Today, Chicago DIY group The Slaps — guitarist Rand Kelly, bassist Ramsey Bell, and drummer Josh Resing — announce Mudglimmer, their strange and beautiful new album that finds the group emerging from the specter of indie oblivion with a raw, expressive, and idiosyncratic sound. It’s a stunning DIY comeback story, a doubling-down on avant-garde impulses that pays immediate dividends.

Faced with professional and personal hurdles that threatened the band’s continuation, The Slaps dug deep into improvisation (even recording an EP at Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, a hub of the city’s rich free jazz scene and home of the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection) and traditional country songwriting.

The disparate threads of spontaneous composition and earnest, threadbare folk collide on Mudglimmer. It’s a marvel of influential synthesis, evoking Slint’s comfortability with ominous tension, Tortoise’s slinky push-pull grooves, Waxahatchee’s slice-of-life Americana gems, elliptical funk-punk a la The Minutemen, minimal grunge-pop in the vein of Sebadoh, and so much more.

Pre-order / pre-save Mudglimmer here.

Accompanying the album announce, The Slaps share two tracks from Mudglimmer. “Compromised Dirt,” which features vocal contributions from Merce Lemon and Maggie Geeslin of Lunar Vacation, is sunnily strummed and naturalistically philosophical.

Says the band: “Big Fertilizer, Big Pesticide, Big Gas-Powered Leaf Blower, you name it, they’ve poisoned you and all the animals you love. Humans have allowed it to happen all this time, but when we’re gone, everything good and green will be restored, as if we were never here at all. Don’t get it twisted, this song is optimistic.”

Watch the “Compromised Dirt” video over at FLOOD.

Meanwhile, “Mudglimmer” is tense and ominous. Tangled bass riffs and shaker rhythms provide groove to the insistent, closely-harmonized guitar chords.

Listen to “Mudglimmer” here.

The Slaps formed in Chicago at DePaul University, and debuted with 2017’s Susan’s Room, a scrappy and surf-y rock project recorded via Garageband at Rand’s parents’ place. Their local profile grew quickly. Subsequent EPs A and B — recorded, for the first time, in proper studios — did well enough to enable them to embark on summer tours of the midwest, striking a hazy and moody middle ground between The Strokes’ tightly wound garage rock and Crumb’s jazzily arranged psychedelia.

The 2020 COVID pandemic re-shuffled the deck, as the band moved to Lexington, KY to keep rent cheap while they toured four months out of the year. They recorded 2022’s Tomato Tree and got ready to hit the road. Hardship followed, including several friends passing away and the cancellation of a major tour.

It was a challenging time, but one that strengthened the band’s artistic resolve. “We had to commit, to each other and to ourselves,” recounts Rand. Their conclusion: “If we’re going to be out here and risk our well-being, we can’t do it for any other reason than for us and our expression.” 

Pulling inspiration from experimental principles espoused by a college class they took called Improv Scratch Orchestra, taught by Jeffrey Kowalkowski (himself a staple of Chicago’s experimental jazz and post-rock scenes), The Slaps followed their muse to odd but rewarding places. In 2023, they recorded and released Pathless, an entirely improvised release recorded at the legendary Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago, a hub of the city’s rich free jazz scene and home of the Sun Ra / El Saturn Collection. Around the same time, they were writing and recording This is My First Day At Drawing, a reflective collection influenced by traditional folk and country songwriting.

From this time came Mudglimmer, a record that finds The Slaps reconfigured and reenergized — finding purpose, not in reaching for a brass ring, but in becoming fully, unashamedly, their own wonderfully confounding thing.

Read more about The Slaps and Mudglimmer here.

The Slaps are on tour in support of Mudglimmer throughout the fall, full dates below.