Boss Hog Release New Track + Expand Tour Dates + Album Out 3/24

Boss Hog Release New Track “Ground Control”

Expand Tour Dates

Album

(Pic credit – Angel Zayas)

First Album in 17 Years Brood X Out March 24

Expanded Tour Dates, Watch Tour Trailer HERE

NYC Release Show at Mercury Lounge

“Ms. Martinez speak-sings at a pace that recalls the blues but with an affect that suggests perturbation or getting stunned or sweating, or all three…”
New York Times

“Menacingly seductive”
Essentially Pop

New York City’s Boss Hog have released the track “Ground Control.” The track appears on their first studio album in 17 years, Brood X, due for release this March 24^th via In The Red Records.

Listen To “Ground Control”:

Boss Hog has announced expanded US tour dates including Detroit, Pittsburgh and more. The NYC record release show is March 30 at Mercury Lounge.

Watch the tour trailer:

Led by Cristina Martinez (ably assisted by her faithful sideman/husband Jon Spencer, as ever playing Flavor Flav to Cristina’s Chuck D), Brood X feels less like the work of a group who’ve been on ice for so long, more a slithering and sludgy monster of an album, a boiling pot of hot funk keys, growling punk attack, searing blues breaks and the ground-shaking holler of Martinez.

On hiatus, since they finished promoting 2000’s icy, wonderful ‘Whiteout’ album, Boss Hog began stirring again late in 2008 with the first of several short runs of shows. “We’d play a handful of shows, once a year,” Martinez remembers. “Festivals, the Amphetamine Reptile 25th Anniversary party, some benefit shows.” Things started getting serious a couple of years later when the Boss Hog all-stars – Martinez, Spencer, bassist Jen Jurgensen, drummer Hollis Queens and keys man Mickey Finn – decided this reunion habit was worth committing to wax.

Cooked up in the same Lower East Side basement where Boss Hog brewed their first blistering noise outs, and cut at Michigan’s Key Club Recording Company on the same Flickinger N32 Matrix console Sly Stone used for There’s A Riot Goin’ On, ‘Brood X’ is serious music for serious times, the perfect soundtrack for a necessary revolution.

The 17-year cicadas have re-awoken, and not a moment too soon. New York has changed beyond recognition and there’s a buffoonish villain entering the White House, but Martinez’s towering vocals and vicious, hilarious, emboldening lyrics have never sounded so sharp, nor Boss Hog so timely. Opener ‘Billy’, all brawny low-end and delirious funk organ, finds Cristina and Jon howling about “The brink of destruction!” over apocalyptic beats, while Ground Control, a prismatic vision of today’s Big Apple, includes the bitter observation, “This is the cost of privilege”.

“A lot of Cristina’s lyrics on this album resonate with me more deeply since the election,” nods Spencer. “They’re blues songs, protest songs.”

“The songs do feel oddly relevant now,” Cristina adds.

The Boss Hog All Stars
Cristina Martinez – vocals
Jon Spencer – guitar & vocals
Jens Jurgensen – bass
Hollis Queens – drums & vocals
Mickey Finn – keys

Tour Dates:
March 30 – New York, NY – Mercury Lounge
March 31 – Buffalo, NY – The Waiting Room
April 1 – Cleveland, OH – Beachland Ballroom
April 7 – Washington, DC – Rock and Roll Hotel
April 8 – Philadelphia, PA – Underground Arts
April 28 – Cambridge MA – The Sinclair
April 29 – Portland, ME – Port City Music Hall
May 19 – Toronto, ON – Lee’s Palace
May 20 – Montreal, QC – Bar Le Ritz PDB
May 21– Burlington, VT – High Ground – Lounge
June 2 – Pittsburgh, PA – Cattivo
June 3 – Detroit, MI – El Club