Ugly Animals



RETOX was Brian Evans, Thor Dickey, Michael Crain (The Festival of Dead Deer, Dead Cross), and Justin Pearson (The Locust, All Leather, Some Girls, Swing Kids, Holy Molar, Head Wound City, Dead Cross, Planet B) The band began in 2011, releasing the Retox 7” self-titled EP – a record marked by reckless speed and blistering defiance in heavy opposition to the ongoing afflictions of stupidity, laziness, and the general bullshit that occupies underactive minds, which are themes that can be found in the majority of their work: “You have received a notice to quit your pointless bitching.” The lineup would remain the same for their first LP, Ugly Animals (Three One G, Ipecac), which proceeded the EP just months later, up until September 2011 in which Brian Evans took over for Gabe on drums. He would first be recorded on their sophomore album, released in 2013 by Three One G and Epitaph, YPLL (an acronym for a term interestingly centered around premature mortality, “Years of Potential Life Lost”). In 2014, the band released a split with Narrows, as well as recorded their third LP (Epitaph, Three One G). Cue the entrance of Keith Hendriksen (Kill the Capulets, Virginia Reed) to take over for Thor Dickey on bass, contributing to the consistent change and growth that propels the band from one unique album to the next: varying styles and sonically experimenting, melding the raw with the refined, reinforcing but never repeating. Throughout, they have toured continuously with similarly like-minded acts such as Melt-Banana, Tomahawk, OFF!, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Doomsday Student, physically bringing every bit as much intensity as the music itself incites intellectually. Retox simultaneously reflects and defies society, using their music as a way of holding a mirror to the rest of us in order to expose our own fucked up realities and the twisted ethics authority attempts to inculcate in us every day. To encourage us to make “the powers that be” become “the powers that were” as they slowly fade into pathetic obscurity and die off, one by one. In May 2018 the band announced that a new album, The Nature of Failure, was being worked on. But the band split, in 2019, before the album was completed. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.