The Dirty Nil

The Dirty Nil's 'Fuck Art' is a statement of confidence and defiance from a group that’s now three albums into the game—i.e., the point where ambitious rock bands are supposed to call in the orchestra, experiment with electronics, and try to make their Ok Computer. The Dirty Nil, by contrast, have opted to perfect the formula that, over the past decade, has landed them on stages with everyone from Against Me! to The Who. Fuck Art melts down all of their favorite ingredients—classic-rock heroism, pop-punk horsepower, ‘80s indie scrappiness, ‘90s alterna-crunch, speed-metal adrenaline—into a radiant, chromatic solution they can then mould and harden into unpredictable shapes.

After all, few bands could pull off a bait-and-switch as masterful as “Doom Boy,” where a thundering thrash intro clears the runway for an ascendant power-pop anthem that name-checks The Cro-Mags and Turnstile. Bentham rocked so hard during the song’s recording (trying to make Fisher and Miller laugh with his crabcore moves) that he quite literally had a blowout – “I have the pants to prove it!” Likewise, what other group would think to cap a swaying, Blue Album-worthy sing-along like “Damage Control” with a death-metal roar (“that’s Ross,” Bentham confirms, “he’s the king of the flaming-rooster scream”), or craft a love song in the key of Mötörhead (“Ride or Die”). But beyond flexing the Nil’s metal muscle more vigorously than before, Fuck Art reasserts the Nil’s uncanny knack for fusing mosh-pit-stoking energy with melodies that effortlessly soar above the melee, as heard in the adrenalized “Done With Drugs,” the swaggering Cheap Tricked knockout “Elvis ‘77,” and the open-sunroof rush of “Jealousy,” which isn’t an intentional callback to The Gin Blossoms’ “Hey Jealousy,” but would sound right at home tucked between it and a latter-day Replacements cut on an early ‘90s college-rock radio show.

“I think we have a pretty distinct knowledge and understanding and comfort about what we do,” Bentham says. “I'm proud of the job that we've done between expanding ourselves and our efforts to navigate the modern landscape as much as possible. But we've never ever sacrificed the core elements of our sound. We have a thing, and we've never compromised it, even though at times we faced a lot of external pressure to do so.”