Salem Wolves get back in the ring with the anthemic ‘So Desperate’
Providence rock band taps into the human psyche and a lost wrestler’s supernatural ambition through a new single out Friday, May 10
NOW PLAYING: Listen to ‘So Desperate’ via Spotify
Concept album ‘The Psychotron Speaks’ out in July via Tor Johnson Records
BOSTON, Mass. [May 10, 2024] -- “Who’d you rather be?” Seldom has a simple four-word question demanded such a complex answer. And that’s often due to the point in which the query is posed: In times of triumph, the human ambition yearns for even higher pleasures, seeing the experienced success as just another step towards a greater achievable goal; and in times of despair, our unrelenting ability to ache for what’s not ours acts as an unbearable weight as heavy as the failures in front of us.
The question is at the core of Salem Wolves’ anthemic, arena-ready single “So Desperate,” set for streaming release on Friday, May 10. It’s the Providence rock and roll band’s first new music since 2022’s Hostile Music, arrives a week ahead of their performance at Wes’ Rib House on May 17, and invites the listener to a world far more chaotic and intense than the quartet’s usual brand of adrenalized garage punk.
“So Desperate,” inspired by the night before frontman and songwriter Gray Bouchard’s wedding, is the first glimpse into Salem Wolves’ ambitious new album The Psychotron Speaks, produced by Jay Maas (Defeater, Bane) and due out in July via Tor Johnson Records. It’s a fever dream collection that sets Bouchard’s own life experiences against the hazy backdrop of the world of wrestling, channeling the musician’s faded recollection of a down-on-his luck ‘80s-era pro wrestler named The Stranger, who according to legend once battled it out in the Southland Wrestling Association (SWA).
With a career on the brink of irrelevance, The Stranger taps into a mysterious power delivered from the Psychotron, an unknowable and unthinkable eldritch device capable of bending the world around it and creating distortion, both aural and psychological.
Bouchard, equipped with a cavalcade of memorabilia and ephemera from The Stranger’s sudden reign, from old torn event posters to weathered trading cards to an unearthed zine penned by the indefatigable Sol Church chronicling this unbelievable arc, races back and forth between his fuzzy memories of the past and his cloudy understanding of the here and now. “So Desperate” strips away the piss and vinegar of the Wolves’ classic material for something elevated into pure grandeur, as the band’s black surf post-punk snarl gives way to dynamic rock and roll illuminated by the brightest of lights and the darkest of human emotion.
“‘So Desperate’ is about recontextualizing what should be a moment of triumph as something grimy,” Bouchard admits. “If you’re ambitious or a dreamer, it’s easy to just focus on the goal, the stage, that moment in the spotlight when all eyes are on you. You tune out the noise, ignore your screaming muscles and tired bones, and march toward victory.”
But true to form, not all is as it seems.
“But then when you get there and the lights are bright, hot, and oppressive, the eyes on you make you feel self-conscious,” he adds. “You should feel like a golden god; but instead, you feel diminished by everything you had to suffer through to get there. The person who stands in the spotlight is a degraded version of yourself, the version you ran through the copy machine over and over until the black ink started to run out. This is your moment, but it’s the worst version of you experiencing it. ‘So Desperate’ is finding yourself trapped in that moment and wishing desperately you were someone, something else. Something better. Ambition can be a beautiful cage that traps you.”
Bouchard admits the basis of the song was formed just ahead of his marriage, revealing that his nerves “were so jangled, I felt like a burlap sack full of broken glass. At the altar, I was a sweating, jittery mess, grinding my teeth and wondering how I managed to trick my (now) wife into this.” His predicament aligned with stories of the past, the ones he read about, or was told to, as a child growing up with wrestling always on the mind. He thought about the undercard wrestler, like The Stranger before achieving that higher power, a body bruised and broken and served up only as a prop for someone else to beat, a pawn for someone else to experience victory in front of an adoring crowd. For the wrestler, it’s thousands of fans; for Bouchard, at least ahead of his wedding, it was otherwise adoring friends and family.
“The song is about painting a picture of desperation that will drive a man to reconsider everything about who they are and what they’re willing to do to be the guy who goes over, not the guy who gets pinned,” Bouchard notes. “The kind of desperation that makes you turn to otherworldly means of influence.”
And that otherworldly influence is what led The Stranger to become the stuff of legend, even as Bouchard actively seeks out others who may have been exposed to the same stories. Pieces of the past come together throughout The Psychotron Speaks, relaying the tale of how this supernatural power enabled the wrestler to rise into the role of a main event talent, the champion he always felt was just out of reach. Nevermind that this power ultimately drove The Stranger and everyone around him insane, as love, power, addiction, and adoration would blend together as he lost his grip on reality and spiraled into the void.
When Bouchard asks himself “Who’d you rather be?”, he thinks of the wrestler. Because the journey from the mat to the top rope usually requires a trip back down. And it comes much faster than the rise upward.
“I’ve always taken a pro wrestling approach to music: Put on a show, get butts in seats, tell great stories at tremendous physical cost,” Bouchard admits. “I appreciate its lack of guile and artifice; it’s honestly dishonest. You know you’re seeing a work, being told a story, and asked to participate. But behind the work, real people are putting their bodies and minds on the line for entertainment.”
