BLACK MARKET KARMA – Announce NEW LP + share single/video

Prolific London-born, Dover-based band Black Market Karma are today releasing new single ‘Adoration’, lifted from their twelfth studio album ‘Mellowmaker’ out June 6th on Fuzz Club.

Following 2024’s ‘Wobble’, the recently announced ‘Mellowmaker’ is the second chapter in Black Market Karma’s two-part album series on Fuzz Club. Crafted entirely by Stanley Belton—who writes, records, and produces everything himself—the record embraces analogue imperfections and tape wobble, splicing them with modern techniques to create a “cassette-ified” lo-fi psychedelia blending ‘60s pop, ‘90s neo-psych, and crunchy hip-hop breakbeats.

“Mellowmaker was made immediately after Wobble, I kinda see them as two sides of each other”, Belton says. The washed-out saturated vocals and jangling Vox guitars are there, but the in-built fuzz and repeater sounds on his cherished vintage Ultrasonic get some heavier usage here. Synths take more of a back-burner in favour of dreamy mellotron samples. Drums are still recorded with one mic and ran through guitar amps or mixed with drum machines, but lean even more into 60s dancefloor breakbeats.

Arriving following the title track and lead single ‘Mellowmaker’, Belton says of ‘Adoration’: “‘Adoration’ is a song about seeing the universe within someone. A long-distance bond and a message of truth and adoration, set to cyclical delay affected and layered breakbeats, tremolo guitars, cranked overdriven bass grooves and vocals on a bed of reverse reverb. Sonically it’s an exercise in interlocking delay effects, with the drums and guitar lines working around eachother like the gears of a clock, making way for the bass guitar to take up lead duties for the outro. I feel that my Electronic Krautrock influences mesh hard with soul & hip hop grooves on this one.”

At its core, Belton states that ‘Mellowmaker’ attempts to give temporary permanence to the timeless and intangible, a liminal feeling permeating the eleven tracks here: “With these two albums I’ve attempted to crystallise how it feels to be stuck between a feeling of amnesia of the soul and the earthly experience of piloting a meat suit… I’m still chasing that longing intangible ‘hiraeth’ feeling. The sense of wanting to find our way home to a place that maybe doesn’t exist.”

‘Mellowmaker’ and last year’s ‘Wobble’ arrive off the back of 2022’s ‘Aped Flair and Hijacked Ideas’ album and the 2023 collaborative album ‘Friends In Noise’, which saw Belton team up with Tess Parks, The Underground Youth, Les Big Byrd’s Joakim Ahlund and The Confederate Dead. In 2023 Black Market Karma also released ‘The Sour Truth’, a collaborative single with Sonic Boom (Spacemen 3 co-founder Pete Kember), and toured heavily around Europe. In January of that year, they went out on a European run with The Black Angels, invited by the Texan psych-rock heavyweights themselves, followed by a 2023 November headline tour of their own and a run of UK/EU ‘Wobble’ dates in 2024.