Riga-based noise punks Les Attitudes Spectrales — co-founders French-born, Latvian-based Julien Stark (vocals, guitar) and his Latvian-born spouse Rūta Stark (bass, vocals), along with Adrians Grīns (guitar) and Mārtiņš Kuzmins (drums ) — was initially founded in 2014 as a duo featuring its co-founders Julien Stark and Rūta Stark. And as a duo, the band released two lo-fi albums 2014’s Floral Wreck and 2015’s Where’s My Ghost Milk?
Shortly after the release of Where’s My Ghost Milk?, the Riga-based outfit expanded into a quartet with the addition of Grīns and Kuzmins. As a quartet, the band released 2019’s Vampire in the Summer and 2022’s award-winning Songs For No One on vinyl through boutique French label Specific Recordings.
The quartet signed to Latvian underground tastemaker label I Love You Records, who will be releasing the band’s fifth album, Watch The Sword About To Drop on May 26, 2026. The 10-song album is reportedly one of the most fearless and heaviest albums they’ve written and recorded to date, while capturing a band on the verge of exploding into the global noise and rock scenes.
Watch The Sword About To Drop‘s first single, “A Trip Down Memory Loss” is a breakneck, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Osees-like mosh pit friendly ripper. The first time I heard “A Trip Down Memory Loss,” I could picture a room quickly turning into a sweaty, joyous mosh pit but the song is rooted in some of the bleakest lyrics that the band’s Julien Stark has ever written.
“Alzheimer’s runs in my family. I didn’t decide to write about it, it just came out. It’s common for me to write a sentence and then work around it. In this case, I started with the final line (“Where was I?”) and the first line was the part I wrote last. It turned out to be about being an old person having hallucinations and falling down the stairs,” Julien Stark says.
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