He adds: “Psychotron sprang to life as I thought about the fact I've spent more than half my life playing music professionally and some nights it still feels like I’m still fighting from underneath. Wrestling history is littered with great workers who got left by the side of the road while their opponents took off. There are a million reasons why this happens, but the idea of a guy who was a mid-card worker (on a good day) who couldn’t get over without some kind of disruptive force on their side resonated.”
With several accolades under their own championship belt, from countless Boston Music Awards nominations (Best New Band! Rock Artist of the Year! Song of the Year!) to endless press across New England to sharing stages with the likes of Diarrhea Planet, Roky Erickson, King Khan and the Shrines, Life of Agony, and whoever else, Salem Wolves ache for something more.
Put the mic in their collective face, the same way overzealous ring announcers would approach The Stranger in some backdoor town on the way to Elsewhere, U.S.A., and ask the question, “Who’d you rather be?” For Bouchard, the answer is suddenly simple.
“The gutters are choked with local bands putting out yet another album of songs to the tepid fanfare of their spouses and friends,” he concludes. “Musicians can be remarkably, self-consciously unambitious and it’s lame as fuck. Who wants to write yet another mundane love song? I don’t want to be ‘just another local band’. I want to create a world.”
Through the lost memory of The Stranger, the Psychotron speaks once more.
‘So Desperate’ single artwork:
Salem Wolves are:
Gray Bouchard: Vocals and Guitar
Justin Tisdale: Bass
Sam Valliere: Guitar
Steven Shepherd: Drums
‘The Psychotron Speaks’: July 19 on Tor Johnson Records
The Story: The Psychotron Speaks is a 12-song concept record telling the story of a down-on-his-luck pro wrestler receiving unsettling instruction and power from the Psychotron itself; an unknowable and unthinkable force of distortion. Love, power, addiction, and adoration all blend together as he spirals into the Void.
The Sound: Produced by long-time collaborator Jay Maas (Defeater, Bane), The Psychotron Speaks combines punk fury, post-punk shimmer, and growling garage rock into anthems. Over fuzzed-out guitars and pounding drums, the record is a dream of contrast: moments of echoing beauty exist alongside roaring feedback. Sometimes anthemic, sometimes keening, always emotional and vivid.
The Special Edition: The Psychotron Speaks will be released digitally and on a limited-edition cassette in July 2024 on Tor Johnson Records. In addition to the standard edition of the record, a special edition will be available with a number of bonus extras supplementing the lore of the record, including: Posters and signed 8x10s, Custom-designed trading cards, buttons, a 48-page zine.
The Psychotron: Accompanying the music, listeners are invited to visit thepsychotron.com to get a tantalizing glimpse of the world of the record and immerse themselves in the mythology of the Psychotron.
‘So Desperate’ single credits:
Performed by Salem Wolves
Music and lyrics by Gray Bouchard
Produced and mastered by Jay Maas
Drums by Don Schweihofer
Additional vocals by Cam Hutchinson, Ben “Cutty” Cuthbert, Matthew Hughes, Michael Medlock, Bjarki Guðmundsson
Funding was provided in part by a grant from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, through an appropriation by the Rhode Island General Assembly, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and private funders.
Media praise for Salem Wolves:
“This song is wild, it’s huge. Great singer too. It’s all there.” _Bartees Strange on ‘Hostile Music’
“Salem Wolves are here to summon out your inner ache for rugged, and damned riffs that ride out onto a thousand sunsets.” _Impose Magazine
“This hot-blooded stroke hit me and my ears from the moment the first chord blasted out of my shaking stereo. Ardent anxiety and edgy excitability dominate this fanatical outburst. And when the clamorous chorus erupts you’ll go mental just as these wolves do. Holy smoke!” _Turn Up The Volume
“Amidst a flurry of riffage that creates an incessant buzzsaw-churning wall of sound sits Salem Wolves’ vocalist Gray Bouchard whose delicate delivery against the brash bombast is just the kind of cathartic contrast the Boston Rawk quartet need to deliver their most hard-hitting and hook-laden track yet… a fiery new anthem.” _Rock & Roll Fables
“There are two wolves inside you. One wants to tear through town on a hate-fueled rampage. The other wants to chill the eff out and listen to the cautionary wisdom of ‘Hostile Music.’” _Vanyaland
“Salem Wolves certainly get after it on their new track ‘Hostile Music’ which is a combination of something that starts off sounding like a classic Billy Idol song and breaks into a big early 2000’s emo era chorus in the vein of My Chemical Romance or The Used.” _Blood Makes Noise
“‘Hostile Music’ is one of the heaviest and oddly pleasant songs to come from Salem Wolves to date!” _If It’s Too Loud
“Hearing the song some more confirms to us what a knockout tune it is. The line in the lyrics ‘we’re not getting better’ is our new catch phrase for this stretch of quarantine. The video has a pastiche of alarming occurrences in film, paper and news footage showing things weren’t great in the past either. It all fits the song’s bleak outlook.” _Boston Groupie News
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