USA Nails

London noise-rock quartet USA Nails return with new album 'Routine Flesh', out February 12th 2027 via One Little Independent Records and SKiN GRAFT Records in North and South America. Across twelve tracks, 'Routine Flesh' is preoccupied with mortality and the things that shape us: the bodies we inherit and watch deteriorate, the beliefs we absorb, the environments we grow up in, and the experiences that leave marks long after they have happened. Ageing, religion, healthcare, trauma, isolation, love and online radicalisation all feed into a record that asks how much control we really have over the people we become. Musically, 'Routine Flesh' pushes at the edges of a sound USA Nails have spent more than a decade pulling apart and putting back together. Distorted bass, dissonant guitars, barked and deadpan vocals and pounding rhythms remain at its core, but across the album the band stretch that vocabulary in increasingly unexpected directions. There are moments of motorik repetition, blown-out fuzz, and wiry post-punk, alongside some of their most direct and unexpectedly tender material. The album opens with 'The Lubricant Of Self Hate', a short, bombastic blast of D-beats and discordant, whistling guitars. Steven Hodson explains; "Lyrically the song is an ode to the social isolation that spotty, teenage boys feel. Sat alone, longing for physical touch and becoming more disconnected with the actual world but more connected with evil ideologies." It introduces one of the record's recurring themes: the distance between the person we might believe ourselves to be and the person our surroundings have helped create. Family, geography, peers, politics and increasingly the digital environments people inhabit all exert their influence. 'Two Grim Choices' began with drummer Tom Brewins wanting to make a techno song. Gareth Thomas explains: "The lyrics are about paranoia, anxiety and anti-depressants. To me, the way the track built and moved felt like a panic attack, so I wrote the words to match." 'A Clean Cut' pairs the band's Drive Like Jehu and Fugazi impulses with a frantic outro, while Steven turns his attention towards religion and the promise of eternal life. "People place a lot of faith in religion, or this higher power that we behave well for, or appease, in order to live eternally. I'm in no way poking fun at this or saying they are wrong, though I am an atheist." On 'Fine Beaujolais', the question becomes less about what happens after death and more about how long we can postpone it. "As a modern culture, we place so much value on looking after ourselves physically, cosmetically and mentally," says Steven. "Where I live, I see old people rallying around on mobility scooters, smoking like chimneys. It definitely isn't a blue zone though. Is longevity just a lottery or can it be earned through clean living?" The body becomes political on 'Private Ambulance', a fuzzed-out, unexpectedly buoyant track written about private healthcare in the UK. "I love the NHS, my sister is a doctor and my parents were both nurses," Gareth explains. "A huge amount of my extended family have worked in healthcare and I have so much respect for them. But the chronic underfunding the NHS has gone through in the last few decades is criminal. Private health is prohibitively expensive and it feels like we live in a two tier healthcare system in the UK now." 'Stopover In A Quiet Town' leans towards the band's more melodic instincts and finds Gareth attempting something that might be more uncomfortable for a noise-rock band than contemplating death: a love song. "I thought, what's the biggest taboo in noise rock? Writing an earnest love song right? I've tried to write one a couple of times but they've ended up coming out a bit silly, this is the first time it sort of felt like it worked." The track features Gareth's sister Claire on backing vocals, while the hollow, metallic guitar cutting across Steven's chugging rhythm part came about almost by accident. Gareth used the first electric guitar he ever owned and inadvertently set its modified pickups out of phase. Claire appears again later on the record, bringing another texture into a band not especially known for softening its edges. With 'The Flick Of A Switch', death comes back into view. Tom devised its chord sequence and unusual rhythmic structure while sitting at a grand piano in the studio's live room, while Steven returns to the possibility of an afterlife with slightly less certainty than before. "I said I'm an atheist but this song makes me sound like an agnostic. Think what you want, I don't believe but I might do when it comes to it." 