Seattle, WA early 90s band Stymie share the title track today from their previously unreleased (for nearly 30 years) debut full length Toil & Folly via Thoughts Words Action.
Does anyone really need a primer on the Seattle scene at this point? Once-sleepy backwater, best known as the birthplace of Hendrix and Heart, goes supernova in the early ‘90s, dethroning the King of Pop and giving a handful of longhairs the chance to seriously upgrade the thread count on their flannel outerwear. But for every Nirvana, every Pearl Jam, every Soundgarden and Alice in Chains — hell, for every Tad and Supersuckers — there were countless scene staples that didn’t hit the gold-rush jackpot.
Enter Stymie. This heavy, hook-minded sextet (sometimes comprising three guitars and one bass, sometimes two guitars and two basses) was ubiquitous on bills from ’92-’94. And they were one of the only acts — likely the only one — at home sharing stages with bands as sonically wide-ranging as Buffalo Tom, Sleep, Everclear, Gruntruck, Flop, Treepeople and even the Spaceman himself, Ace Frehley.
Stymie’s own diverse musical influences — Black Sabbath, Black Flag and Black Francis are all reasonable reference points — allowed them to slot into a variety of bills but made them hard for label suitors to pigeonhole. There were flirtations, but no one put a ring on it, with the band self-releasing a handful of singles and showing up on the occasional compilation, including C/Z’s Teriyaki Asthma Volume IX. Stymie’s brief three-year run ended in late ’94 without acrimony or messy interventions, leaving behind a solid resume and a cache of unreleased material.
Toil & Folly
Now, nearly 30 years after the band’s conscious uncoupling, those tunes are ready to have the basement dust blown off them. The 13 tracks on Toil & Folly were drawn from five sessions and represent the many ways the band could bring the heavy. Largely recorded and mixed by noted Seattle producer Phil Ek (Built to Spill, Truly, Big Business), Toil & Folly is an unearthed gem for flannel-flying Seattle Sound obsessives always digging through crates (or Spotify) for that band they never heard of but can’t wait to tell everyone they discovered.
Toil & Folly will be available on limited edition LP and download on December 15th, 2023 via New Rage Records.
