“It is about hopelessness, anxiety, and depression so familiar that they seem like permanent fixtures of one’s psyche and identity,” thus go the closing lines of the press release for «Mental Wounds Not Healing», the title of the upcoming collaboration between The Body and Uniform. The record’s third track, «Come and See», is already available, so just press play before reading the rest of the story and getting those sweet pre-order links.

As is by now common knowledge, whenever The Body comes to Europe, drummer and co-founder Lee Buford stays in the US and someone else accompanies Chip King. Normally, that’s a session drummer. However, last year when they toured Europe with Uniform, neither drums nor guitars were there to be found. Instead, King took his noise-making devices and his unmistakable voice, and was joined on stage by someone else (as far as we could dig, it was Dustyn Astbury) who also had a synthesiser / noise-making device. We caught the tour in Amsterdam and the ensuing forty minutes or so were a maelstrom of superlative extreme music that we then wished had lasted for a couple of hours more. Sound-wise, this is more telling of the beast that is «I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer», which came out last week, than anything to do with the collaboration. Of relevance to this text is that during the planning stages of this tour, Uniform singer Michael Berdan asked The Body’s Lee Buford, with whom he had started corresponding regularly, if he and King wanted to do a collaboration.

A couple of months later, Uniform’s permanent members Michael Berdan and Ben Greenberg joined The Body at the Machine With Magnets studio in Providence, where they were then recording, and started writing the songs, a process which ended up with Berdan recording his vocals at the hallway of Greenberg’s apartment in Brooklyn. Per the press release, the songs in «Mental Wounds Not Healing» are effectively a duet between Berdan and King.

«Mental Wounds Not Healing» is set for release on June 8 via Sacred Bones Records. Pre-orders are available here (vinyl) and here (digital and vinyl).