Deep States is the third studio album by Australian group Tropical Fuck Storm. It was released on 20 August 2021 through Joyful Noise Recordings. Recorded during the COVID-19 pandemic, the recording process for the album was unconventional and involved heavy experimentation. The music features a range of diverse influences and has been variously labelled as art rock, noise rock and psychedelic rock. Lyrically, the album deals with the social and emotional impact of the pandemic, with many songs also diving into subjects such as conspiracy theories, social media polarization, corruption, death and occasionally even feature science fiction themes.
Deep States was released on 20 August 2021 to positive critical reviews, debuting at #7 on the ARIA Charts – the band's highest placement thus far. At the 2021 ARIA Music Awards, the album won the award for Best Hard Rock or Heavy Metal Album.
Background
During the first six months of the pandemic – which began a few months after the release of their second album Braindrops and a series of promotional tours through Australia, North America and Europe – lead singer/guitarist Gareth Liddiard noted that he was in "a musical drought, with a sense of nihilism seeping through as a result of the state of the world. Eventually though, the music began to flow again, with songs related to what we were all feeling and seeing coming to a head." The pandemic had also forced the band to cancel a spring North American tour that they'd announced in January 2020. The cancellation of the tour was announced weeks before its scheduled commencement through an Instagram post where they promised that they would instead be working on new material.
Two days after announcing the tour's cancellation, on 15 March 2020, the band released "Suburbiopia". The video which accompanied the song's release "features the band dressed in blonde wings à la The Family cult in Victoria and also samples recordings of Heavens Gate [sic] cult leader Marshall Applewhite and anime footage from the Aum Shinrikyo cult – famous for releasing sarin gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995." The 7" of the single was released on 3 April, with a cover of "This Perfect Day" by The Saints – featuring Amy Taylor of Amyl and the Sniffers and Sean Powell of Surfbort – as its B-side. On 12 August 2020, the band premiered a new version of the track "Legal Ghost": a "sprawling, experimental cut" originally recorded by Liddiard during the 1990s for his Bong Odyssey project with former Drones member Rui Pereira. It was released as a 7" single on 11 September, with a cover of Talking Heads' "Heaven" as its B-side. The band revealed that the track would feature on their upcoming album.
Recording
The album was recorded at Liddiard and Kitschin's home in the town of Nagambie, Victoria. The period consisted of the band "slinging sausages onto the barbeque, swimming and spending time outdoors, then coming together to jam together for hours, seeing what came of it." According to guitarist/vocalist Erica Dunn:For this record, because of 2020 being what it was, most of the beds for the tracks were Gaz [Gareth] trawling through recordings that we’d done and fucked up, things in the hard drive. He was really researching to find cool stuff that we’d done, or that he’d put down and stored away. So he came up with the rhythm sequence, or synths as the start for the tracks but from there, anything goes.