Royal Blood — Dead Company

“I was never lost and I was never found.” Royal Blood drop Dead Company and the thing has a HUGE blast radius. Step inside — if you dare.

First spin. Friday night. Verdict rendered before the record’s even over — because sometimes you know by track three.

The opener and title track “Dead Company” rolls in on a jam-riff swagger: tight stop-time, real syncopation, a little Queens of the Stone Age menace inside the first two minutes. Meaty snare, drums landing like furniture down a staircase. Whatever else you say about this band, these two know how to WRITE A GODDAMN RIFF and how to SING. Hooks for days. Commitment. Three minutes in and I’m already sold.

“Swallow the Bomb” keeps the sex appeal going — slick fretwork, FAT guitar tone that never lets up. By “Ten Over Ten” I’m trying to get up and do literally anything else, and the record keeps reaching out and dragging me back into the chair.

Full disclosure: I’m three tracks deep and calling it. Didn’t finish it. Didn’t need to. This is exactly what a Friday night orders when it wants another major-league record from Royal Blood.

A word on the engineering, because it matters here. Thirty-two minutes and forty-five seconds, ten tracks, not one of them overstaying its welcome — this is a record built to be flipped and played again, the way the great ones were. They cut it at Sound City in Van Nuys, the same linoleum-floored room that caught the drums on Nevermind, Rage Against the Machine’s debut, and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. You don’t drag your amps to that building to make a polite record. You go there for the boom.

Behind the glass: Tom Dalgety, who produced the self-titled 2014 debut that went straight to UK number one and has been in Royal Blood’s corner ever since — and whose hands you’ll also find on Ghost, Opeth’s Sorceress, Clutch, and Green Lung. Not a pop producer slumming it. Family. And remember what this band actually is: two people, one bass guitar rigged to roar like a whole band, and a drummer who swings like a wrecking ball. Four albums, four straight UK number ones. Dead Company makes five feel inevitable.

FILE UNDER: Death From Above 1979, later-era Queens of the Stone Age. And if you want the receipts on where that fuzz-bass bloodline runs — StonerRock.com logged Kyuss, Queens of the Stone Age, and Fu Manchu in real time, twenty years back. The receipts are in the Archive →

8.7. HORNS UP.