Hippie Death Cult have released Blood, Grit and Bone with a video. It is their first new studio recording in three years and the first since they signed to Blacklight Media, the Metal Blade imprint.
A standalone single rather than an album teaser is the interesting choice here. A band that has just signed usually appears with a record behind it, and putting one song out with nothing announced reads as a deliberate reintroduction: the label gets to see what the trio sounds like now, and so does everyone else, without a release date hanging over it.
Three years is also long enough for a band this size to have been written off. What they built their name on was a heavy rock trio sound thick enough to pass for doom on a bad night, with the organ and the fuzz doing work that most bands in the lane hand to a second guitar. The last record was produced, engineered, mixed and mastered in the band, which is the opposite end of the process from a label single.
Nothing else was announced with it, so the song is the whole statement for now.