This week we're talking about US Maple. Which is a bit like saying we're talking about having your teeth drilled without anaesthetic.

The Chicago quartet spent twelve years making music that deliberately disappointed every expectation you might have about rock music. They took guitars, drums, and vocals and somehow made them sound like they were arguing with each other in a language nobody understood. It was brilliant. It was infuriating. It was absolutely necessary.

This is the final part of our Anti Rock trilogy, where we've been exploring bands that knew the rules of rock music inside out and chose to break every single one of them. US Maple didn't just break the rules though. They took the rulebook, fed it through a modified guitar with quarter tone frets, and sang over it like a demented lounge singer having a breakdown.

We get into their impossible discography, their custom instruments that were designed to sound worse, their legendary tour with Pavement where they got pelted with rubbish nightly, and that infamous Oklahoma City incident involving Xanax and a cockroach. We also try to answer the eternal question: why would anyone voluntarily listen to this?

Fair warning: this episode might make you feel slightly seasick. That's entirely by design.

Featuring Ferruccio Quercetti from the brilliant Italian band Cut, who knows more about post punk and experimental music than literally anyone we know.

Highlights:

00:00 Introduction and Welcome

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