They come from Warsaw and present themselves as the missing link between Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker. The psych landscape may be crowded, but Atom Juice stand out with a debut that surprises through flair: within the psychedelic framework they weave elements of jazz, hard rock, funk, and cinematic storytelling, with a stylistic freedom that goes beyond skill and technique, reaching into vision and imagination.
Atom Juice is a generous record, both in arrangements and in atmospheres, precise and dynamic in its execution. The six tracks unfold like short films in constant motion: long takes, zooms, accelerations, sonic wide-angles. Every track contains multitudes. Duo, a nine-and-a-half-minute instrumental suite, begins with a hypnotic guitar-and-synth pattern before opening into a jazzy progression, full of distorted drones and chasing delays that echo the Californian skies of the Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa. In Gooboo the band hit their peak: a desert-dry psych blues evolving into a tour de force of acid guitars, jazz-funk interludes, and ’70s-styled accelerations.
Analog production, textured vocals, and the measured use of effects highlight the attention to detail. A solid and imaginative debut: the real challenge now will be to see how far they can push themselves — even without showing off all their special effects.