The Dream Machine, the purposefully perpendicular diversion from samey and slavish content-era beat combinations, return to release their first new music of 2025, the wheeling and wailing MC5 and Stooges-reminiscent, “Fort Perch Rock.” Half-inched from an EP of the same name.
Suburban fatigue, substance experimentation and juvenile investigations into record collections of otherworldy weight catalyzed The Dream Machine’s emergence in 2021, releasing the sporadic acid-rock of three EPs over 18 months before their self-produced, debut album, Thank God! It’s The Dream Machine arrived in 2023. With the Fort Perch Rock EP being the first new music released since 2024’s follow-up long-player, Small Time Monsters, followers of bracing, bug-eyed psych-punk-rock-and-roll are permitted to hope for even more to come.
A band as much of the city as of the sea, The Dream Machine’s Fort Perch Rock is named after a promontory point of national defence in New Brighton, facing Liverpool’s shoreline. The garrison, now monument, landmark and café, remains as much an imposing edifice of colonial power as the last sign of establishment interest in The Dream Machine’s overlooked northern seaside town.
Zak McDonnell: “The title track, ‘Fort Perch Rock’ is like looking through a backwards telescope at a song, it’s a tiny smashed up version of a band playing at their loudest. Fort Perch Rock is a whole place and a feeling. It’s a look back at beauty pageants and outdoor swimming baths of the 1950’s, then a sharp look down at your ice lolly, hairy and melted in the sand. We were musically inspired by The Red Devils, The Stooges, Eddie & The Hot Rods, The Coral, 60’s nugget psych, R.L. Burnside and Jim Henson.”
