Plastic Eternity (Gray Vinyl)

Mudhoney have never sounded especially interested in behaving like elder statesmen. Plastic Eternity, their eleventh studio album, arrives more than three decades after the band emerged from Seattle, yet its best moments are scruffy, funny and irritated rather than reverential. The guitars still enjoy grime, Mark Arm still sounds as if a lyric has personally offended him, and the band’s garage-rock instincts remain elastic enough to absorb psychedelia without becoming respectable.

The album was recorded in November 2021 at Crackle & Pop in Seattle with producer Johnny Sangster. Circumstance forced an unusually concentrated process: bassist Guy Maddison was preparing to move to Australia, so the band completed the recording in nine days. Many songs were not fully written before the sessions, a change from Mudhoney’s normal method, and drummer Dan Peters took a more active role in songwriting. Sangster also became the first outside co-writer on Mudhoney songs, another small disruption to a famously self-contained group. That looseness suits the material. “Almost Everything” and “Move Under” were released as singles, while titles such as “Cascades of Crap”, “Flush the Fascists”, “Human Stock Capital” and “Cry Me an Atmospheric River” make clear that the band’s humour has not mellowed into nostalgia. The music moves between blunt garage attack and stranger psychedelic detours, with the rhythm section giving Arm and guitarist Steve Turner enough stability to make the edges fray productively.

When Plastic Eternity was released on 7 April 2023 through Sub Pop, King County in Washington officially proclaimed the date Mudhoney Day. The civic recognition is amusingly at odds with a band whose appeal has always included a certain refusal of polish. Happily, the album does not sound ceremonial. It sounds like Mudhoney treating longevity as permission to stay curious, irreverent and noisy. There is history behind every fuzzed chord, but the record keeps its eyes on the present rather than turning itself into a museum of grunge.