When Justin Pearson says “we just wanted our music back, so we took it. Illegally,” it’s not posturing. It’s a concise summary of what happened with Amateur Surgery on Half-Hog Abortion Island, the upcoming anthology by All Leather, out July 11 via Three One G. The double LP compiles the full arc of the band’s short, loud, and wired existence—remixed, re-recorded, and recontextualized.
All Leather, described by Alternative Press as “teeming with a circuit-encrusted attitude that seemingly borrows classic caged-animal vitriol,” was never designed to follow industry etiquette.
Featuring Nathan Joyner (Psychic Graveyard, Some Girls), Jung Sing or Tin Cagayat on drums, and Pearson on vocals, the group mashed electronic abrasion with punk vitriol. Pearson calls the genre simply: “annoying.” But more importantly, it was theirs.
“Things with the band and label were pretty lame,” Pearson says, referring to Dim Mak, the label run by Steve Aoki. “So the band took all the material back, recorded over most of it, remixed all of it, and remastered it as an anthology.” The result is a complete, disfigured self-portrait of a band that played hard and broke even harder.
Originally released on Dim Mak nearly two decades ago, All Leather’s recordings came with a $7,000 studio budget and an eventual dispute over royalties. “Dim Mak stopped accounting to us after one of our tracks sold just shy of 2 million downloads,” Pearson recalls.
“Granted, the sales were due to the Bloody Beetroots doing a remix for us… But we were actually accounted for that track’s sales, which shows that All Leather made a little over $300.”
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The numbers didn’t add up. According to Pearson, Dim Mak claimed the band still owes $14,000. “Which I suppose makes sense,” he adds, “when they also charged us for shit like a photoshoot our friend did for free, and somehow managed to not account for any physical sales, or merch at all.”
The band alleges that Dim Mak also licensed one of their vocal stems to another act—Religion—without their consent. “The lyrics to the song ‘Mystery Meat’ are, ‘burn the barn down,’” Pearson says. “They used it in a song called ‘Burn the Bar Down.’ I was not asked about that in advance, nor was I compensated, other than Dim Mak saying sorry and sending me a hundred bucks.”
That kind of treatment, Pearson notes, makes sense “coming from a label owner who spends $23K on Cap’n Jazz art, and who gets paid triple digits to push play on a laptop in Vegas.” The subtext is bitterness earned, not manufactured. There’s a suggestion of something deeper too: “I guess I expect this situation from a dude who has allegations of misuse of funds from the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant,” Pearson adds. “When you are that rich, you become a different tier of human.”
The new anthology, however, isn’t a rehash. These aren’t just archival releases or B-sides. The band went back and reworked most of the material, injecting their sound with more menace, more grime, and more fury. Scene Point Blank once said the band “walks the line between electronica, punk, grindcore, and dance-pop.” The new versions push the needle further into chaos.
Tracks include titles like “I Do It With My Prick Out,” “When I Grow Up I Wanna Fuck Like a Girl,” “Well Fed Fuck” (featuring Eric Paul and David Scott Stone), and “I Don’t Hate Fgs, God Does.”* These are not attempts at radio play—they’re provocations, explosions of guttural, digital noise with titles that are as abrasive as the sounds inside them.
Recording took place across San Diego—at Earthling with Mike Kamoo, Singing Serpent with Brent Asbury, and Cereal and Soda with Joyner himself, who also handled mixing, remixing, and mastering. The double LP comes with a faux leather cover and layout by Displaced/Replaced. It’s being pressed on limited edition color vinyl and lands on Three One G, the label that originally housed some of All Leather’s earlier work.
Pearson’s hope isn’t for mass appeal. “It’s not technically new songs, but the versions are unreleased, and some are noticeably different,” he says. “If you are down to cover it in any way, I’d be psyched. No pressure though, as it’s EDM. But I’ll take any attention you are up for giving this.”
The collection’s name—Amateur Surgery on Half-Hog Abortion Island—doesn’t explain itself, and probably doesn’t want to. That’s All Leather. Weird, confrontational, and unapologetic. They didn’t break up. They broke back in.
