The World/Inferno Friendship Society Announces 20th-anniversary Reissue Of “Red-Eyed Soul” Out October 30

The World/Inferno Friendship Society and Ernest Jenning Record Co. are excited to announce the 20th-anniversary reissue of the legendary band’s classic double LP Red-Eyed Soul, available on vinyl for the first time since its original 2006 release. Newly pressed at 45rpm under the supervision of original producer Don Fury, the reissue is out on October 30 and available for pre-order now via Bandcamp.

To celebrate the release, the Red-Eyed Soul lineup will perform as Just The Best Party at a record release show for After This The Abyss, an album of new material, on October 17 at Main Drag Music in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Self-described at the time as “New York and New Jersey’s disturbingly cult-like, circus-related, Halloween-tent-revival orchestra,” The World/Inferno Friendship Society became a northeastern punk phenomenon in the 2000s, drawing hitchhiking, trainhopping anarchists, misfits, and theater kids to their legendary live shows and Halloween spectacles, and becoming arguably (alongside sometime collaborators Leftover Crack) the biggest NYC punk band of the decade.

They were equally able to share stages with hardcore and art-rock bands without being domesticable into any one scene—”a band,” wrote The New York Times in singer Jack Terricloth’s obituary, “that melded punk defiance with the decadent theatricality of Weimar-era cabaret.”

Red-Eyed Soul was the culminating statement of the group’s classic second lineup, a tightly-arranged nine-piece juggernaut (including the three-piece horn section of Peter Hess, Maura Corrigan, and Dan Bailey; percussionist Semra Ercin, drummer Ben Kotch, guitarist Lucky Strano, bassist Yula Be’eri, and piano/accordionist Franz Nicolay) which solidified from the The World/Inferno Friendship Society’s 1990s incarnation as a loose collective to become their longest continuous lineup 2000–07, captured on 2002’s Just The Best Party and 2004’s Hallowmas Live at Northsix. 

After a series of EPs, The World/Inferno Friendship Society (augmented by Bang On A Can saxophonist Ken Thomson and a string quartet) completed the sprawling RES sessions with producer Don Fury (best known for his work with NYC hardcore acts like Agnostic Front and Gorilla Biscuits) at his Cyclone Sound studios in Coney Island. 

The original vinyl release, reproduced here in improved fidelity and on tan/smoke colored vinyl, was conceived and executed as an omnibus anthology of five years of the The World/Inferno Friendship Society’s songwriting 2002–07, including the EPs Speak of Brave Men and Me V. Angry Mob as well as the unreleased tracks “Please My Favorite Don’t Be Sad” and “We Will Never Run Into One Another On Trains.” 

From the infectiously danceable and politically astringent “Brother of the Mayor of Bridgewater” and “Paul Robeson,” to the ferocious, anthemic “Fiend In Wien,” to the spiraling melodicism of “Me V. Angry Mob” and “The Devil’s Ball;” from the acoustic to the orchestral, Red-Eyed Soul stands as a definitive assertion of the breadth of the musical and philosophical ambition—to make punk a treat again! the vaudeville circus you always wished your life could be, can be! fate loves the fearless!—of one of the 21st century’s most inimitable, indefinable, and irrepressible bands. 

Red-Eyed Soul was released in April 2006; by September of that year, The World/Inferno Friendship Society was debuting its evening-length theatrical concept piece about the life of Peter Lorre—in keeping with the fertile productivity of that time, look for ENRC’s twentieth-anniversary reissue of Addicted To Bad Ideas: Peter Lorre’s 20th Century in 2027!