 21, 2025, via Los Angeles’ Already Dead Tapes, SH!TOMATO is the first solo album by Seattle-based artist Daniel Wolff under the name SH!TOMATO (pronounced “shit tomato”). It’s a 100% DIY operation: Wolff plays everything—bass, trumpet, vocals, SP404-sampled drums, noise box, aux percussion—and builds the project on improvisation, loop stations, and years of trial by fire in the underground.
“I started this project in 2023,” Wolff says. “I moved to Seattle at the start of 2020 (right at the beginning of the pandemic), and began pursuing a new project. I worked with a variety of drummers, but nothing was really sticking. I grew tired of waiting around for the right person to manifest, so I decided to take the project solo.”
Featured photo by Lux Lain
The result is a disorienting, deliberate swirl of noise rock, psych, trip-hop, jazz, and DIY grit, recorded in spring 2024 at Empty Lane Studio in Bremerton, WA, with sound engineer Colin (“highly recommended!”).
Though it’s his first Seattle-based release, SH!TOMATO marks Wolff’s fifth release on Already Dead Tapes, a label he describes as “home.” The roots go deeper—Wolff spent a decade in the Chicago underground with the experimental junk jazz two-piece Comfort Food. But Seattle brought transformation: isolation, redefinition, and a new self-contained sound machine.
“I view my evolution so far as unexpected, challenging, and rewarding,” Wolff says. “If I didn’t have a drummer, I thought I couldn’t make music at all! Now that I have developed a writing, performing, and recording ‘system’ as a solo artist, the sky really is the limit.”
That system relies on layers: bass loops, SP404 samples, BOSS RC-3 blending, trumpet, vocals, noise textures. “It’s a complicated, messy writing process based on experimentation and it usually works… about 60% of the time,” he adds.
Lyrically and thematically, SH!TOMATO is loaded with the weight of starting over in a new city mid-pandemic, probing dystopian unease and existential dislocation. “This album, like any of my albums, is a snapshot into an era of my life as a musician… exploring themes of loneliness, resilience, and frustrations with finding my place in the music world.”
The opener STONEY BALONEY / CELLULOID WONDERLAND kicks in with frenetic bass, layered trumpet, and a vocal line “meant to get in your head and make your skin crawl.” It’s about surveillance, existential dread, and eventual submission to the machine. SINK YOUR TEETH follows with trip-hop melancholy and free-jazz industrial chaos, a search for belonging and healing. WURM channels sludge, stoner metal, and disillusionment with the industry: “a harsh exploration of how society tends to suck us dry of all our inner resources… the darker side of being an artist in that we must comply with the music machine to be ‘heard’.”
OOEYGEODUCK, Wolff’s personal favorite, is where the SH!TOMATO persona solidifies: “an anti-hero, superhero-like character… angry and cynical… sarcastic and triumphant.” Using samples from Creature from the Black Lagoon, it nods to MF DOOM’s world-building and unpacks the artist’s role in a crumbling, absurd world.
The visual identity of SH!TOMATO is as essential as the sound. The cover art shows Wolff smashing one of his own tomatoes in his fist—a nod to his side hustle, Underground Produce, an organic farm that supplies food banks. “So much of my music over the years has been inspired by food,” he explains.
“The cover art is a tomato, one of my own, smashed in my fist. I think it’s a mix of gore and power. Something messy and triumphant, silly and irreverent, and something angry. This is how I see SH!TOMATO.” The inside cover features Lux Lain’s photos from a shoot where Wolff smashed tomatoes all over himself, surrounded by his instruments.
Wolff’s next steps include recording a couple of new singles this summer at Empty Lane Studio and touring the West Coast with Peopling in late July/early August. A Midwest and East Coast tour is also in the works for the fall. “My hope, this year, is to push this album as far as it can go… One of the challenges of playing experimental music is that people generally don’t know they want it until they hear it.”
Wolff moved to Seattle in part to embed himself in the city’s underground scene—a move shaped as much by its legacy as by its present-day potential. “Seattle, of course, has a deep, rich music history which I don’t need to expound on here,” he says, “but needless to say, this history is partially what drew me to this city in the first place.”
Since relocating from Chicago at the start of the pandemic, he’s been immersed in the city’s noise, improv, and experimental circles—a small but deeply committed community. “I have spent much of my time working in the noise/improv/experimental underground scene,” he says. More recently, he’s been drawn into the noise-punk and University District house-show scenes, where things can get wild in the best way.
What stands out to him is how Seattle’s scene isn’t so sprawling that genres can’t cross-pollinate. “There’s a lot of crossover when booking bills, which I really appreciate.” Still, he points out the limitations: “The ‘Seattle Freeze’ is a real thing… the city has room to blend its cliques a little better, and perhaps be more inclusive to new artists.”
There’s also what he calls the “King of the Hill” mentality—an unspoken hierarchy common to most music cities—but he sees potential for Seattle to push past that. “Seattle is in a unique position to bring people from all musical backgrounds together under one roof. I strive to do this when I book my own shows.”
Coming from Chicago, what strikes him most is the collaborative energy. “Stick around Seattle long enough, you’ll find yourself collaborating with all kinds of artists and have like… six different side projects.”
Because he landed just as COVID hit, Wolff feels like he missed out on a certain phase of the scene—especially when it comes to DIY house shows. “It seemed like the house show scene was thriving a bit more than it is now. Seattle is expensive, and very few people own DIY houses. Shows are usually held at bars or art spaces, which is great, but everyone knows the real shows are in basements, right?”
Still, he’s been part of the rebirth. “It’s been interesting watching the rebirth of Seattle music post-pandemic, and I am thankful to have been a part of that movement.”
For anyone digging into the broader scene that SH!TOMATO exists within, Wolff recommends: Peopling (South Sound noise), Miscomings (noise punk, Tacoma/Seattle), Sea Moss (Portland noise), (-2) (noise-jazz skronk from Portland), Coyote Teeth (harsh noise meme-core, Seattle), Sissy XO (noise-hardcore from Vancouver, BC), CSTMR (no-wave thrash, guitar/drums two-piece), Cop Funeral (experimental, LA), and Enemy Zero (Olympia noise). And, of course, Already Dead Tapes.
“I just feel like food is tied to my meaning on this Earth somehow,” Wolff says. SH!TOMATO, in all its smashed, looping, snarling glory, is where that meaning ferments into noise.
