ANAHEIM, Calif. — The creative juices wouldn’t stop flowing for Huntington Beach’s Dirty Heads as they were recording the 10-track album “Midnight Control,” which debuted in the Top 10 on Billboard’s alternative albums chart last year. Vocalist Jared Watson also described it as one of the best albums the band has written.
The quintet was on such a musical high during those recording sessions that the creativity spilled over into 2023 in the form of a trio of EPs comprised of songs that came out of making the last studio album.
Dirty Heads recorded a total of 14 songs for the new album and decided to hold back four tracks to later release an EP.
But, “music was still coming out, we were still creating and it was still cohesive and really good,” Watson said.
Soon, the band found itself with enough content for three EP releases, the first of which is dubbed “Midnight Control Sessions: Night 2,” and drops April 14. It will be followed closely by “Midnight Control Sessions: Night 3” and “Midnight Control Sessions: Night 4.”
“We thought it would be a really fun, creative way to give it legs and let it live for a couple of tours and in this day and age you need content, you constantly have to be putting out music,” he added.
Formed in 2003, Dirty Heads have focused on catchy, upbeat melodies with their blend of reggae, hip-hop, alt-rock, and these days, pretty much whatever else they feel like throwing in the mix.
“We know how to captain our ship 100% now,” Watson said. “I think that’s why that (new) album was so good, because we know how to get our sound; we know what we want to say and we know how to do it now.”
The first single from “Midnight Control Sessions: Night 2,” is “Rescue Me.” The song is currently available for streaming and is an ode to the band’s Southern California roots. The song is also driven by the Dirty Heads’ take on a melodic hook made famous by another local band. After settling on a guitar part written by a producer for the song, the ideas for hooks started coming and Watson said he couldn’t get a certain familiar radio hit out of his head.
“I couldn’t stop humming ‘Californication’ from the Red Hot Chili Peppers,” he said. “So we were like, yo, should we take this Chili Peppers melody and flip it? They’re a big California band that influenced us and it made sense and we loved it.”
With a breezier version of the Red Hot Chili Peppers melody, the song mixes hip-hop beats and rap vocals to create catchy summertime tune.
“The vibe of that song is just like cool to me,” said Dustin “Duddy B” Bushnell, Dirty Heads’ vocalist-guitarist and co-founder said. “It’s nothing too serious, it’s nothing too crazy. It’s just a hometown song really.”
The song “John Linen” on the EP is a straight-up hip-hop song with tinges of reggae soul that started out as a song for Watson’s hip-hop solo project, Sword Beach.
“Every time I played it for people it got this big, huge reaction,” Watson said. “There was something really special about that song that I thought could be better if I brought it into the Dirty Heads world.”
The final song on the three-song EP is “Bright Side,” what includes a chorus created by Bushnell.
“It’s just a classic Dirty Heads song,” he said. “It’s got a good feel, a good upbeat tempo and when we were writing that song, it’s what we were going for. We just needed another classic upbeat, positive Dirty Heads song.”
The last of the original four songs that Dirty Heads cut off the “Midnight Control” album is “Island Glow.” Though it didn’t make the first EP, it will be on one of the following records and features Colombian musical ensemble Monsieur Perinè.
The release of the new EP also marks the kickoff of a busy season for the band, which will include its Island Glow Summer Tour featuring support from Lupe Fiasco, Yelawolf, G. Love & Special Sauce, Tropidelic and Bikini Trill. The tour kicks off in June and the band also announced it would be performing at the Alta Music Festival that takes place at Avila Beach near San Luis Obispo Sept. 23-24.
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