New York City is a big place. A loud place. Some of that noise is music and some of the music is noise. Sucking it all in and turning it loose with prejudice, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion take a ferocious bite out of the Big Apple with their new album ‘Freedom Tower – No Wave Dance Party 2015’, the first record of the new era that demands to be stopped and frisked.

Like the best sides that percolated up from the Bronx, the Lower East Side and Greenwich Village across the 1970s and 80s, ‘Freedom Tower’ is more than a high-octane dance party record, it is a document of New York City, a chronicle of grit and terror and love.

‘Freedom Tower’ is a radical portrait of New York City set to the savage funkacide of the Blues Explosion, locked and loaded with the most deadly, predatory guitar riffs that primitive magnetic tape can handle. From start to finish, ‘Freedom Tower’ is overmodulated, cooked with dirt and finished in acid rain. ‘Freedom Tower’ is packed with the kind of beats and rhymes that will make even the most reserved Walter Mitty jump back and say “damn!”.

For nearly a quarter of a century the Blues Explosion have been sweating, freezing, eating, drinking, fighting, winning and losing in New York City, perpetrating some of the most timeless moments of musical mayhem in the history of Manhattan and beyond. As ever, Jon Spencer tells the tales, Judah Bauer plays the blues and Russell Simins smashes things to bits. As always, the Blues Explosion stomp on the faux underground oasis peddled by bourgeois hipsters and marketing jocks to deliver the real deal: rock ‘n’ roll that is unapologetically nasty.

Rehearsed and polished in a string of secret gigs and unannounced opening slots in theatres, hotel bars and dives (often under assumed names) and then recorded at the legendary Daptone House Of Soul in Bushwick and mixed with hip hop cult legend Alap Momin at the cutting edge of Harlem, ‘Freedom Tower’ is the most provocative statement of urban pathos and panache ever recorded.

LP format includes digital download code.