Formed in the fall of 1998, Dead Meadow emerged from the Washington, D.C. indie/punk scene to fuse their love of early ’70s hard rock and ’60s psychedelics into a unique marriage of dreamy guitar-fuzz bliss and stoney riffs. Over the course of seven studio albums, three live records and a Peel Session, they incorporated darker eastern influences and increasingly dense and hypnotic layering as they toured such far-reaching places as Russia and Australia and performed at renowned festivals including Roadburn and Levitation fest. They’ve become an inarguable pillar of the modern heavy psych movement alongside contemporaries like Black Mountain, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard and the Black Angels.
In 2021, they began work on a collection of jams and experiments for Blues Funeral Recordings’ PostWax series, working up a disparate yet cohesive group of songs that placed new works alongside the culmination of ideas they’d been tinkering with since the band’s genesis.
Force Form Free is spacey and dreamy at times, grimly propulsive at others, and captures Dead Meadow continuing their effortless exploration of the transporting, astral-gazing form they’ve spent their entire existence pushing forward.