LIFE IN PRISON
CREEM trips balls—and the light fantastic—with the drone kings of Rockaway Beach.
Prison gave me a bunch of acid and I ate some of it in my Subaru on a Saturday morning outside of Matt Lilly’s house in Rockaway Beach. I told them I was going to “save it for the right time.” I guess what I meant was “as soon as no one’s looking.”
Matt’s the drummer in Prison, a heady, shreddy mix of weird blues, krautrock, and psych punk stuck in a locked circular groove. Think of it as a drone-y, hypnotizing version of the Stooges or MC5, or Can’s heavier moments, or even a slowed-down Hawkwind in an extended Grateful Dead jam session. It’s a band stuck in time—and who probably should have existed 50 years ago at an acid freak-out, since their music is best consumed while dosed. Prison’s new LP Upstate is a loose and spacey 91 minutes of hard groove to infinity, and in an era of verses synced for optimal TikTok posting, it’s a long, deep breath of DMT smoke. With five tracks that are more than 11 minutes long and three of them clocking in at over 20 minutes, that’s a lot of inhaling.