The bad trip in “Dose” is not treated like a warning sign. For Trip Villain, it is closer to a operating condition: sweat, panic, bass pressure, body music, chemical overload, and the ugly little voice that says one more hit might fix it.
The Brooklyn band’s second LP landed May 8th through Seeing Red Records, sharpening the electronic metal attack Josh Musto, Damien Moffitt, and Jon Ehlers have been building since “Won” in 2022.
Trip Villain pull from thrash, nu metal, industrial techno, EDM, and the Brooklyn electronic underground, with the record moving like a rave that got booked inside a circle pit and forgot to end before sunrise.
Musto puts it: “Dose is the soundtrack to having a bad acid trip and absolutely loving it. Trip Villain is a metal band that makes dance music. I’ve felt for a while that the two genres at their best evoke the same feelings – different languages, but the shared purpose is to move peoples’ bodies.”
That idea keeps the album from turning into a genre exercise. “Dose” does not split its time between metal parts and dance parts. It treats riffs and drops as versions of the same physical command.
“We built this album on two pillars,” Musto says. “Number one: every single moment of music exists in service to the groove. There are no soft, clean, filler parts awkwardly shoehorned in to appeal to radio, or big flamboyant choruses that undermine the gravity of the main riff. Number two: every riff deserves respect.”
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The comparison he draws is less about reference points than body mechanics. The pressure before a Pantera or Gojira riff lands, for him, is the same heart-spike as a Boys Noize or Skrillex beat drop. “This is not a 50/50 dance/metal album,” he adds, “it’s 100% of both sonic palettes blasting at every moment. And it’s meant to be listened to EXTREMELY LOUD.”
Across the record, that physical logic sits inside a loose story of ego rot, altered states, addiction, club-floor paranoia, and the collapsing difference between pleasure and damage. “Reign Supreme” opens with domination as disease: a self-appointed tyrant feeding on confusion, ambition, and wasted time. “Cyan Spirits” pushes the body into a dark room where anxiety melts under 303 acid lines before the exit suddenly becomes very hard to find.
That shift – release turning into threat – runs deep through “Dose.” “You Flew a Plane Into My Heart” turns a trip into a hostile hallucination, full of bees, fear, sexual grotesquerie, and the dumb terror of realizing the peak is not going to be polite. “Lowbender” pushes bass into almost religious territory, where the body becomes less human and more receiver. “Meth Communion” is shorter, uglier, and more direct: lungs, veins, hate, crank, choke.
The record is not shy about its cartoonish horror either. Trip Villain know how absurd the nightmare can get when panic, drugs, sex, power, and volume all start talking at once. “Villain Maw,” with lyrics by Jacob Lumet-Cannavale, turns the party into a trap, the mouth into a place, and the body into evidence. “Angelsmoke,” written lyrically by Ehlers, moves in a different register, with crushed wings, windows rolled down, and something holy reduced to dust. Closer “Shitkill” ends on decayed authority: an aged-out commander clinging to power while the throne starts to smell.
Full track-by-track commentary from founding guitarist/vocalist Josh Musto follows below.
TRACK BY TRACK BREAKDOWN:
Reign Supreme: The night I made the first demo of Reign Supreme I had been at a DJ party thrown by my homies in Surf Gang and Bodybag and dipped early because I had a burst of inspiration when Goner dropped “Spheres of Madness” by Decapitated in the middle of his set. At first I thought he was trolling, but the crowd loved it and it dawned on me that it actually fit the vibe perfectly, and I wanted to do some version of that move on our new record.
I immediately ran home and started downloading Youtube mp3s of the most brutal riffs I could think of – Slayer’s “Raining Blood” and Gojira’s “Remembrance.” I doubled the “Remembrance” intro with a super distorted kick from a gabber drum kit Goner had sent me, looped the first measure of the “Raining Blood” guitar gallop, and built the track on that foundation. After the V1 demo, I wrote actual riffs, Damien wrote original drum parts, Jon came up with some synth melodies on top, and I deleted the original samples.
That process really encapsulated the thesis of this album: maximum brutality and maximum danceability. Another Slayer nod on this track is that I wrote it from the perspective of the villain, which they often did – an amalgamation of a few different manipulative narcissists I’ve known. “Reign Supreme,” was the working title of the first demo, an obvious nod to Reign In Blood, as well as my favorite Dying Fetus album that shares the same title.
