Small Studio Saturday: A Melbourne Singer Spent Three Months Making Her Debut Album for a Label That Reissues John Carpenter Scores

Melbourne singer-songwriter SPIKE FUCK had been teasing a debut album for long enough that its actual arrival, October 2, functions almost as its own news story. evidence was written and recorded in three months with producer Adam Hyde (also known for his own project Keli Holiday), and it carries its own description of itself – “a brazen proof of life statement” – as something closer to a mission statement than marketing copy. The influences named alongside it are a genuinely strange, specific mix: Pere Ubu’s art-damaged post-punk, the New York Dolls’ glam sleaze, the Temptations and Bettye Swann’s soul phrasing, and, improbably, the 1971 Anarchist Cookbook as a stated point of reference for the record’s confrontational streak.

What holds that combination together is the label underneath it. Sacred Bones Records is small by any commercial measure – a Brooklyn imprint better known among casual listeners, if known at all, for reissuing John Carpenter’s film scores than for breaking new pop or rock acts – but it’s exactly the kind of label built to say yes to a record this specific. A major imprint chasing a repeatable formula has little use for an album that fuses new wave, glam, and doo-wop over the course of eight tracks with titles like “Can’t Get It Up” and “Bored to Death”; a label built around horror-score reissues and uncompromising art-rock has every reason to want it. The lead single, “All By Myself,” makes the thesis audible in miniature – a genuine new wave, glam, and soul hybrid that commits fully to each of its three reference points rather than blending them down into something safer.

That’s the actual case for small-label distribution that this column keeps returning to: not that bigger labels are incapable of recognizing talent, but that an album built this specifically, around influences this particular, needs a home willing to let the specificity stand rather than smoothing it into something more marketable. evidence sounds like a record that got to exist exactly as its maker intended, start to finish – a fairly rare outcome, regardless of how good the songs underneath it turn out to be.

Hero image: “evidence” album cover art, Sacred Bones Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.