REVIEW: Deerhoof—Noble And Godlike In Ruin (2025)
20 albums down, 30 years on, Deerhoof continue to thrill in the wonkiest way known to ears.
For science, I decided to play the latest Deerhoof album in the car to my unsuspecting 8-year old son on the way back from football practice. Not really knowing the record too well, I stuck on the last track Immigrant Songs.
For the first half of the track, I was relieved it was one of their prettiest ever songs, with it’s harmonious chorus “I’m dreaming of a melody…” showing where their heads were at that day.
On a particularly vibrant spring evening in Glasgow, it was a sound choice for the car…until we reach 3 minutes and 26 seconds, whereupon the band elect to open up a portal to hell itself, and the remaining three and a half minutes screech and rattle and scream until the last rotation of the record.
To his credit, my son didn’t flinch, perhaps used to the peculiar rackets that pass as music on my watch. But it neatly sums up the two extremes of this singular band—at once keenly melodic, but also liable to dissolve into a frenzied apocalypse of noise—sometimes within the same song.
For Noble And Godlike In Ruin, they walk the line between the two as you’d expect, but mostly rein it in, with a sequence of short-sharp songs, kicking off with the gentle lullaby Overrated Species Anyhow, before kicking up a notch or two with Sparrow Sparrow, something you might deem as classic Deerhoof with each instrument seemingly on its own side quest, while still meshing together in a fascinating way. Twists, turns, changing time signatures, it’s all here. As ever.
Seguewaying neatly into Kingtoe this pattern continues, content to sashay along in their own melodic, rhythmic universe, unfolding pretty yet unsettling fractal patterns of sound.
Return of the Return of the Fire Trick Star keeps the pop hook quotient high, with its taut, funky riff, but also seeds the intent to take things in a slightly sinister direction, with its horror strings and odd noises stabbing in just to remind us who you’re dealing with here. And lo and behold, the anti dinner party sequence appears, with A Body of Mirrors fully embracing the darkness, while the maniacal Ha, Ha Ha Ha, Haaa burbles and clacks along, daring you to dance like no-one’s watching.
Disobedience continues the fine Deerhoof tradition of everyone playing whatever the hell they want, and sticking with it regardless. Eventually it all coalesces into something wonderful, before they return back to the demented opening riff before heading into the cosmos…somewhere. Will you want to go with them? You may not have any choice. You’re strapped in.
Of course, at some stage we arrive at planet Skronk, where the band get a chance to cut loose on Who Do You Root For, via spooky arpeggios, crunchy psych riffs and falling-down-the-stairs drumming. Under Rats, meanwhile, ropes in Saul Williams to give us a taste of what a Deerhoof rap band might sound like. Rather good, is the answer, laced with the usual inexplicable batshittery that makes most other bands seem trad and unadventurous by comparison.
And that brings us back to the beginning. An album with more twists and turns than a bag full of forgotten cables. How remarkable that 30 years in, they keep finding new ways to make their weird nonsense fun.
