Britain's cutting-edge dance rock band Hadouken! have signed with Nettwerk Music Group to release their US debut album For The Masses on February 2, 2010. Their first single M.A.D. an acronym for Mutually Assured Destruction, is a booming, bass-heavy explosion that ponders the psychology of violence in the broadest sense. M.A.D is available now on iTunes
Hadouken! (James Smith (vocals), Alice Spooner (keyboard), Dan Rice (guitarist), Chris Purcell (Bass) and Nick Rice (drums)) formed in 2006, and by 2008, their word-of-mouth, internet fanned, predominantly teenage fan-base blossomed at such a rate that their first headline tour to 6,000 fans sold-out in under a week, and their second headline tour of the UK in October 2008 sold over 23,000 tickets in 30 days. The rabid Hadouken! fan-base adds up to over a million MySpace friends, accounts for 100,000 downloads of their UK debut album (2008's Music For An Accelerated Culture), and also helped propel that debut to #12 on the UK album chart (as well as #4 in Japan) with barely a waft of hype from the mainstream media. Hadouken! have no one but themselves to thank for this defiantly loyal fan-base. They have been the creative mastermind behind all of their marketing; they know what their fans want and the know how to give it to them.
For The Masses, recorded in Holland with gilded Dutch electronic producers Noisia, evolves the edge of your seat meld of twenty ton club rhythms, furious, teeth-grinding guitars and keen-witted 21st century lyrical journals located on Hadouken!'s 2008 UK debut, Music For An Accelerated Culture, by delivering ten tracks that are even harder, even louder, even more rhythmic and even more tightly focused than anything they've attempted before. If a historic comparison was to be attempted, cast your mind back to the earliest, comparatively sketchy works by the likes of the Prodigy or Chemical Brothers. Then recall the impact when each delivered Fat Of The Land and Dig Your Own Hole. That's the kind of leap forward successfully maneuvered here. Britain's next great dance-rock band has arrived.
"I feel like the stars have been aligning for us," says singer James Smith. "The Prodigy have come back with a massive hit record. I've seen bands like Chase N Status and Pendulum rise to the fore-front, I've seen the dubstep thing happen. We're cut from the same cloth as all that but I think we're doing something really new and exciting with this album that we've recorded with Noisia. It's a big, big progression. The time is right for us."
Don't be surprised if For The Masses sounds a bit like the spirit of Rage Against The Machine is being channeled through the Prodigy. "I got into Rage Against The Machine after the first album," says James, "and wondered if you could mix the impact of their guitars with what The Prodigy do. They're both key influences."
Stay tuned for more news from Hadouken!, including 2010 N. American tour dates.
