Tropical Fuck Storm | Artist
Tropical Fuck Storm is an Australian rock band formed 2017 in Melbourne, Victoria, by Gareth Liddiard (vocals, guitar, keyboards), Fiona Kitschin (bass, vocals), Lauren Hammel (drums, programming) and Erica Dunn (guitar, keyboards, vocals). Liddiard and Kitschin came from the band The Drones, Hammel from High Tension, and Dunn from Mod Con. TFS's sound is characterised by elements of art punk, noise rock and experimental rock, driven by Gareth Liddiard's unconventional song structures and absurdist lyrical content. The band came about when The Drones ceased performing in December 2016. Drones founder Gareth Liddiard and longtime bandmate Fiona Kitschin started writing material for a new project under the name for the record label they'd coined to self-release the last Drones album. They recruited Erica Dunn and Lauren Hammel before embarking on an American tour. They released a series of singles later that year while on tour with Band of Horses and King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard in the US. Their debut album, A Laughing Death in Meatspace, dropped in March 2018 and the band signed with Joyful Noise Recordings shortly thereafter. The album – which saw the band utilise a range of obscure digital guitar effects, synthesisers, drum machines, and DAW software such as ProTools – received positive reviews for both its raw and unusual style as well as its lyricism. Greil Marcus wrote that the album makes "as fierce a band as" The Drones "seem austere" in comparison, writing that "the explosions in "Two Afternoons," "A Laughing Death," and "Rubber Bullies" are glorious and frightening, so big they don't feel quite real, but there's a story trying to climb out of the noise, carried by Liddiard's weariness, his uncynical fatalism, but shaped by the counter-vocals of Kitschin and Dunn." He concluded by saying that "you can feel as if this is what history sounds like as it's being written." The band is frugal with its output, having only released four studio albums in eight years. Their latest album, 2025's excellent Fairyland Codex is attracting stellar reviews, such as the following exerpt from RYM: "The tracks manage to be deeply catchy underneath the layers of noise and distortion, some of which even feel evocative of avant-garde artists like Boredoms and Merzbow, which creates a dizzyingly entrancing vibe that truly feels like the epitome of Tropical Fuck Storm's potential so far. The influences across genres in dance-punk, art-rock, noise, and post-rock are all here in equal measure, and they truly combine into something greater than the sum of their parts". Standout albums include all their studio releases to-date; A Laughing Death in Meatspace (2018), Braindrops (2019), Deep States (2021), Fairyland Codex (2025), plus the soundtrack to their absurdist-doco film of the same name Goody Goody Gumdrops (2022). An insight into the bizarre subject matter of interest to lyricist Gareth Liddiard can be gleened from the background to TFS's debut album A Laughing Death in Meatspace. Here the title links "meatspace", which is a derogatory term used by Silicon Valley engineers to refer to the physical realm (ie. humans) with a neurodegenerative disorder called "kuru", once found in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. Men would eat the muscles of the deceased, while women and children ate the brains, thereby inheriting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and degenerating their grey matter to such an extent that they lost control of their emotions and laughed themselves to death.
Artist Website: tropicalfuckstormrecords.com
Featured Albums: Tropical Fuck Storm
Related Artists: The Drones, Gareth Liddiard
