Streets Sects have made 2025 the year of a triumphant return to musicmaking – on the same day in August, they unleashed two full LPs of new material in two notably-different styles. While the first, Dry Drunk, is very much a continuation of the sonic arc the band has been on for the whole of their career, the second, Full Color Eclipse, is a marked departure from their usual style. It’s so different in fact that the band – still Leo Ashline and Shaun Ringsmuth, as ever – has in fact become two bands, releasing FCE under the moniker “Street Sex”, which is what most people hear the first time the band’s original name is said to them aloud. [Perhaps one day we’ll get an LP under the name Street Sexts, which will cover all the bases.
To hear them tell it though, the band(s) nearly didn’t exist at all – their music has always been fully up to the task of keeping pace with their harrowing instrumentals, putting the listener face-to-face with ugly, depraved extremes of violence, sex, and addiction – then placing a hand behind their head and determinedly shoving their face even deeper into those machinations. According to a pre-album press release, Ashline relapsed in 2020, and the band broke up around that time. But their reunion has borne fruit, with these two records preceded by the excellent ‘X Amount’, a trio of singles, and a collaboration with HEALTH entitled ‘The Joy of Sect’ – a slow drip that preceded the current deluge.
The band returns to the road as part of an absolutely-packed lineup, teaming with Insula Iscariot, King Yosef, and Youth Code for a night of noise that may vary in style but never in force. Amid the four-band bill they cut together a leaner setlist that favors keeping heartrates elevated, beginning with ‘X Amount’ and from there chiefly focusing on songs from End Position and Dry Drunk, the latter represented by its two singles, ‘Spitting Images’ and ‘The Glass Shithouse’. The full record is worth listening to though, for highlights such as the unbelievably-intense ‘Baker Act’, as well as to examine how the album’s fury is arranged between interludes at the close of most songs.
Ashline stalks the front of the stage wide-eyed, with Ringsmuth bouncing restlessly behind a massive board of equipment and gadgetry. While Ashline’s long white-haired wig doesn’t make an appearance during the set, a fan-favorite set piece returns: Ashline descends from the stage and approaches the back of the room, where next to the soundboard he’s stashed a literal, actual chainsaw. There’s no blade, of course – but he carries it around the center of the room menacingly, hoisting it single-handedly above his head dead-center. Even without the rotating slew of teeth, the visible vibrations of the tool, the trademark sound, and most of all the unmistakable smell of real gasoline being used up in its engine – inspire agape mouths across the entire room.
Absent from the live set, notably, are any selects from Full Color Eclipse – whether due to time, the tone of the tour, or equipment considerations, the live forms of those songs remain a mystery for now, but the prospect of Street Sects/Sex coming back around as a headliner weaving between two styles, or even fully devoting themselves to their new vision of more danceable iterations of their music, is tantalizing. I’ll not spoil the lyrics here, but the experiment is most successful in the chorus of lead single ‘Turn Blue’ – patently gruesome yet undeniably catchy. It’s brazen, accelerationist industrial pop music – enough said.
“I wish I would have signed you when you were younger, and hungry” sneers Ashline in the guise of a record label suit on ‘Perpetuity’ from Full Color Eclipse – if this was based on an in-person interaction, I’d like to attest that they still seem plenty hungry to me: two albums, two earworms slithering into each ear canal to eat from both sides.
Photos and words by Collin Heroux