Sometimes, you want a record that makes you feel like you need a shower afterwards. Just me? No, if you're on this site you're likely interested in music that's fast, fuzzy, and grimy. Then I've got an album for you: Libertine by Brooklyn's Foreign Body. In just a half-hour, Libertine will transport you into a world that feels a lot like 1970s New York City, where trash litters the streets and the people you encounter are all up to something shady. 

With short, energetic songs, submerged, distorted vocals and punchy drums, Foreign Body seem clearly influenced by bands like Big Black. Vocalist Hugh Potter's vocals are often anguished and throat-shredding, but he's also capable of clean singing, as evidenced in the almost-title-track above, "Libertines." On that track, he sings about sexual exploitation and how it cheapens human connection, one of two tracks on the album that tackles the subject. As he told Decibel about the single "When Sex is Not Enough":

“This is the second of two songs dedicated to obsessive sexual behavior of the male. Here the role of pornography and desensitization: a life drawn out only to consume and pleasure oneself. At the same time being destroyed by the inadequacies of fantasy and role play. Hence the Dworkin quote—this fantasy must be replicated in reality, and it is a violence that begets further violence. A timeline of scrubbed internet histories and deleted videos of dubious legality. You’re aware that it’s gotten out of control, but to stop you wouldn’t know where to begin and would you want to? Can you even come without the hideousness of your own perversions?”

With a sound this scuzzy, it is fitting that the band is focused of stories of vice and exploitation. These aren't songs of glorification, though. On Libertine, Foreign Body is shining a light on the ugliness of the world, and their anger about the evils that have been with us for decades. The songs may recall the uglier years of New York, with rampant drugs, violence, and exploitation, but all of these issues are still with us today. If we have to live in an ugly world, we might as well do it with a soundtrack that rips. 

Foreign Body’s Libertine is out September 11th via Brutal Panda.