That essential jolt of rock ’n’ roll—timeless, freewheeling, hard charging—comes to you courtesy of Urge Overkill, the outfit out of Chicago, resurfacing in 2022 with new stuff. The Vinyl District is proud to premiere the bracing “Forgiven” here from their upcoming album Oui, due in stores February 11 via Omnivore Recordings.
It will be the first new release in more than a decade from the band that earned its name backing Nirvana on its Nevermind tour, Pearl Jam on the Vs. tour, and especially with their cover of Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon” that became a sensation in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
The vibrant, almost offhand “Forgiven”—one of 11 new originals on an album that also includes a cover of Wham’s “Freedom,” came with some specific inspirations from some classic rockers, Eddie “King” Roeser says. “Little Richard. The Killer, Jerry Lee. Gang of Four, Some Girls, Television. Unwittingly these were the sounds swimming through my brain the day I started working on ‘Forgiven.’”
His only goal, he says, was to “return with something that rocked.” Turned out it was simple. “I had been messing around working on high volume riffs,” Roeser tells us. “You don’t need lyrics, all kinds of songs just repeat one word for a while—just go over there and kick some fucking ass!” As such, the words come secondarily—and spontaneously. Working with longtime band partner Nash Kato, “I freeform sang most of the ideas you hear on the track,” Rouser says.
Forgive him if the words seem just right for a world trying to crawl out from the pandemic, with refrains like “When the world comes down around you, you gotta believe,” and ultimately: ”I’m going to be among the living / I don’t want to hear your opinion.”
“I had just re-screened The Night of The Hunter where Bob Mitchum has the haunting LOVE/HATE knuckle tats, and that image would be in my head to guide any spontaneous vocal ideas,” Roeser says.
But mostly, “Forgiven” is defined by his driving guitar. “I’d been working different ways to play the riff that became ‘Forgiven,’” he says. “I had the drummer play faster and faster. The guitar takes—tossed off with complete abandon. I stuck every trick in the book into the way those guitars wandered off script only to veer back at the right second.”
It all seemed to gel. “You don’t always realize at first when you have caught Rock Lightning in a Bottle,” he says. “For the first time in a long time I felt… forgiven.”
Oui will be in stores on black vinyl as well as CD and mp3.
PHOTO: JEROD HERZOG
