Archive for March, 2023

Direct Hit / Decent Criminal Split 7″ and Beacon Comic #1

OUT NOW! ORDER HERE: https://bit.ly/3FDGfZT

On April 28th, Dirtnap Records will publish the first installment of Beacon Comics, packaged with a 7″ record featuring a taste of Direct Hit‘s (Milwaukee, Fat Wreck Chords) dubiously-forthcoming album (“Wasteland”), and new Decent Criminal (Santa Rosa, Diised/Gunner Records) songs “Time” and “Dream” – each an alternate take, and a B-side off their forthcoming album, respectively.

At some point during quarantine – with an album of new material shelved, and a month-long European tour all but canceled – Direct Hit singer/songwriter Nick Woods found himself working on a story about the future.

‘I’d get on video calls with my friends Dylan [Brown] and Jenny [Lapham], and we’d joke about being locked up with nothing to do – just like everyone else was,’ he says. ‘At some point, I got it into my head that this was all training for some kind of future where virtual reality would be the only way to experience the universe. And since I had nothing else to do at the time, I figured I’d start writing some of that stuff down.’

Together, Nick, Dylan, and Jenny – along with long-time Direct Hit collaborator and illustrator Walker Dubois – pieced together the first half of BEACON from Woods’s notes, producing a science fiction comic about a person named Doro, and their robot caretaker Partner, as civilization is reborn from apocalypse.

“Wasteland” was a tune I wrote and recorded by myself in a couple hours in June of 2020, a couple months after we canceled all our scheduled shows, and right around when I admitted to myself that I wasn’t gonna be able to be in a full-time band for a while,’ Woods says. ‘This was also right after when George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police. So I was angry, and depressed, and embarrassed, and felt like I had to do something to express that mindset, and show some solidarity. The original version is really nasty-sounding – this one is too, but a lot more listenable. And Dylan, Jenny, Walker and I had the first part of this book lying around. So we figured it was good a time as any to try something far-out, with a label that wasn’t scared to experiment.”

This lavishly packaged comic/7” combo is a one time only pressing of 500 (300 on black, 100 on red, 100 on blue) and will only be available for a limited time. Get yours today! 

Listen To Direct Hit’s “Wasteland” HERE