Studio 52 is a community artist space located in the heart of Allston, and is proud to support the Boston music scene and local artist community.
Whether we realize it or not, 2018 and all its absurdities have forced us to get personal. The world outside our windows has led us to identify our beliefs, our attitudes, and where the boundaries of our comfort zones lie. That has extended to music and the arts as well, where creatives have come to terms with their own sense of what it means to create — and exactly who they are creating for. Salem Wolves are no exception. “This record is both more personal and political than anything we’ve done before,” says Salem Wolves’ Gray Bouchard, “as everything is in 2018.”
That record is Shake, the North Shore band’s furious new nine-track LP that further cements the Wolves as one of Boston’s finest. A few weeks back Shake was teased by its razor-sharp title track, a sonic firecracker that slashes out of the speakers and pierces your beaten-down soul.
“This is the evolution of Salem Wolves,” Bouchard adds. “Same desperate, shrieking like a bat outta hell vibe as our previous releases, only this is the first time we have a record written entirely by the core four Wolves. It’s personal, it’s political, it’s all of us playing the hell out of songs we wrote together.”
Shake has a strut of freshness to it, a metaphorical guitar blazing along in a electronic-popped world of synths and computers. But there’s a continuation of fascist fighting that’s as American as shitty baseball and leftover pie.
“What guitars are and traditionally have been is a populist, utilitarian way for a kid to express frustration,” says Bouchard when asked if society should still believe in guitar-rock. “They’re loud, relatively easy to pick up, and the melodic combinations are almost endless. All that is good and the reason why kids (particularly marginalized, frustrated ones) for nearly a century have been using them to express how they can’t get no satisfaction. But also we have to be wary of it folding in on itself as it disappears up its own ass and becoming an exclusionary, ‘rock n roll dinosaur’ thing that only appeals to middle class white cis dudes… which is to say, whatever allows people to best express themselves is king. Guitars are our thing but we don’t evangelize.”
What’s also a thing of Salem Wolves is a relentless approach to rock and roll, and Shake is another spin around the ol’ block of personal exploration. Get into it below, save room for that blistering title track, then catch the band playing with Ash at Brighton Music Hall on September 15 and then with King Khan & The Shrines at Sonia on October 4. Bring your newfound sense of self.
Featured Salem Wolves image by Scott Murry.