When I go swimming in the North Sea
burning ships are guiding me.
You can hear the room tightening around Dry Skin‘s new record, Dead Wood, from the start, like the walls have decided they’ve heard enough excuses and would now prefer a beat. This post-punk act from Dresden possesses a kind of wiry conviction with this offering: nothing here feels overly fussed with; the pleasure comes from how directly it moves, and how casually it slips a knife between the ribs of modern life.
Robert E. Smith has been dragging this project through various states of existence since 2007, first under the gloriously dubious name I’M YOUR STALKER, later through a long interruption imposed by money, work, and the general insult of adulthood. Then the world shut down, live music temporarily vanished, and the band finally had time to become…a band. He was joined by drummer Simon Herzog, synth aficionado Bernd van den Broedericken, and bass virtuoso John Köhler. Dead Wood carries that feeling of delayed gratification as it finds its proper form. This is not the sound of people discovering themselves; it is the sound of people deciding to get on with it.
Dry Skin describes their coordinates with a wink: “Somewhere between Factory Records or Daniel Miller’s Mute Records, Captured Tracks or Mexican Summer. Between Talking Heads and The Cure. Between James Murphy and the Muppets.” Good line. Better still, the EP earns it. These songs have the clipped drive of stripped-down new wave, the odd little smirk of post-punk, and the occasional bounce of something that might have once stumbled out of Manchester at 3 a.m. with its shirt half untucked and its head full of ideas.
Again and Again opens the EP by staring straight at the tidy little coffin of adult aspiration: work, mortgage, inherited fantasy, fear on a loop. The song moves with a pared-back insistence that brings Suicide, Fad Gadget, and The Normal to mind, almost like doo-wop got locked in a concrete room with minimalist post-punk and came out with its tie hanging loose and its faith shot through. It’s funny…until you realise it’s also your life.
The video for the song is as minimalist as the song itself, with a charming DIY choreography video starring dancer Cindy Hammer. “I am really happy to have found a visualization of the forever returning stupidity of human behaviour the lyrics are about,” Smith reflects.
So Clean is the sound of social performance turned rancid. Everybody’s composed, everybody’s respectable, everybody’s standing on a nice clean street while the ugly business gets filed somewhere out of sight. The refrain lands like a command barked by a culture obsessed with presentation and allergic to conscience. Its energy has that jumpy, needled edge that calls up LCD Soundsystem and Dan Deacon, though Dry Skin sound less interested in catharsis than in exposing the stench underneath the deodorant.
The title track Dead Wood is one of the EP’s best turns, a warped little travelogue through environmental collapse, lifestyle vanity, and cheerful self-involvement. Burning ships, hiking crews, photographs in the firelight: the world is caving in, but at least the picture came out nice. There’s real humor here, black and bracing, which makes the song hit harder.
No Tears slips into estrangement and bad ideas with a cool stare and a slow, fuzzed-out, glitchy pace, moving like a late-hour comedown through streets that no longer feel familiar. There is a sly nod to Tuxedomoon in the way it holds emotion at arm’s length, letting alienation pool quietly rather than boil over. The song captures that peculiar state of feeling unmoored in your own life, where temptation, disconnection, and self-protection all start speaking in the same voice.
Reach Your Hands Out To The Lost shifts the EP into more guitar-driven territory, channeling traces of The Horrors, The Smiths, and Pulp through Dry Skin’s scrappier post-punk frame. There is uplift in it, but not the kind that arrives wrapped in platitudes. Instead, the song reaches toward solidarity with real feeling, extending sympathy without sermonizing, which is rarer than most bands seem to realize. It understands that compassion carries more weight when it sounds lived-in, slightly battered, and entirely sincere. Backseat handles romantic wreckage with a surprising degree of grace, filtering heartbreak through a lo-fi haze that makes the song feel intimate without becoming overly polished or precious. There is tenderness in the way it sits with memory, with movement, with the awkward persistence of love after the fact.
Just A Thought Is A Way Worth Living closes the EP with a bruised kind of wisdom, turning over questions of honesty, love, self-regard, and the daily labour of staying awake inside your own life. It feels restless, searching, and deeply aware that clarity is less a revelation than a practice.
Listen to Dead Wood below and order the album, out now via Blood Service, here.
For an EP named Dead Wood, this thing is very much alive. It knows the world is ridiculous, expensive, cruel, and often cosmetically clean in all the wrong places. It also knows that a sharp song, played with purpose, can still make that mess feel briefly legible.
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