It’s not easy to return after seven years without sounding either out of breath or like you’re chasing ghosts. But Electric Citizen doesn’t trip over nostalgia or buckle under expectation – EC4 hits like a stoned cobra coiled under a velvet curtain. This is not a record that reintroduces the band with a polite handshake. It’s a séance, a ritual, and a righteously amplified reclamation of their throne in the crumbling temple of proto-heavy rock.
Electric Citizen’s latest is soaked in everything that once made basements in the Midwest quake – tube-amp warmth, rhythms that swing like pendulums over lava, and vocals that shimmer with the menace and mystique of a haunted bell tower. Laura Dolan doesn’t so much sing as channel, weaving between siren clarity and feral sneer with the ease of someone who’s long since stopped second-guessing the ghosts in her amp.
You won’t find EC4 apologizing for its genre obsessions. This isn’t some ironic rehash or genre exercise in cosplay. This is lifer music, road-worn and saturated in the fumes of countless van tours, record bins, and incense clouds. You can smell the denim and leather. You can hear the dust in the grooves. And still, there’s a sharpness here, a new cut in the fabric – likely due to the years they took crafting it. It’s tight without being sterile, feral without being messy.
Musically, they’ve pushed the needle slightly toward the dramatic side of 70s heavy rock, but without veering into cartoon territory. Think Uriah Heep organ swells twisted into darker shapes, Coven-like witchy blues underpinned by that unmistakable Cincinnati grit. EC4 is steeped in groove and analog crunch, but there’s no self-parody or excess. It’s heavy, sure – but not just loud-for-the-sake-of-it. This is listenable heavy. Smoke-out-with-the-lights-off heavy. It’s got that subtle swing that’s so often missing in today’s basement bangers.
Producer Ross Dolan (yes, Laura’s partner – this is very much a family affair) keeps the whole thing locked down without sanding off the splinters. And the mix, courtesy of Collin Dupuis, gives it a sheen that’s more silver dagger than plastic polish. It’s tight in the right places and woozy where it counts, with just enough low-end rumble to make your speakers sweat.
EC4 isn’t about innovation. It’s about devotion. Electric Citizen has always been less concerned with chasing trends than they are with conjuring feelings – the way your stomach flips when a riff drops just right, or how a Hammond organ can sound like a weapon in the hands of a true believer. This is album-as-invocation: to the gods of fuzz, to the high-priests of head-nod, to the eternal flame of the power trio.
There’s no need to single out tracks here. EC4 works as a whole, like a dusty spellbook – the kind that makes the candles flicker when opened. It’s a record you live in for 40 minutes and change, and when it ends, the silence feels wrong.
For those of us who cut our teeth on basement tapes, underground zines, and bar shows that felt like rituals – this is the kind of record you pray someone still knows how to make. Turns out, Electric Citizen does. Still. Better than most.
Welcome back. Light one up. Turn it way the hell up.
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Released by Heavy Psych Sounds on June 27, 2025
