One of Greater Cincinnati’s best Rock bands over the past 10 years, 500 Miles to Memphis, has announced that its first album since 2014’s Stand There and Bleed will be released early next year.
The group (which dubs its sound “Americana Punk Rock”) also unleashed the first music from the album, titled Blessed Be The Damned, and announced the opening of pre-orders for the LP through the 500MTM Bandcamp page. Blessed Be The Damned will be available Jan. 25.
Those pre-ordering Blessed Be The Damned get a free download of the fiery album track “Bonnie,” which you can stream below. The song has the classic sound 500 Miles to Memphis fans expect, know and love — highly memorable and energetic Rock & Roll with a heavy dose of Americana/Roots music coursing through its veins — but there’s a twist. Instead of a prominently American Roots music bite, “Bonnie” roils some Celtic flavoring into the distorted guitars/banjo/fiddle soup, with rally-cry gang vocals and a slithering, haunted verse melody helping to make it an instant classic in a catalog of songs full of them. It’s the sound of Flogging Molly and The Pogues crashing the basement stage at a house party where an especially amped-up and locked-in Green Day is letting loose.
This past spring, 500 Miles to Memphis recorded a live album at Southgate House Revival in Newport (no word on its release date yet) and announced that it would begin the recording sessions for Blessed in the summertime.
Visit 500milestomemphis.bandcamp.com to pre-order Blessed Be The Damned now. You can also check out and order new 500MTM t-shirts (and stickers) featuring the cool album cover artwork by Richard Brumbaugh. The band recently posted video on social media of Brumbaugh doing some shading work on the tattoo-ready cover art (set to the tune of “Bonnie”).
Next weekend, on Saturday, Nov. 10, 500 Miles to Memphis is returning to Southgate House Revival to play Night 2 of the massive Ironfest IX.
This article appears in Oct 31 – Nov 7, 2018.