Illinois-based blues rock masters Rosetta West are returning with their newest single, “Town Of Tomorrow”, a track that’s as driving and hard as an acid-soaked trip through a neon-lit landscape of the mind. Over a career of fiercely independent and experimental forays into sound, the band has continued to stake out its own space in the underground, with a record that's both bluesy and futuristic in imagination.
“Town Of Tomorrow” jumps out of the gate with searing slide guitar riffs that feel as though they're roughly through time and space from the first note. The founder and songwriter Joseph Demagore’s voice is inflected with a gravelly intensity, interweaving harmonic flourishes that hark back to the band’s bluesy foundations and threading in traces of psychedelia. The drummer Mike Weaver’s punchy, hard-hitting strokes propel it forward like a propulsion system, and Orpheus Jones’s bass grounds the song with an ear-soothing, steady rhythmic groove. The result is a hard blues rock cut that doesn’t just rock, it waxes.
Rosetta West explores the mystic and spiritual, which previously characterised the band’s songwriting. “Town Of Tomorrow” evokes both a tantalizing and a cryptic future, where recognizably terrafirma boundaries overlap with the dreamscape. It’s music that somehow feels both rooted and otherworldly, the kind that is inviting you to lose yourself but never lets you out of the groove.
The song features on "God of the Dead," their recent album, which explores the crossroads between blues, psych, and global folk influences and draws support from their vast international fanbase. The album and this single demonstrate how Rosetta West hasn’t lost its ability to grow while retaining that untamed power that has characterized its decades-long career.