Seattle’s Johnny Nails is a lifer – a shredder, studio rat, and road warrior whose fingerprints are all over the city’s rock, jazz, and underground scenes and on Savor The Blood, his new LP out via Killroom Records, Nails distills a career of chops, chaos, and pure studio instinct into a record that’s equal parts fever dream and love letter to the craft. Tracked mid-pandemic with a no-fuss, first-take energy, it’s a wild ride of psych-shred workouts, gut-punch riffs, and personal vignettes, all delivered with the swagger of a player who knows when to let it rip and when to let it bleed.
A multi-instrumentalist endorsed by Gibson, Johnny Nails (Ryan Leyva) grew up absorbing everything from jazz to punk to pop-radio earworms, cutting his teeth with Michael Shrieve’s Tangletown before building a globe-trotting career backing grunge heroes, Idol pop stars, hip-hop legends, and more. He’s been a mentor to Seattle Theater Group for two decades, but Nails’ true sanctuary has always been the studio, a place where mistakes are gold, tape flips backwards, and first takes often are the takes. You can hear that raw spark on Savor The Blood, especially on tracks like “Taking Tea with Crowley,” where the band locked in on take one and never looked back.
The album is a personal one. The opening track samples his daughters’ heartbeats. “Ascensión” pays tribute to his Mexican roots, reworking a family folk song into his first track in Spanish. “Murder” was written in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing. Even the lighter moments have teeth: “Blood Rats” is a punky ode to a tampon-thieving dog, while “Scam Likely” was born when engineer Matt Bayles’ phone rang mid-take with that now-famous caller ID. It’s an album that swings from humor to heartbreak, wrapped in riffs that bite and grooves that swagger.
Nails is backed by a powerhouse lineup of Andy King (drums), Aldo Galatioto (guitars), Mike Sparks (bass), Billy Stover (keys), with Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Minus The Bear) engineering and mixing, and mastering by Ed Brooks. It’s a crew that knows how to bottle lightning, and Savor The Blood captures that live-wire energy in spades.