The lyrics were the last piece, and I decided to write them around the title so we could keep it. I’ve always proudly worn my influences on my sleeve and this is a prime example. – Josh Musto
Cyan Spirits
I’ve associated the sound of the Roland 303 with the color cyan since my brief stint running lights at Basement, the dystopian Berlin-style techno club in Queens. They were very strict that I only use red lighting, but I could throw in a little cyan here and there if I heard acid bass (303).
Our synth player Peter let me borrow his 303 to make the first demo of this song, which started from a riff our synthbassist Jon had sent me (the “all anxiety melts away” section). It was the first thing Jon ever sent me for DOSE – we had the album title before we wrote any music, so he made all his working titles puns on the word dose – this one was called BullDoser. Lyrically, I wrote “Cyan Spirits” and “You Flew a Plane Into My Heart” a few days after watching a friend of mine have a bad acid trip at a rave (Merge January 2023 to be exact). These are probably the most literal lyrics on the record.
As we walked in, Aurora Halal was in the middle of an incredible hardware set of warm, earthy, inviting techno. People had been dancing since the previous morning, so the concrete floor was soaked in a half-inch of liquid – an insidious cocktail of spilled drinks, sweat, and god knows what else. – “My feet fumble with fear, splashing mystery liquid.” – The venue doubled as a WeWork style space during the day, complete with fully glass ceilings, which had been blocked by a shoddy patchwork of black garbage bags, save for one tiny hole which let an extremely bright sunbeam tear through the illusion of darkness – “A single beam of lights assaulting my gaze.” – And then… darkness washed over the crowd. – Josh Musto
You Flew a Plane Into My Heart
After about an hour of organic Aurora Halal bliss, DJ Amotik took over the decks and hit us with (what I remember as) harsh jet engine sounds, followed by the most unfriendly, bass-less 100bpm kick drum I’ve ever heard. My buddy started hyperventilating and said we needed to leave immediately. We Ubered back to my place, put on Air’s Moon Safari to calm him down, and I looked at him and said “that DJ flew a plane into your heart tonight.” At that moment I knew: this borderline avant-garde demo I had made as a joke, “Fart Dying,” had to be called “You Flew a Plane Into My Heart.”
I was in the midst of a major Gojira kick, so I started messing around with a drum sample from “The Art of Dying,” specifically the first four bars, before it turns into a math equation. I downloaded the audio of the Krimh (Septicflesh drummer) YouTube cover and mistakenly dragged it into a MIDI track, which was set to the “Bedbugs” preset on the Ableton Wavetable synth. The sound, which is mostly unchanged on the record, made me laugh so hard that I approached the rest of the track with the intention of making the rest of the band crack up.
The slow triplet groove in the verse and Darude-meets-Dragonforce sounding lead in the chorus were moods we had never played with – quirky but still aggressive as hell. Once we worked out guitar, bass, and drum parts, we knew we had made something truly unique. – Josh Musto
Lowbender
“Lowbender” was the first song we put together for DOSE. I read on Metal Injection that the game Cyberpunk 2077 was doing a contest for a piece of new original music for their in-game radio station. Cyberpunk was already kind of an aesthetic touchstone for where we wanted to take DOSE, so we decided to hunker down and blast out a track we could submit. We figured we probably wouldn’t win the contest (we didn’t), but regardless would end up with something super dope. We brainstormed the most brutal concepts to write about and ended up somewhere between The Matrix, Dr. Manhattan, and The Pick Of Destiny.
A man imbibes a super potent psychedelic drug while blasting hard techno and trips so hard that he sheds his physical form and transforms into an omnipotent spirit made of pure BASS – the Lowbender – picture the Airbender, meets Lemmy. The idea of the Lowbender haunting some super lame hippie festival and blowing out everyone’s eardrums always gave me a chuckle, but we’ll have to revisit that on the next record in “Lowbender Part 2: This Time It’s Personal.” – Josh Musto
Dose
We had a more “rock n roll” sounding song that we cut from the album, which included a short drum solo section. We had tracked Damo improvising drum fills for about ten minutes, so I went in and made little loops out of it, then assembled them into a rough song structure. Jon sent me a bunch of synth riffs, I went through around six different versions of a guitar scheme, and eventually I refined it into the title track.
“Dose” is the spiritual sequel to “Fun Guy,” the instrumental track off our first record. A little easter egg is that this song started from the same nugget as Lowbender, which is why they’re both 119bpm.
