Thee Oh Sees

With a stage show defined by its sweat-drenched intensity and a catalog of albums marked by their signature unhinged style, Thee Oh Sees rank among the era’s most vital garage punk acts. Fronted by guitarist and vocalist John Dwyer, whose instantly recognizable guitar tone and fiercely aggressive playing define the sound, the band navigated multiple phases that carried them from clanging lo-fi garage experimentalism on their 2007 debut Sucks Blood, through weirdo psych-pop on 2011’s Castlemania, to a near-slick garage punk approach on 2014’s Drop. Following that release Dwyer broadened the group’s palette to encompass proto-metal, dark psych, and trippy prog. The first signs of this expanded direction appeared on 2015’s Mutilator Defeated at Last, after which the band launched into a rapid burst of productivity that yielded several mind-bending albums: 2016’s A Weird Exits introduced motorik rhythms, 2018’s Smote Reverser incorporated boogie rock organs and mystical jazz-rock, and 2020’s Metamorphosed delivered a blown-out synthesis of everything they had explored over the previous decade. In the process they established themselves as a leading psychedelic rock outfit known for delivering the unexpected, such as the hardcore punk album 2022’s A Foul Form, with consistently exhilarating results.

After Dwyer, originally from Rhode Island, moved to California in the late ’90s he immersed himself in the San Francisco indie scene, performing with multiple groups including the Coachwhips, Pink & Brown, Yikes, Up Its Alive, and Swords & Sandals. He launched OCS—standing for Orinoka Crash Suite, Orange County Sound, or any other meaning Dwyer chose on a given day—as an outlet for the experimental instrumentals he was creating in his home studio. Over time OCS evolved into a full band and operated under a rotating set of names, most prominently the Oh Sees or the Ohsees, before settling on Thee Oh Sees. The lineup consisted of Dwyer on guitar and vocals, Brigid Dawson on vocals and tambourine, Petey Dammit on bass, and Mike Shoun on drums.

Evoking the Mamas & the Papas and Love fed through a blender fitted with bent and rusty blades, the group signed with the German Tomlab label and issued Sucks Blood in 2007 and The Master’s Bedroom Is Worth Spending a Night In in 2008. Thee Oh Sees then shifted to In the Red for their third album, 2009’s Help, which blended a dose of garage rock power with the band’s psych-pop leanings. Warm Slime arrived in 2010. In 2011 Thee Oh Sees released two albums: the pop-leaning Castlemania in June and the heavier, wilder Carrion Crawler/The Dream in November, the latter marking the first recording with second drummer Lars Finberg of the like-minded band the Intelligence. Never content to pause when new music could be made, Thee Oh Sees returned in September 2012 with Putrifiers II, an album that merged Castlemania’s fractured pop sensibilities with Carrion Crawler/The Dream’s ferocious rock experimentation. Their following effort, 2013’s Floating Coffin, found the group discarding much of the eccentricity in favor of a direct, hard-hitting set of straight-ahead garage/punk rock songs.

When Dawson relocated to Santa Cruz and Dwyer moved to L.A. later that year, the band appeared headed for a split, a sense reinforced when Dwyer announced to the audience at a December 2013 show, “This will be the last Oh Sees show for a long while, so dig in.” The break proved short-lived, however, and a new album, Drop, surfaced in early 2014. Recorded solely by Dwyer and longtime producer Chris Woodhouse inside an old banana-ripening warehouse, it displayed a more arranged, unexpectedly poppy character. With a refreshed lineup that included drummer Nick Murray and bassist Timothy Hellman, Thee Oh Sees resumed live performances and tracked their fourteenth album, Mutilator Defeated at Last. Released in May 2015, it featured former member Dawson on backing vocals.

Shortly after the album’s release Murray departed and was succeeded by dual drummers Ryan Moutinho and Dan Rincon for ensuing tours. A live recording captured during a San Francisco date was issued in June 2016 as part of Castle Face’s Live in San Francisco series. Close behind came the group’s fifteenth album, A Weird Exits, which appeared in August and included contributions from the touring musicians plus cover art by Hair Police’s Robert Beatty, celebrated for his hallucinatory airbrushed imagery. Before the year ended the band put out another single, “Fortress,” along with An Odd Entrances, a collection drawn from the same sessions that produced A Weird Exits.

The group remained largely quiet through the first half of 2017 before resurfacing under a shortened name, Oh Sees, and with a new drummer, Paul Quattrone, stepping in for the departed Moutinho. The first release by this configuration was Orc, issued in August and featuring contributions from Brigid Dawson. A few months later Dwyer and Dawson resurrected the OCS moniker for Memory of a Cut Off Head, an album of quietly hazy acid folk songs. After another extended pause from new studio material the band returned with the expansive, prog- and metal-influenced Smote Reverser. Issued by Castle Face in August 2018, it retained the core lineup from Orc while adding keyboardist Tomas Dolas from Mr. Elevator and the Brain Hotel.

Throughout the following year the band maintained a consistent schedule of live performances while Castle Face reissued two early lo-fi titles, The Cool Death of the Island Raiders and Graveblockers. They also found time to record Face Stabber, an expansively trippy album that folded additional electronic and free jazz elements into their already dense sound and appeared in August 2019. After Dwyer issued records under his Damaged Bug project and with free jazz outfit Bent Arcana—both featuring Oh Sees bandmates—he introduced the band’s new name, Osees, as they resurfaced in September 2020 with Protean Threat, a more aggressive, punk-influenced album that condensed their prog and jazz tendencies into tighter forms. Just a month later the group revealed two contrasting facets of their personality on Metamorphosed, which opened with three punk ravers each clocking in under two minutes and closed with a pair of extended prog-psych jams lasting 14 and 23 minutes. Determined to avoid any impression of inactivity, Dwyer capped the year by releasing Panther Rotate, an album assembled from drastic remixes of Protean Threat tracks, electronic excursions, field recordings, and a sideways cover of a song by Alice Cooper’s early garage band the Spiders.

Dwyer devoted much of 2021 to issuing psychedelic avant-jazz records created with a shifting roster of collaborators, after which the band undertook a North American tour in the latter part of the year. Upon resuming studio work they assembled a set of songs that honored the loud, fast, and uncompromising hardcore punk bands Dwyer had admired in his youth and revisited during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Recorded on a modest budget with minimal reverb and roughly half the length of recent albums, A Foul Form presented the band at their most ferocious and included a cover of a song by one of the project’s inspirations, Rudimentary Peni.