Small Time Monsters: Vinyl LP

Small Time Monsters, the second full-length album from The Dream Machine, is set to be released this April on Run On Records/ Modern Sky.

If 2022s critically-acclaimed debut album Thank God! Its The Dream Machine was their first and most wild child, then Small Town Monsters is its refined younger sibling. The psychedelia, euphoric choruses, flashes of surf guitar and B-movie references are all there, amongst the familiar reflections of life in their beloved and faded seaside town of New Brighton, but this time the wilder elements are controlled, the songs packed into three-minute pocket symphonies.

Lead single Frankenstein is an anthem for the sugar-rush generation, an infectious, rattling earworm that recalls everything from haunted rockabilly to the sun-drenched melodies of Blossoms. Elsewhere on the album, the pulsating surf-stomp of Cindys Eyes, a small-town story of unrequited love, has a chorus to fill the most cavernous arena. Produced by The Corals James Skelly, the album was partially recorded at The Dream Machines rehearsal space, then stitched together in Skellys Kempston Street Studios.

Theres a refined, more literary quality to singer and primary songwriter Zak McDonnells lyrics; explorations of everyday life, teenage doom, B-movie monsters, family turmoil, and coming-of-age tales in the familiar backdrop of life in modern Britain. Small Town Monsters is the sound of a band breaking free from the small town into the big world.