I was fully intending on taking a break from Trouble Juice stuff over the first few weeks of the year, but it was hard to say no to SKXI when ‘Crystal Meth Superstar’ came crawling into my inbox. That’s not to say the track’s totally irresistible (although maybe it is), but instead just so relentlessly volatile that it seemed like denying the band could be something I might come to regret.

For context, SKXI have been a band for a remarkable seven years, made up of a gang of familiar faces from Melbourne’s music community, and they’ve been sitting on their upcoming album How Does It Feel? for three years now. It’s hard to imagine how they’ve managed to contain ‘Crystal Meth Superstar’ for so long though, as it builds around a searing wall of guitar noise over a galloping backbeat, while Joel Duscher’s roaring vocals keep the track at boiling point for its 90 second runtime.

Following on from the band’s previous two breakneck releases, ‘Crystal Meth Superstar’ does sound the most ‘songlike’ of anything SKXI have come up with so far - I’m pretty sure there’s even a chorus on this one - but that doesn’t mean they’ve skimped on any of the usual mayhem either (especially when it comes to the straight 20 seconds of noise that wraps up the track). It also doesn’t mean the band are any more mature than they were previously; in the press release, Joel’s lyrics are described as sounding like they were “written by a primary school bully”, and it’s hard to lose that image as the track thunders along. Somehow, that only makes the whole experience of ‘Crystal Meth Superstar’ as exhilarating as it is completely brutal.

To pull the curtain back on the new track, Joel very kindly shared some thoughts with us. “Crystal Meth Superstar chronicles the real life experience of having a man decked out in a pristine adidas tracksuit open your passenger side door at 2am on Good Friday while you’re stopped at a red light. He gets into your car and demands you take him deep within the suburbs of the northwest. You say yes and spend 20 minutes following vague directions. Eventually you arrive at a house. He gets out of the car but not before asking what he owes for the trip. He has no cash but says you might recognise him as 'The Shard King'. He’s happy to give you a sample for the solid you’ve done. You decline. He says you’ll regret it because there’s no shard quite like his. You never see him again. He is a Crystal Meth Superstar.”