For those unaware, Indiana duo The Cold Stares will release their new album Heavy Shoes on August 27th via Mascot Records (Black Stone Cherry, Crobot, Monster Truck).

Their story alone would be enough for a drama series – cancer, suicide, betrayal, divorce, loss, self-identity crisis, survival, and ancestral skeletons. Write about what you know, they say.

Indeed there is a richness running through the songs with dark, multi-layered narratives that course through every twist and turn.

Dirty fuzzed-up rock and roll meet blues, garage, desert rock and a Southern Gothic sensibility.

Somber storytelling is etched into their songs with unflinching honesty. For Chris Tapp and Brian Mullins, authenticity is their hallmark.

I’m writing from the point of Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner. It needs to have weight to it, singer-guitarist Tapp explains. There’s not really anything that bothers me to talk about. When you don’t allow yourself to be human and say what’s happened to you, then you make other people that are going through tough shit think that they’re alone.

1. Heavy Shoes
2. 40 Dead Men
3. Take This Body From Me
4. Hard Times
5. In The Night Time
6. Strange Light
7. Prosecution Blues
8. It’s A Game
9. Save You From You
10. You Wanted Love
11. Election Blues
12. Dust In My Hands

This quite stunningly opulent new album opens on the foot-stomping rock of the title track Heavy Shoes and the phenomenal rocker 40 Dead Men, before bringing us the melodic strains of Take This Body From Me, the Delta rock of Hard Times, the Nuggets-era psychedelic garage-rock of In The Night Time and then the rhythmic rock-blues of Strange Light.

Up next is the slow-blues, swamp guitar groove of Prosecution Blues and the foot-stomper It’s A Game, and they in turn are followed by the down and dirty rock-blues of Save You From You, the drum-led hipsway of You Wanted Love, the album rounding out on the Zeppelin-esque Election Blues (and not the Canned Heat song either), the album closing (all too soon, in my humble opinion) on the mid-tempo, earnest, foot-planted rock of Dust In My Hands.

There were a million opportunities for us to bail, Tapp continues. We’ve both been through divorces, and I’ve been through cancer. We’ve been through tough times and never been given anything on a silver plate. We’re just a blue-collar American rock and roll band, he continues.

I don’t think you can get to know people any better than playing music together, says drummer Mullins. You see people at their best and their worst. We’ve cried in front of each other, we’ve celebrated in front of each other.

You want authenticity, take one long cold hard stare at these two. The Cold Stares are a rock ’n’ roll band, but they take a sledgehammer to the foundation to reveal the cracks that are suppressed within it.

With that, allowing themselves to be raw and open to show that, we are not alone.

Heavy Shoes will be available on CD and 180 Grams Shiny Gold Vinyl.

The Cold Stares - In The Night Time (Official Lyric Video)

The Cold Stares - Prosecution Blues Official Music Video

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