Butthole Surfers – After The Astronaut

Sunset Blvd

Okay, so first things first: I’m an objectively terrible reviewer. I never read the press releases that labels prepare, certainly not before listening to the record. If it’s a band I don’t know then I rarely dig up any details about them, and if it’s a band I think I know well, like this one, then I rely on what I think I know and work from there. I almost always fail to do the work and I have a shitty attitude: no one’s getting paid here, you want research and actual facts? You do it.

This isn’t some purist statement of intent on my part. I’m not taking a stand against ‘the man’ or the algorithmic heavy press of Google optimisation. I’m not imagining I’m slaying any dragons up here. Rather, I’m just very lazy when it comes to music. I listen hard and I think that should be enough. I want to lie back and listen and perceive — actually, nowadays I’m mostly walking and listening — and I want the music to come to me. As a reviewer, I’m entirely solipsistic, or self-obsessed if you’re feeling uncharitable.

So, irony abound, let’s get to the point: I accidentally reviewed After The Astronaut, the ‘latest’ from the Butthole Surfers in two entirely different ways. Initially, I wrote a review that bemoaned the backwards-facing ’90s approach they seemed to be going for. I accused them in my head of deliberately leaning into the ’90s nostalgia that seems unwilling to go away (my generation has a lot to answer for; we’re almost as annoying as the Boomers). I talked about Brit-Pop and Grunge and suggested that, while it was a wonderful ‘corrective’ (patronising Gen X twat that I am) to an album of theirs that I didn’t particularly  like —  Electric Larryland — it was also unfortunate that it hadn’t come out twenty years before.

Released now, as a ‘comeback’ album in the ever-weirder times we all find ourselves in, it was just too ’90s to function. It reminded me a lot of all those beautifully weird Julian Cope remixes that came out in the mid-decade and, while I still love those remixes, they are loved in the same way I miss Cabana bars and Flake Snows. I enjoyed it, but I was saddened by it. I listened all the way through a few times and I couldn’t bring myself to love it because it seemed so retrogressive.

In short, it was a great record (a)chronically displaced in time. It was Billy Pilgrim trapped in a glass box with some Weller-cut lads, Gail Porter and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. It wasn’t The Butthole Surfers record I wanted.

And then I happened to skim-read the press release, uncharacteristically looking for the album release date — 26 June 2026, if you’re interested — and, well, everything changed because this record is the one they recorded after Electric Larryland. It is from the ’90s and it is exactly the Butthole Surfers record I’d wanted them to release at the time.

I went back, took out all the crybaby “why did they do this?” stuff, and re-listened. It’s a completely different record when you see it was supposed to come out in ‘97 and ‘98.

Looked at like this, this record would have been a fantastic way to see out the decade. It starts with a Jimmy Swaggart / Kenneth Copeland (he of the “Hey Poor” stuff in Front 242’s “Welcome To Paradise”) style Gibby Haynes rant / preach about the Weird Revolution and then descends into some wonderfully sequenced chaos. “Intelligent Guy” quotes The Kinks in a strange declarative but confessional tone, whereas “They Came In” touches on that brief moment of time when they almost became mainstream — “Pepper”, “Whatever” — then dissolves into a dancey acid trailer.

This happens a lot in various ways — they are clearly having fun going back to the all-over-the-placeness of Locust Abortion Technician.  As ever, they lean heavily into stoopid — never stupid — and at times foreshadow where the likes of Andrew WK was going to go with I Get Wet. But while that record insisted its way into your skull with pure frat-boy energy, the Buttholes are way too twitchy to stay in a punk groove.

Some parts are reminiscent of the approach they took on the Widowermaker EP ( a very good thing to these ears), other tracks – -“Junkie Jenny In Gaytown” – feel a little like Can’s ethnological forgeries. Then there’s tracks like “Jet Fighter”, which start like comparatively straight (if acid-frazzled) surf-psych rock, but then continually finds itself on the edge of dissolution into tape noise; and “I Don’t Have A Problem”, which has the same woozy feeling as “22 Going On 23”, a track that mesmerised me as a teenager when I heard it on the radio late at night.

If I had one, very minor, gripe it is that I really miss the twin-drummer thud they used to have when Teresa Taylor (RIP) was still with them. Her and King Coffey’s relentless, slightly de-synced tubthumping added an additional menace to their work which is mostly missing here.

This record has devilish glee all the way through, but a lot of this does sound like Andrew Weatherall has gotten into their bones and I think those signifiers are largely in the drums, which are almost too funky and hold things together almost too well. Now, in this house mentioning Weatherall means you’re saying this is a class act, and so it is here; but Weatherall was about ecstasy and light, whereas the Buttholes always seemed to be also about k-holes and darkness.

The surrealism in their early albums always had a touch of the hollow cheek-boned absurdity of Antonin Artaud and this album misses some of that crunch; though tracks like “Mexico” are stuffed full of wooze and “The Last Astronaut” is like a darkly-manic ADHD flick through some late-night radio stations. In fact, the way many of these tracks pitch-shift through the genres feels very much like very late-night Brighton Festival Radio circa 1994, when the DJs just fucked around playing all kinds of things on top of gentle IDM and breaks. Not that there is anything gentle here, but you’ll hopefully get my point… things are being thrown around and many of them are sticking in weird places.

So, even if my original impression was utterly misguided, and my original hypothesis completely unsupportable, there is a slight sense of loss here, a sense of what could have been had this record been released at the time. It’s the record the ’90s really needed. A record that could have helped define the good parts of the decade; the slightly demented genre-hopping bits that often now get subsumed by the Oasis et al juggernauts of mediocrity.

Ironically, given that their label at the time wanted a more commercial record, this could have been a real breakthrough — “Pepper” was surely always going to be a false dawn — because it sits in the middle of the ’90s laughing madly at all the shit that’s going down and finding its own way of playing around in it.

It’s clear that this was the Buttholes’ faeces-throwing record, their way of turning away from their sponsors and saying: ‘“Fuck it: have you met us? We can’t be trusted on TV, or in interviews, or on stage, or in the studio. We’re the Butthole Surfers, the clue is in our name. It’s been fun being on Romeo And Juliet soundtracks and all that but we just can’t sustain that degree of normal. We’ve been masking our crazy all along — didn’t you guess? We are mad children with boxes of electronic gadgets and de-tuned guitars. We are the people your parents didn’t even think to warn you about, and we really don’t have a clue what’s coming next.”

I hope they’re thinking of recording something new soon. A gabber record, perhaps. An album of Divine covers, or a collaboration with people like UnicaZürn, or UKAEA or Underworld. We need more shit-throwing, we need new toys hurled at our heads, we need dysfunctional relationships and brown acid and guys and girls who don’t know what they’re doing.

-Loki-