Stinking Lizaveta

Stinking Lizaveta crafts instrumental post-rock that pulls equally from Sabbath and the approaches of Sonic Youth or Slint. Their blend fuses a stoner/doom metal edge with jazz, the exacting repetition of math rock, and the raw force of early Black Flag to produce a wholly distinctive attack. The Philadelphia trio took its name from a Dostoevsky figure in The Brothers Karamazov. Guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos and drummer Cheshire Agusta formed the group in 1994 and brought in Yanni’s brother Alexi Papadopoulos on upright electric bass. Three 7-inch releases appeared in 1995, one of them a split with Greg Ginn’s band Gone. Steve Albini recorded the band’s debut full-length, the fiercely guitar-driven …Hopelessness and Shame, in 1996; Slaughterhouse followed the next year. Violinist Gloria Justin and analog-keyboard player John Schenk joined for the third album, III, issued on Tolotta Records—run by Fugazi’s Joe Lally—in 2001. Caught Between Worlds surfaced in 2004 on At a Loss Recordings domestically and Monotreme Records throughout the U.K. and Europe. The trio returned to Albini for their fifth studio album, the intense Scream of the Iron Iconoclast, released in 2007. Sacrifice and Bliss, an exploratory set, arrived in 2009, followed by 7th Direction on Translation Loss in 2012 and Journey to the Underworld in 2017.