'Shaped' reconnects with the ideas introduced at the very beginning of the album, turning towards keyboard warriors, isolation and those who profit from reinforcing increasingly extreme worldviews. "Some people have lived in land-locked small towns and never ventured out and grown up to be perfectly lovely people... and some didn't," says Steven. "There's such a rise in hate at the moment and it's very scary." The song sounds different from much of the record too. Rather than being captured predominantly as a live performance, it was pieced together, and when the studio engineer offered to bring out high-end vocal microphones, Steven instead chose what Gareth describes as "the shittiest Goodmans moulded cable microphone", plugged into his Peavey combo. The degradation isn't incidental to the sound. It is the sound. If much of 'Routine Flesh' contemplates the inevitability of death, 'French Metal' follows an experience in which Gareth came perilously close to it. In 2018, while touring with his former band Silent Front, he was involved in a high-speed motorway accident outside Paris. Their Sprinter van flipped multiple times and Gareth broke his neck. Police told the band it was remarkable nobody had died. "This one is a glib look at that, and PTSD, and wanting to not exist rather than living with the shadow trauma can cast over your life," he says. "In contrast the tune itself is a fairly upbeat number, so despite the heavy subject matter it's kind of fun? I think that sort of juxtaposition, and the use of dark humour to process difficult things is something we've often done." 'Death Cinema' was written after Gareth experienced what he describes as the deepest and most prolonged period of depression of his life. "This song is about aging, and feeling your body and mind degrading, delusion, losing any sense of self esteem or pride in your appearance, and feeling like you are losing touch with reality. It also features one of the sickest guitar riffs I've ever written." By 'And So It Goes', one of the record's poppier cuts, the record's gaze has shifted towards time already spent. "At times life can seem like it's just flashed you by. This song is about looking back at younger years and wishing you could have a second go at them. I'm a firm believer that life is linear. I try not to think back and dwell on mistakes." Finally, 'Routine Flesh' brings the album back to the question of how people are shaped. A slow, Flipper-esque lament built around a single riff, it considers the cumulative influence of what we see, read and hear, before disappearing into a squall of fuzz and feedback. "I think it's normal to draw influence from what's around you," says Steven, "but when the views are so extreme and hateful, it's a bloody worry." The circumstances in which 'Routine Flesh' was made gave those ideas an unusually immediate musical setting. Following 'Feel Worse', USA Nails found themselves dissatisfied not with the record itself, but with the process behind it. This time, they decided to remove as much preparation as possible. The band spent just four days together in summer 2025 with long-time producer Wayne Adams, writing and recording simultaneously. They consciously brought almost no finished material into the studio, with most of the music performed live and individual songs written and recorded from start to finish in three or four hours. Sixteen tracks emerged from the sessions before Steven and Gareth spent the autumn writing and exchanging vocals. The title track was the final song recorded. Adams thought the album was missing a slow, one-riff track, prompting the band to create 'Routine Flesh' at the end of the fourth day. "This felt like a joyous noisy celebration of a successful few days work," says Gareth. "We had to back ourselves that we'd be able to work this way, because we didn't have the time or money to try it another way if we had come out with nothing good. The sense of relief I think we all felt that not just worked, but had exceeded our expectations is hard to overstate." The result is a record concerned with all the forces that make us who we are, created by deliberately stripping away many of the conventions that would normally govern how an album is made. Where 2024's 'Feel Worse' turned its attention outward towards schadenfreude, public humiliation, bullying, consumer culture and divisive politics, 'Routine Flesh' looks closer to the bone. USA Nails formed in London in 2013 and comprise Steven Hodson, Gareth Thomas, Daniel Holloway and Tom Brewins, with members having previously played in Kong, Future Of The Left, Blacklisters, Death Pedals and Silent Front. Across more than a decade, the band have established themselves as one of the UK's most distinctive and uncompromising noise-rock outfits. Early releases appeared through Northern Irish DIY label Smalltown America before they began working with legendary Midwest experimental label SKiN GRAFT Records, whose catalogue has included Melt-Banana, Shellac, Dazzling Killmen, U.S. Maple, Brise-Glace, Cheer-Accident and more. USA Nails have also contributed to the Too Pure Singles Club and in 2022 released a split with Psychic Graveyard through SKiN GRAFT and Box Records. Their sixth album, 'Feel Worse', followed in 2024 and marked their first release with O