Naturally, horror writer Stephen King has inspired a near-cottage industry of thrash and speed metal tracks. And, via the success of the King-indebted Stranger Things and the widespread influence of John Carpenter scores, he has also indirect influenced a whole lot of retro-leaning synth music to come out in the last few years. Now, at long last, King’s aesthetic is penetrating the hermetic and spooky world of noise-rock thanks to a brand-new album by dystopian cyber-punks Uniform.
The band will release on August 17 via Sacred Bones. It’ll be their first album since their collab with The Body, Mental Wounds Not Healing (which came out…I don’t know, like three weeks ago?), and it was recorded with ex-Liturgy drummer-at-large Greg Fox over the course of a few days using a palette of live drums and triggered samples, synths, and electric guitar.
The Long Walk was named after King’s novel of the same name, published under his sometime-pseudonym Richard Bachmann, which tells the story of a highly fucked-up, dystopian contest in which adolescents walk at a constant rate down the U.S. East Coast, getting shot dead if they slow down one too many times, till a lone survivor is declared the winner. Fun Times!
Per Uniform’s press release regarding the album, “In this case, it’s an allegory for an extended march away from comfort, family, and faith, and eventually into an amorphous sense of spirituality that can be understood on a personal level.”
To this point, The Long Walk has never gotten a batshit film adaptation like King’s other Bachman novel The Running Man, but hey — at least you can watch a Danny Perez-directed video for the album’s lead single “The Walk” down below and pre-order the album here on some Stephen King-esque “concrete grey” vinyl. For now, that’s probably as close as we’re gonna get!
The Long Walk tracklisting:
01. The Walk
02. Inhuman Condition
03. Found
04. Transubstantiation
05. Alone in the Dark
06. Headless Eyes
07. Anointing of the Sick
08. Peaceable Kingdom
More about: Greg Fox, Stephen King, Uniform
