Lithics

Emerging from Portland, Oregon, Lithics channel maximum tension through their stripped-down post-punk, updating the legacies of Bush Tetras, Pylon, and Captain Beefheart for a new era. Their 2016 release Borrowed Floors captured late-2010s anxiety and disillusionment via locked-in rhythms, stabbing and scraping guitars, and the surreal detachment of Aubrey Hornor's vocals and words. The band pursued a more straightforward route on the 2018 breakthrough Mating Surfaces and its 2020 successor Tower of Age while preserving every trace of their subversive edge.

Late in 2014 the Portland friends Aubrey Hornor, bassist Bob Desaulniers, drummer Wiley Hickson, and guitarist Mason Crumley launched Lithics after years of shared stages with their earlier projects. Hornor claimed lead vocals and returned to guitar—an instrument she had played in childhood before switching to drums—developing an instinctive style. The group gradually tightened its method, treating Hornor's fractured, dreamlike lyrics as seeds for collective improvisations that were later shaped into songs echoing the angular spirit of Devo, Kleenex/LiLiPUT, and the Fall. In July 2015 the band issued its self-released Lithics EP on a limited cassette run. Water Wing Records put out the debut album Borrowed Floors in March 2016, drawing notice for its taut, confrontational post-punk renewal. August 2017 brought the self-released limited EP Wendy Kraemer, which highlighted the quartet's improvisational facility. Lithics signed with Kill Rock Stars for the politically charged second album Mating Surfaces, released in May 2018; the wider distribution brought broader recognition and prompted European and U.S. tours. That August the Kansas City, Missouri-based label Thrilling Living released the double A-sided single "Photograph, You Of"/"Lost Signal." Trouble in Mind issued the jittery yet catchy Tower of Age in June 2020.