Team Dresch Releases FURTHERMORE, First Album in 30 Years

Team Dresch has released Furthermore, their first album in thirty years, via Jealous Butcher Records. The queercore group kicks off a European tour before heading back to the US for late fall dates.

To celebrate the release, Team Dresch is releasing a new video directed by Lance Bangs for their song 'Heard A Bang.' The track is described as a soul-grabbing primordial sea of glorious guitar noise, a full body experience that leaves the listener wanting more.

Furthermore can be purchased here.

Originally formed in 1993 in Portland, Oregon, back when it was still an under-the-radar postindustrial midsized city, where an artist could still live in a punk house for $200 a month—maybe less if you claimed a closet as your room—Jody Bleyle lived in one such house in SE Portland where she hosted the band's earliest practices, with Kaia Wilson on guitar and vocals, Donna Dresch on guitar and bass, and Jody on vocals and drums. Before long, Jody moved over to guitar and bass as well, and the band found a kindred queer spirit in drummer Marcéo Martinez, who played on the band's first full-length release, Personal Best (1995). Marcéo took a break from the band for their 1996 second album, Captain My Captain, which featured east-coast hard-hitter Melissa York on drums. Today, the band is a power 5-piece with both Marcéo and Melissa in their respective drummer's seats.

Most people think early '90s Pacific NW music and they think grunge, riot grrrl, Sub Pop records, and yes Donna shredded in Screaming Trees and Dinosaur Jr., and Jody played in Sub Pop's Hazel, and Adickdid (Kaia), Calamity Jane (Marcéo), and Vitapup (Melissa) were sometimes considered Riot Grrrl-adjacent. But those are labels, not sounds, and what Team Dresch sounded like was melodic shredding, emo desperation, pop bliss, the fight and the fallout, the fantasy and the future, a real future that could hold all of it.

There was a time when the way you found out if a queer you'd just met was 'your kind' of queer was by asking if they listened to Team Dresch. It was 1993, it was 2001, it was, let's be honest, last week, and what you were really asking was: Are you weird? Are you pissed-off? Do you want to make out with your (real or desired) girlfriend in public, and do you hate the Xtian Right? Team Dresch are legendary because they were being THAT queer and THAT pissed and courageous and THAT loud at a time when young queer punks had few other cultural lifelines. And they remain legendary because, more than three decades later, they're still going strong.

Even though Team Dresch was always for the queers, they were also always for everyone. Or, for anyone who felt themselves held and reflected in, in the words of former Washington Post music critic Chris Richards, their 'heroic loudness'. When Rolling Stone recently named Personal Best one of the 'Greatest Punk Albums of All Time', they were recognizing that the power of their music transcended the specificity of the band's queer identity, even as it remained proudly rooted in it.

At their shows last year celebrating the 30th anniversary of Personal Best, the ardent audacity of that sentiment still reverberated. They played to venues packed with old fans, and kids of those fans, and new young fans who had found their way there through some alchemy of internet and identification, the open-secret path to radical queer culture.

Furthermore Track Listing

01) One Song

02) Growing Underground

03) Heard A Bang

04) I've Really Become Some Thing

05) Jamie

06) Still Your Room

07) And Now Your Face

08) I Won't Tell

09) (Where Do) I Belong

10) Every Owl Leaves

11) Last One At The Party

12) Protectors

Tour Dates

September 19 - Bern, Switzerland - YEAH Fest @ Reitschule

September 20 - Mainz, Germany @ Schon Schön

September 21 - Oberhausen, Germany @ Druckluft

September 22 - Berlin, Germany @ Neue Zukunft

September 24 - Bremen, Germany @ Tower

September 25 - Karlsruhe, Germany @ Alte Hackerei

September 26 - Köln, Germany @ Blue Shell

September 27 - Hamburg, Germany @ Betty

September 30 - London, UK @ Downstairs at The Dome

October 28th - Portland, OR @ Revolution Hall w/ Heavens to Betsy & Altar Girl

November 4&5 - San Francisco, CA @ Bottom of the Hill w/ Longstocking & The Third Sex

November 7 - Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon w/ Longstocking & The Third Sex

November 12th - Tacoma, WA @ Spanish Ballroom w/ Neko Case

Photo Credit: JJ Gonson