And again, for legal reasons I can’t get into specifics, but there is at least one Sith sampled in this song. – Josh Musto
Meth Communion
The first demo of “Meth Communion” was a live jam complete with the first tempo drop into the second riff. The title was a reference to High On Fire’s “Death Is This Communion,” which one of the riffs reminded me of.
The first time we played with our homies in Lip Critic I was floored by the live outro bass riff in the song “Milky Max” where Danny Eberle gets off the drums, screams his ass off, and jumps into the audience. I knew our album was missing a giant stupid riff. What I ended up with was energetically inspired by Lip Critic, but musically more in line with more fried stuff like Eyehategod and Crowbar.
I always have this Exodus quote in the back of my head – Paul Baloff’s way of telling the band a riff was too complex was to say the “Two IQers” wouldn’t get it. I always gotta throw some red meat in for the Two IQers. The sludge riff in “Meth Communion” is the dumbest riff I’ve ever written. And to top it off, Danny was gracious enough to come in and scream over it. I’m not sure what “beating on the blast door” means, but it was the most brutal line I could think up. Shoutout the Trade Federation. – Josh Musto
Villain Maw
The intro riff in “Villain Maw” came out of a jam I had in 2023 with my homies Grayson and Mo from Vixen Maw. I’m a big fan of little guitar noises, and there are a bunch in this song. I love players like Joe Duplantier (Gojira), Dimebag Darrell (Pantera), Jack Wetmore (Model/Actriz), Saguiv Rosenstock (YHWH Nailgun), who all have these cheeky little ways to throw harmonics into their riffs. The main riff is just me dragging my index finger between frets 3 and 5.
I brought it to Jon and he came up with this really sick plucky bass riff – it felt like evil club music. We started opening our shows with this song because that riff really encapsulates the genre-fusion on this album. I knew I needed to get my brother Jake Cannavale (Vixen Maw, The Mandalorian, Nurse Jackie) singing on it – Jake co-wrote “Another Round” off our last album. I sent him the instrumental track and a few days later he came over with the whole song written as a frantic back-and-forth duet. I had no notes and tracked him singing the whole song in under an hour. I’ve always wanted to use the word “abacinate” in a song, and Jake finally made it happen – Slayer fans will understand.
Definitely a lot of Static-X / late 90’s industrial influence in the guitars and production on this one. I’m hesitant to get into specifics for legal reasons but Star Wars prequel fans will recognize a lot of the electronic percussion samples… once again big ups to the Trade Federation.
I chose Joker colors (purple and green) for the light show & music video because this song is cracked the fuck out. – Josh Musto
Angelsmoke
“Angelsmoke” is a personal story in which I had been poisoned. I am still not sure what the contents were, but on my 17th birthday I had been given something that I thought was Starburst. What resulted was one of the scariest experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Obviously, it likely was something meant for recreational use, but I was not prepared to put my body through that.
Through this experience, I was both betrayed and tossed to the furthest edge of my sanity in a synthetically induced haze. The song has an eerie sound palette that’s both comforting and discomforting. There are characteristically softer vocals that narrate a safe passage through the devastating blown out 808’s and guitars. Something akin to a chemically imagined angel guiding the listener to a comfortable place. – Jon Ehlers
ShitKill
We decided to re-work an unreleased ShitKill song to close out DOSE. Damien and I put out an album and two EPs with ShitKill, (Asylum EP 2010, S/T 2011, The New Breed 2014), and had been working on a second album until we stopped work to focus on Netherlands when we joined the band in 2018. We cannibalized a couple old ShitKill riffs on WON but I’ve always been hesitant to fully recycle old songs. I messed with the structure a bit, tweaked a few of the notes (to make the riffs even more menacing), and Jon and I re-tracked everything except drums. I can’t imagine this record not closing out with the absolutely GIANT riff at the end. – Josh Musto
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The album was produced by Musto, with guitar, vocals, and programming from him, drums and percussion by Moffitt, and synthesizer and vocals from Ehlers. Joe Ippolito mixed most of the record, with Jack Mullin mixing “You Flew a Plane Into My Heart” and “Lowbender,” preliminary mixing by Damien Moffitt, and mastering by Will Killingsworth. Guest vocals come from Goner on “You Flew a Plane Into My Heart,” Danny Eberle of Lip Critic, MK Ultra, and Post No Bills on “Meth Communion,” and Lumet-Cannavale of Vixen Maw on “Villain Maw.” Jack Florio adds guitar on “Reign Supreme” and “Lowbender.”
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