Glasgow psych-rock heavyweights Helicon have been blowing minds across the UK with their esoteric noise for the best part of a decade; huge walls of cosmic, motorik noise colliding head-on with strung-out Sitar-led jams and nihilistic fuzz to magnificent effect. After picking up a notorious reputation for their live show and releasing a handful of EPs, it wasn’t until 2017 that Helicon released their long-overdue self-titled debut album - a declaration of intent that proved beyond any doubt why the band had become such a prominent face within the UK psych scene. Just over a year later and Helicon are set to release a new three-track EP titled Zero Fucks. Recorded live, mixed and produced in one day at Glasgow’s Green Door Studio, the new EP is comprised of three instrumentals that strip things down to their raw fundamentals and allow the band's expansive song-writing to take centre-stage. Talking about the EP, vocalist and guitarist John-Paul Hughes explains: “We wrote the tracks on this record as we were preparing to tour ahead of Fuzz Club Eindhoven 2018. We wanted some new high-energy material for our live set and these three tracks went down so well in Eindhoven that we decided to get into the studio as quickly as possible to record them and try to capture what was happening at that moment.” Opening track ‘Phil Mitchell’d’ is a full-throttle kosmische freak-out about “getting off your fucking nut and causing carnage”, inspired by one particularly-ridiculous drunken night out involving a DJ set from Steve McFadden (Phil from Eastenders), wrestling with door-staff and watching a middle-aged couple get it on on the dancefloor while staring everyone out. ‘Come On Get Off’ is propelled by a “good old rip-snorting guitar riff that hooks you into a loop from the start and refuses to let go” and ‘I Hate Everyone But I Quite Like You’ begins as a soft washed-out psychedelic haze before unravelling into a warped far-out groove: “Like the title, it’s a song of two halves that completely shifts in dynamic halfway through. The way your life does when someone completely different comes into it. It’s probably about as close to a love song as we’d ever write.”
