Travelling casually through time as across borders, The Dream Machine return with their new single, “Flowers On The Razor Wire“, a Ramones-referencing, Berlin-written rush of radio-ready new wave rock. Following up two underground long-players with their most uncompromising and ambitious collection of songs yet, the five-strong band from the windswept Wirral peninsula announce that their new album, Fort Perch Rock, for release on February 27, 2026 via Run On Records.
Having made their return with the release of the album’s title track, a wheeling and wailing sprint through Jim Hension-inspired, organ-fired MC5 rapid punk/psych, “Flowers On The Razor Wire” sees the band deliver an infectious brand of drivetime melody to introduce the follow up to 2024’s Small Time Monsters album. Pounding in on a slick of keys and climbing steadily to meet a gilt-finished chorus, easily mistaken for a Blondie heyday single, the band’s starting point was found in the pages of a mysterious second-hand comic.
Songwriter and lead vocalist, Zak McDonnell says: “’Flowers On The Razorwire’ was about a comic book I found in an antique shop. I was sitting with a guitar, and the lads were just shouting out lines and ideas from it. It wasn’t long before we realised it was some sort of erotic graphic novel. I was in a Ramones phase around this time, so we went to Berlin during the writing of this album, intending to make a pilgrimage back to The Ramones Museum that we’d visited years ago, only to find it was gone. It’s as inspired by The Ramones as The Strokes, Television and The Walkmen.”
Recorded and self-produced between studios on the Wirral and in Liverpool, The Dream Machine’s 12-track Fort Perch Rock album is set to be released on multiple formats, including digital, CD and special edition, colored vinyl editions. A limited, band store-only butterfly effect vinyl version is to be released with a one-off, glow in the dark 7” EP of covers that pays tribute to the Motown girl group, The Shirelles.
