Loud, angry, and willfully removed from contemporary musical fashions, Mudhoney’s 10th album, Digital Garbage, is another molten slab of wryly caustic heavy-guitar rock. After 30 years, the Stooges still loom largest in Mudhoney’s palette of influences: Steve Turner’s mangled gutter-blues guitar owes as much to Ron Asheton as Mark Arm’s sardonic growl of a singing voice owes to Iggy Pop. The alt-rock pioneers’ devotion to the quintessential proto-punks manifests in even the smallest details, like the one-chord “I Wanna Be Your Dog”-esque piano that shows up here on “Please Mr. Gunman.”
Digital Garbage, however, also pulls from a few other sources—albeit none that date from any later than Mudhoney’s early-‘90s commercial heyday. The twangy garage-punk guitar and Farfisa buildup of “Kill Yourself Live” is a dead ringer for Devo’s “Gut Feeling”; the minor-key sledgehammer riffs of “Night and Fog” and “Next Mass Extinction” tread into Black Sabbath doom-rock territory; Turner’s jangly guitar chords and Arm’s plaintive vocals on “Messiah’s Lament” even sound a bit like mid-period R.E.M. The most welcome addition to their sonic stew may be the synthesizer that bassist Guy Maddison plays on “21st Century Pharisees”: Without disrupting the band’s stripped-down punk aesthetic, it’s the closest Digital Garbage comes to evoking the album cover’s desolate late-‘70s sci-fi landscape.
Also conjuring a bleak terrain—though unfortunately not a fictional one—are the album’s lyrics, which are the group’s most topical since 2006’s