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Photo – Celeste de Clario

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Photo – Celeste de Clario

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Praise for GUT HEALTH + STILETTO

“Gut Health have produced an album for our times, unpredictable, uplifting and unifying” – CLASH

“a solid collection that reflects the diverse members of the band swinging from hypnotic grooves to outright exploration with nary a pause… a live kinetic experience” – NARC (★★★★)

“an utterly undeniable debut album” – Far Out Magazine (★★★★)

“engulfing, kaleidoscopic soundscapes” – 2SER

“the band’s title track is hypnotically repetitious, carefully building to its chaotic, cacophonous crescendo; the pacing is so meticulous that the epic track feels like a tight three-to-four-minute anthem.” – Rolling Stone

“On the album’s epic, nearly eight-minute title track, they punctuate a hypnotic, snaking bassline and drums, each syllable jagged and dramatic, before the song ramps up in intensity, a noise bricolage of synths and guitars washing over. The final few minutes collapse into glorious discordance, complete with saxophone by friend of the band Yang Chen. It sounds absolutely fucked, like it’s exorcising all the tension and violence it possibly can before tapping out with an exhausted, droning synth.” – Alex Gallagher, NME

“dance-floor chaos with funky bass and psychedelic-tinged punk guitar lines, darting between a no wave attack and post-punk disco. Gut Health remain in astounding form, as they open the song with a relative simplicity and end it tangled in abrasive knots, the entire structure threatening to collapse.” – Post Trash

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Naarm/Melbourne’s hypnotic dance-punk sextet GUT HEALTH today unveil their debut album Stiletto, an immersive ten-track foray into dancefloor-inducing soundscapes and punchy prowess centred on “the healing qualities of consensual rage” featuring the singles ‘Separate States’, ‘Cool Moderator’, the seven-and-a-half-minute odyssey of a title track – which have seen support, additions and airplay from BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 6, NME, Double J, triple j, DORK, The Needle Drop, Wonderland, RUSSH, Rolling Stone and many others – and focus track ‘Restless’. Gut Health are taking Stiletto on the road for an east coast album tour this October (full details below) – tickets are on sale now from guthealth.space. Order / listen to Stiletto HERE.

Light-hearted and biting, focus track ‘Restless’ partly pays homage to lyrics in The Pretenders’‘Private Life’ (1980) – which was covered by Grace Jones – “and your sex life complications are not my fascinations.” On the single and across Stiletto, Gut Health journey through the “healing qualities of consensual rage” backed by an unparalleled ability to build lingering tension and release in their instrumentation, songs shifting between infectious up-tempo numbers, hypnosis and chaotic noise, underpinned by the type of uncertainty where it feels like it’s about to fall apart at any second, “we don’t want the listener to know exactly what is going to come next in the album to create excitement, intrigue and unease,” they share.

The themes embedded in Stiletto are expressed largely through imagery, an offering of cues and clues for listeners to find their own meaning in, and often only emerge to the band themselves in hindsight. The repetition of words (‘Scripture’, ‘The Recipe’), signalled to them the importance of sharing knowledge and language (“I think there’s great weight in listening to others, self-reflection, sharing resources and forming secret codes within community and free education as a public good”), the push and pull of power and energy exchange (‘Juvenile Retention’), and exploring permanence and impermanence (‘Memory Foam’). Stiletto a transient commentary on life: the myths and falsehoods of contemporary so-called Australia, an “expression of the passing human experience,” capturing moments in time as they flash by.

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Gut Health experimented on their debut EP Electric Party Chrome Girl (2022) while they figured out their sound, playing with atonal verses juxtaposed with catchy hooks and choruses. Then Stiletto comes through, still part of their journey of learning but more realised in its outcomes; vast soundscapes hinged on their “melody-meets-chaos” ethos on which they champion noise and atonality throughout, building on its capacity to reflect a feeling of overstimulation and overwhelm, whilst simultaneously offering a space of comforting envelopment. “Creating the feeling of ‘chaos’, something at the core of our music-making as a group, was a more focused or less dimensional version on our EP but nonetheless an important stepping stone in us finding what exactly we wanted Gut Health to sound like on our debut album,” Gut Health shares. It wasn’t about bottling the live sound of songs like ‘Stiletto’, ‘Memory Foam’, ‘Scripture’ and ‘Juvenile Retention’ – which draw mostly on improvisation – but to use recording as a creative exercise in itself. “We broke a lot of ‘rules’ we had previously kept to with our music, stretching and pitching guitar recordings around to make some ambiences we hadn’t explored before… it took a lot of trial and error to feel realised in their recorded form as often these elements are more improvisational in their live form. We just kept layering more and more until [it] felt unrecognisable from where it began.” 

Each of Gut Health’s six members come from different corners of music – soundscape design, jazz, brash punk, folk, R&B – and with influences spanning Grace Jones, Drinks, 80s post-punk band Ludus and B-grade sci-fi films, they have created an album that is at once groove and dance-driven while being thickened by kaleidoscopic soundscapes. Stiletto was recorded across different spaces in the band’s world, predominantly with Julian Cue (Screensaver, CIVIC) at Button Pusher on Wurundjeri Land in Preston, with overdubs recorded by Cue and guitarist Dom Wilmott between the band’s homes, rehearsal spaces, and their old warehouse space APAX, and engineered and mixed by Portland’s Evan Mersky (Lithics) on a 24-track reel-to-reel tape machine, bringing through the compression and warmth heard across the album.

GUT HEALTH – Athina Uh oh (she/her; vocals), Eloise Murphy-Hill (they/them; guitar), Dom Willmott (he/him; guitar, synth), Angus Fletcher (he/him; percussion, synth), Myka Wallace (they/them; drums) and Adam Markmann (he/him; bass) – first formed in a sharehouse on Hope St in Naarm/Melbourne’s inner north in 2022 and have since staked their claim as one of so-called-Australia’s most compelling new underground acts. Following the release of their debut EP Electric Party Chrome Girl (2022), a collection of songs self-recorded in a National Storage facility in the heart of Brunswick – paired with their visually adventurous and sonically daring live shows that regularly have sweat dripping down the windows – Gut Health have gone on to share stages with Queens of the Stone Age, POND, Otoboke Beaver, Up Chuck, The Black Lips and Mudhoney, local icons Hiatus Kaiyote, RVG, Cash Savage and the Last Drinks and Body Type; they’ve showcased at BIGSOUND and SXSW Sydney, and made their debut performance at Meredith Music Festival last year.

TOUR DATES

Sun 13 Oct – Instore @ Soundmerch – Naarm/Melbourne (free/AA)
Sat 19 Oct – The Tote – Naarm/Melbourne | Tickets
Fri 25 Oct – The Lansdowne – Gadigal Land/Sydney | Tickets
Sat 26 Oct – Black Bear Lodge – Meanjin/Brisbane | Tickets
Sun 27 Oct – Instore @ Jet Black Cat Music – Meanjin/Brisbane (free/AA)

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Gut Health – Stiletto
Debut album out today (Highly Contagious/AWAL)
Order / Listen

TRACK LIST

Uh Oh
The Recipe
Scripture
Restless
Separate States
Cool Moderator
Juvenile Retention
Two Steps
Memory Foam
Stiletto

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Photo – Celeste de Clario

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Follow GUT HEALTH
Instagram · Facebook · Bandcamp
 Spotify · Apple Music · YouTube

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AMNPLIFY – DB