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Feb 21, 2022 By Caleb Campbell Photography by Omari Spears

With their upcoming record, Connecticut art punk trio PERENNIAL set out intentionally to break the punk mold. As they put it, they wanted to “...make a punk album that doesn’t operate like a punk album.” They turned to punk luminaries like Patti Smith, Refused, The Clash, Le Tigre, and Nick Cave, finding new instrumental combinations and creative song structures while working relentlessly to capture the band’s manic live aesthetic.

Co-produced and engineered by Chris Teti of The World Is A Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid To Die, the band’s resulting sophomore album, In The Midnight Hour, is out on streaming and vinyl March 1st. Today, the band have shared the latest single from the record, “Food For Hornets,” premiering with Under the Radar.

“Food For Hornets” is a work of blistering punk synthesis, pulling from stinging bursts of garage rock, punishing post-hardcore, bass-heavy dance punk, and droning ambient soundscapes. Vocalists Chelsey Hahn and Chad Jewett trade ferocious shouted lyrics atop of jackhammering guitars, constantly veering in new instrumental directions and winding through atypical song structures. It’s a wild maelstrom of potent punk fury, packing an immense amount of passion and creative vision into just under two minutes.

Jewett says of the track, “‘Food For Hornets’ was a really fun experiment for us, because we had this initial version which was this lightning quick, minute long garage rock song, but then we kept coming up with ideas for what could happen next. It became a whole new song by the end. So it goes from this sharp, wild first minute into this bass-heavy dance track that’s a lot more about groove and ambience. In some ways I think it’s a good metaphor for the larger album: “Let’s see how many textures and sounds we can explore in this compressed format”.

Check out the song below. You can also listen to the record in full over at Bandcamp before the album hits streaming and vinyl on March 1st.