VR SEX Release New Album “Hard Copy”

VR SEX, the acid punk alias of Noel Skum aka Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty, has today released his new full length, Hard Copy, via Dais Records. Following 2022’s Rough Dimension album, Skum made the radical leap of expanding his psychedelic post-punk vehicle VR SEX into a fully collaborative five-piece band. To christen the new group’s camaraderie, they booked a block of studio time in Glassell Park, working twelve hour days, they banged out the basics in a week, then tracked the rest over a month, fine-tuning it with flourishes, FX and amplifier experiments. Hard Copy is the result, ten tracks of sneering psychedelic punk streaked with Chrome damaged freak outs and snotty power pop harmonies chronicling sex doll love affairs and glue sniffing fatales.

Mixed by guitarist Mike Kriebel, an accomplished engineer with dozens of credits across the punk, goth, and garage underground, the album is dense, rich and spatial, spurred by Skum’s muse of “reckless abandon.” Shadows of Chrome, Stickmen With Rayguns, Japanese psych and loud-quiet-loud grunge anthems flicker here and there, but ultimately VR SEX‘s mode is more sardonic and saturated, oscillating between ripped leather riffing and space echo meltdowns. Banning plug-ins was a mission statement, with most instruments tracked direct into the board, then guitars added via a daisy chain of amplifiers, panned and mixed and matched for maximum intoxication.

Lyrically, the record revisits the project’s perennial fascinations: twisted lust, cheap thrills, dirty money, doomed delinquents and ruined romance amid the creeps and cracked dreamers of gritty city voids. The title refers to the uncanny valley between “facsimile and the real thing, and the illusion that one is better than the other, when both come with their own menu of delights and demonic pleasures.” Hard Copy embraces extremes and outliers, delusion and perversion, the conflicted dimensional depths lurking in every exploded heart.