Retail Drugs Presents "Demon Town," New Single/Video From 2nd Album of 2025 !
Retail Drugs — the NYC recording project of Jake Brooks — is set to release their second album of 2025, Factory Reset, on December 5th via Angel Tapes / Fire Talk, and today unveils its new single, “Demon Town.” Channelling the provocative nature of Retail Drugs’ oft-discussed live performances, “Demon Town” is an immediately disarming fusion of blown-out electronics and avant-punk rock. “Demon Town” is a microcosm of Factory Reset’s experimental palette, which expands upon Brooks’ prior forays into guitar-forward tape-recorded compositions. Written in sequential order, Factory Reset stands as a testament to artistic experimentation, with each track written, engineered, and mixed by Brooks himself.
Factory Reset eschews the norms of Retail Drugs’ prior writing and recording habits, but it’s in no way a declarative statement of where Brooks sees the project going next. “Retail Drugs is an outlet for me,” he says, continuing, “I suppose I’m just in a perpetual state of recording and making music for it.” For Factory Reset, creating that music largely involved abandoning all things tried and true, but Brooks confesses: “I did some acoustic guitar on ‘He Hears Us (Reprise)’ so I did break the rules. But fuck it rules are meant to be broken.”
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Factory Reset marks Retail Drugs’ second album of 2025, following the b-sides and demos collection rECKless dRIVing released earlier this summer, and comes a little more than a year after the band’s underground debut album i love you so !. Factory Reset takes a stark detour from Brooks’ prior releases, abandoning guitar-forward tape-recorded compositions, and instead doubling down on the experimental electronic impulses scattered throughout Brooks’ prolific discography.
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Emerging from New York City’s thriving scene of twenty-something rockers, Retail Drugs funnels Brooks’ early adulthood experiences through layers of fuzz, distortion, and guitars that land somewhere between grunge and noise. rECKless dRIVing picks up where Brooks left off, gesturing toward digital and electronic impulses yet to be explored in Retail Drugs’ burgeoning discography, and zeroing in on the emotional well from which i love you so ! pulled. rECKless dRIVing and its predecessor bring a decidedly lo-fi POV, and present some of Retail Drugs’ most immediate and heartfelt songs-to-date.
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Last year, Brooks quietly released his debut album, i love you so !, which established his presence as NYC’s premier home-tape recording entity. Brooks followed the release with countless live performances around the city’s venues, bars, and DIY operations, gaining a reputation for provocative gigs that blur the line between rock show and performance art. Newly signed to Fire Talk’s emerging artists imprint, Angel Tapes, Retail Drugs presents a new run of cassette tapes.
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