Peel Share New Single 'Climax'

Los Angeles duo Peel have shared “Climax,” the latest preview off their debut album Acid Star, out March 29th via Innovative Leisure.

Inspired by the 2018 Gaspar Noé movie of the same name, the song is an urgent blend of jagged guitar stabs and disco-inspired drumming. The accompanying video see's the band performing the song, captured on grainy VHS against the concrete backdrop of their downtown Los Angeles loft. Paste Magazine described the track as a “unique convergence of post-punk, electronica and psychedelia.”

The creative partnership of Sean Cimino and Isom Innis, their bond was initially formed as touring members of Foster The People (now both official members live & on record). The two developed a musical language all their own over the years, ideas coalescing organically until the eventual birth of Peel. Inspired in part by genre-bending Creation Records bands like Primal Scream and Madchester groups like Happy Mondays, Acid Star expands on the industrial edge of early Peel, adding layers of psychedelia, electronica, and even reverb soaked freak folk, as seen on the title track. 

"The sonic landscape of Climax nods to our post-punk roots, while the spirit and rhythm propel us forward into the realm of club and dance music” shares Cimino. “The lyrics are inspired by the Gaspar Noe movie ‘Climax' and a bizarre rave I went to in Mexico City,” explains Innis.

“The movie is about a dance party gone wrong because someone spikes the punch with acid and everyone freaks out, but our song flips the perspective - a psychedelic dance party gone right where everyone has fun. At the rave I was navigating this really dark dilapidated industrial building trying to find the basement where the dance floor was. It was like a crowded maze with all these hazardous drop offs and dead ends. That tone came out in Climax, the alarming but exciting feeling of dancing into the unknown.”

Watch the video for “Climax” below, and listen to previous singles “Y2J” and “Acid Star.”

For Acid Star, the duo began by tapping into the music that they liked as kids. That is, the music they gravitated toward before they had “any taste or judgment,” as Innis puts it. “If you think too hard, and you try too hard, you can kind of ruin the expression that comes out,” he adds. “But there's something about trying to recreate a song that was in my DNA before taste came into it that just sounded, listening back, like it had a lot of energy and life.”

The opener, “Y2J,” was one of the results of that childhood-song experiment, and is, appropriately enough, named in reference to Y2K. “Climax,” a song inspired by the 2018 Gaspar Noé movie of the same name, is a rocket-ship ride of a tune, as much within Nile Rodgers' wheelhouse as Spoon's. 

Each side of the album is bookmarked by ghostly ballads—“Acid Star” and “The Cloak”—both driven by acoustic guitar and gentle vocals that push home the crucially melodic underbelly of Peel itself. “You're smiling, laughing there, my acid star,” sings Cimino on the former song, an ode to an idea of a certain ephemeral and untouchable type of rock god.

“That lyric is a tribute to the power of words beyond our everyday use,” Cimino says. “I was thinking of a term for someone, something, or an idea that is so meaningful—almost too important.” When it came time to decide what to name the album itself, it was right there in front of them.

Photo by David Black

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